John Cruys

Sir John Cruys or Cruise (died 1407) was a prominent Irish military commander, diplomat and judge of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

[2] He was a highly regarded public servant, but also a determined and acquisitive man of business, who fought a ten-year battle to establish his wife's right to her inheritance.

In 1366 John Bathe of Rathfeigh, County Meath (a member of another prominent Anglo-Irish family, who were later based at Drumcondra, Dublin) granted to John Cruys the lands of Thorncastle, i.e. modern-day Mount Merrion and Booterstown, and the fisheries attached (which are mentioned in an earlier Crown grant of 1299 to William le Deveneys)[6] and other lands at Donnybrook and Ballymun in Dublin.

[2] He also inherited the family's estates at nearby Stillorgan and at Naul, and acquired other lands in Dublin, Meath and, in right of his wife Matilda Verdon, in Louth.

[3] However a later owner, James Fitzwilliam, who was Sir John's son-in-law, was required to pay rent to the Crown on Thorncastle of £5 and 8 shillings per year.

[9] In 1376 he was sent to England with Maurice FitzGerald, 4th Earl of Kildare, on important diplomatic business, including a report to the English Crown on the state of Irish affairs, and was paid £20 for his expenses of the journey.

After Windsor's recall in disgrace in 1376, Cruys was out of favour for a time: according to a petition which he co-signed in 1379, the petitioners pleaded that they had been threatened with prosecution and forfeiture of their lands.

[3] In the same year he led a military expedition against the O'Toole clan of County Wicklow, in which he was badly wounded, and received compensation from the Crown for his pains.

[13] In 1386 the King's Escheator was ordered to convey to Cruys and his wife Matilda Verdon the lands of Clonmore (now Togher) and Mansfieldtown in County Louth.

[1] Matilda's recovery of Clonmore was the result of a determined and lengthy legal struggle against her male cousins, whom her father had tried to make his heirs, ignoring the clear right of his daughters to inherit his lands.

[3] An inquisition held in 1408 shows the great extent of his holdings: he had estates at Merrion, Thorncastle, Rathmore, Donaghpatrick, Clonmore, Kells, Naul, Duleek and Dundalk.

In 1423 he received another pardon for numerous acts of trespass on estates including Dundalk, Duleek and Kells, which, though they had belonged to his father, required a royal licence for him to enter, apparently because the Gyffard family were in possession of part of them.