Humphrey Swynnerton

Humphrey Swynnerton (c. 1516 – 1562) was a Staffordshire landowner, a Member of the English Parliament and an Elizabethan recusant.

[2] In 1537, Swynnerton became bailiff of the Black Ladies estate, near Brewood, a small Benedictine nunnery dissolved by the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act.

[1] The new owner was Thomas Giffard, who outmanoeuvred Edward Littleton of Pillaton Hall, the husband of Humphrey's aunt Helen Swynnerton to get it.

[1] About 1541, shortly after marrying Cassandra Giffard, Swynnerton inherited the family estates on the death of his father.

Ownership of the Cheshire lands was disputed by Sir John Savage and, in 1555, Swynnerton came to an agreement and sold them to him.

In the electoral indenture, completed in Latin, he was placed second in order of precedence, with the 21-year-old John Giffard as his senior.

Swynnerton shared the Giffards' religious conservatism and can only have welcomed the restoration of Catholicism by Mary.

Swynnerton's religious conservatism had led him to preserve and keep a large breviary when Lichfield Cathedral was compelled to dispose of its treasures under Edward VI.

Mary restored Catholic worship (though not, at that point, the link with the Papacy) through her first parliament in 1553, and in October the chapter took stock of what was needed and found that the only breviaries they could obtain were Swynnerton's, which he gave back, and a damaged one from Sir Thomas Fitzherbert,[5] his son-in-law's brother.

The dissenting or recusant group were distinguished by taking advantage of the general pardon issued by Elizabeth at her coronation on 15 January 1558.

If he were to die at Hilton he asked to be buried in the chancel of Shareshill church, where the image of St Luke had stood.