page_title: Maurice Denys
section_title: Acquires Wye College
hierarchical_section_title: Maurice Denys / Acquires Wye College
caption_attribution_description: A 16th century portrait of Edward North (c. 1504–1564), 1st Baron North of Kirtling, Cambridgeshire.
context_page_description: Sir Maurice Denys of Siston Court, near Bristol, Gloucestershire, and of St John's Street, Clerkenwell, Middlesex, was an English lawyer and property speculator during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, at which time he served as a "powerful figure at the Court of Augmentations". He served as a Member of Parliament for Malmesbury in Wiltshire and as Treasurer of Calais. He was the builder of Siston Court in Gloucestershire, which survives largely unaltered since his time. His excessive speculation and borrowing caused the ruination of the Siston branch of the Denys family.
context_section_description: In 1546 Denys acquired Wye College, Kent, from Walter Buckler, who had been granted it by the crown following the Dissolution. Buckler was secretary to Queen Katherine Parr and the second husband of Katherine Denys, Maurice's sister, whose first husband had been Edmund Tame (died 1544) of Fairford, Gloucestershire. Buckler’s licence to alienate, dated at Westminster 25 December 1546, is recorded in the Patent Rolls:
  
  "Walter Bucler to Maurice Denys and Elizabeth his wife. Mansion, etc., of the late College of Wye, Kent, manors of Perycourte and Surrenden, rectory of Promhill, pensions of 33s. 4d. out of Westwell rectory, 10s. out of Hothefield rectory and 8s. out of Estwell rectory, and all lands in Wye, Wydtheston, Nacolt, Henxsell, Goodmesham, Crondale, Charter Magna, Bethersden, Postlyng, Westbury and Promhill, Kent, which belonged to Wye College. 
  On 22 February 1547, two days after the coronation of King Edward VI, Denys was knighted, and in the same year he became a bencher of the Inner Temple and a Justice of the Peace for Gloucestershire and Kent, as well as being elected to the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Also in 1547, he sold some of his land in Clerkenwell to Sir Edward North (later 1st Baron North), who  in 1545 following the Dissolution had acquired the nearby London Charterhouse and made it his London mansion. In May 1548 he sold the manor of Surrenden to Sir Anthony Aucher (d. 1558), of Otterden in Kent, a commissioner for that county, whose burial place in Bishopsbourne Church in Kent records as follows:
  
  "Sr. Anthony AUCHER, Knt. Mareschall of Callice; Governr. of Guisnes; Master of the Jewel House, in Times of HENRY YE EIGHT. EDWARD YE SIXT, and QUEEN MARY. Slayn at ye Loss of Callice"
  The Feet of Fines for Middlesex contain the following entry for 1547, the first year of the reign of Edward VI:
  "Sir Edward North, knight, Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, and Alice his wife and Sir Maurice Denys and Elizabeth his wife. Premises and a chapel called Pardon Chapel, in the parish of Clerkenwell. Trinity, Anno 1". 
  This comprised a chapel and presumably also the graveyard attached to St James's Church, Clerkenwell, then part of the London Charterhouse, known as the "Pardon Churchyard" and used to bury suicides and those executed as felons. It stood between Great Sutton Strest and Clerkenwell Road.
caption: Sir Edward North, an associate of Denys
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