Adam Moleyns

Adam Moleyns
Bishop of Chichester
Appointed	24 September 1445
Term ended	9 January 1450
Predecessor	Richard Praty
Successor	Reginald Pecock
Other posts	Lord Privy Seal (1444–1450) Dean of Salisbury & Archdeacon of Taunton (1441–1445) Archdeacon of Salisbury (1440–1441)
Orders
Consecration	6 February 1446
Personal details
Died	9 January 1450 Portsmouth

Adam Moleyns (or Adam Molyens, Adam Molens, Adam Molins, Adam Molyneaux, Adam Molyneux, Adam de Moleyns; died 9 January 1450) was an English bishop, lawyer, royal administrator and diplomat. During the minority of Henry VI of England, he was clerk of the ruling council of the Regent.^[1]

Life

Moleyns had the living of Kempsey from 1433.^[2] He was Dean of Salisbury. He became bishop of Chichester on 24 September 1445, and was consecrated bishop on 6 February 1446.^[3] He was Lord Privy Seal in 1444,^[4] at the same time that he was Protonotary of the Holy See. In 1447 he had permission to fortify the manor house at Bexhill.^[5]

An active partisan of the unpopular William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Moleyns was lynched in Portsmouth by discontented unpaid soldiers on 9 January 1450.^[3][6]

Moleyns was a correspondent of the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, who complimented him in a letter of 29 May 1444: "And I congratulate you and England, since you care for the art of rhetoric".^[7] In 1926 George Warner attributed The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1435–38) to Moleyns but this theory was partly based on Warner's mistaken identification of Adam Moleyns as a member of the family’s Lancashire branch.^[8] The theory of Moleyns' authorship of the poem is now rejected by most historians and scholars.^[9]

Citations

1. Paleography Exercises A document of Adam Moleyns accessed on 25 August 2007
2. Priests of Kempsey accessed on 25 August 2007. Archived 2009-10-24.
3. Fryde, et al. Handbook of British Chronology p. 239
4. Fryde, et al. Handbook of British Chronology p. 95
5. Bexhill Museum The History Of Bexhill accessed on 25 August 2007
6. Michael Miller The Wars of the Roses chapter 37 accessed on 25 August 2007;Steven Muhlberger Beginning of the Wars of the Roses accessed on 25 August 2007;The Royal Garrison Church accessed on 25 August 2007
7. Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of 2004:216 and note
8. Holmes, G.A. (1961). "The Libel of English Policy". English Historical Review 76: 193–216. doi:10.1093/ehr/lxxvi.ccxcix.193.
9. Smith "Moleyns, Adam (d. 1450)" Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

References

• Fryde, E. B.; Greenway, D. E.; Porter, S.; Roy, I. (1996). Handbook of British Chronology (Third revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56350-X.
• Smith, Bill (2004). "Moleyns, Adam (d. 1450)" ((subscription or UK public library membership required)). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/18918. Retrieved 18 April 2012.

Further reading

• Reeves, A.C., Lancastrian Englishmen (Washington: University Press of America) 1981. One of five fifteenth-century careers outlined through documents.