page_title: William Denys
section_title: Founds Guild of St Denis
hierarchical_section_title: William Denys / Founds Guild of St Denis
caption_attribution_description: English: St Peter's Church, Dyrham, Gloucestershire
context_page_description: Sir William Denys of Dyrham, Gloucestershire, was a courtier of King Henry VIII and High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1518 and 1526.
context_section_description: In 1520 Sir William and Lady Ann founded the "Guild of St. Denis" in the Church of St Peter, Dyrham, next to their manor house. The early English guild performed the service to the general community and the poor and needy which is today performed by government-funded social security, but had a religious element in addition. This later guild at Dyrham appears however to have been more akin to a chantry, endowed with revenues to fund the singing by priests of masses for the souls of the members.  The records of the guild are held by Bristol Archives, and it is recorded that "Many were the brethren and Sisters of this Guild who were prevailed upon to contribute towards its maintenance; which persons lived in fifty several parishes at least, in Bristol, Bath, Somerset and Gloucestershire, and might amount to three hundred persons". The endowments of the guild consisted mainly of livestock which were let out to local farmers for a yearly rental. The fate of the chantry at the Dissolution of the Monasteries is not recorded, possibly because it seems not to have held any endowments in the form of land. It is likely that the Patron Saint Denis was selected due to his having the same name as the Denys family, yet the family itself was probably so named not after the saint, but due to its probable Danish origins. In ancient charters the name is latinised as Dacus being the adjectival form of Dacia, mediaeval Latin for "Denmark". In Norman French it is given as Le Deneis, i.e. "The Dane".  There were 3 prominent mediaeval Denys families in the South-West, one from Ilchester, Somerset, one from Devon, and that from Glamorgan which in about 1380 came to Siston and then to Dyrham in Gloucestershire, in the person of Sir Gilbert Denys (died 1422), great-grandfather of Sir William Denys. The three families may all have originated from a common root before the era of the mass adoption of armorials, that is to say the first half of the 13th century. The Somerset branch was the most short-lived, having disappeared before it might have adopted arms, but the Devon Denys's adopted as their arms three Danish battle-axes, the favoured weapons of the Vikings, as borne by the King of Denmark and recorded as used by him in the Camden rolls of arms, c. 1280.
caption: St Peter's Church, Dyrham
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