Rethinking Roger Carpenter. Roger Carpenter was the only Carpenter in 1330s and 1340s with wealth and importance in the city of London. The merchants of the period are referred to as the ‘Barons of London’. Would it be reasonable in any way to exclude the possibility that Richard Carpenter could be his son? There is no will extant for Roger. However there is extant documentation for his infant son Thomas in 1349. If Richard was born c. 1330, he would already have been a young man about business by 1349, but still too young to care for Thomas. The legal representative of Thomas is his Aunt Agnes. It is an interesting fact, in the extant documentation for Thomas Carpenter, which he is entrusted to a mercer, and that one of the two ‘sureties’, of the document was a mercer. We know that John Carpenter the Town Clerk of London was a mercer, and his father Richard was buried in the neighborhood (St. Martin Outwich) associated with the mercers, and he appears in documents with other cloth merchants. (Calendar of Letter-Books, Letter-book F, p. 200.) “Wednesday before the Nativity of the Lord [25 Dec.] 23 Edward III [a.d. 1349], the guardianship of Thomas, son of Roger le Carpenter, “spycer”, committed to Thomas de Brandone, mercer, by Walter Turk, Mayor, Richard Lacer, Roger de Depham, Aldermen, and Thomas de Waldene, the Chamberlain, by assent of William de Chalk and Agnes his wife, the aunt and nearest friend of the said Thomas, together with the sum of L.45, and rents of the value of 105s 9 1/2d., to hold in trust for the said infant, who is not to marry without the permission of the Mayor and Aldermen. Sureties, viz., Richard Vyncent, Rector of the Church of St. Benedict de Shorhogge, who holds a lay fee in the parish of St. Augustine, near St. Paul’s gate, and Adam Fraunceys, mercer.” The language describing Agnes as the ‘nearest friend’ of Thomas must mean his nearest relative of legal age or station in life bestowing responsibility. If Richard were a brother he would have been disqualified of any legal responsibility because of age. The other point, which makes me suspicious Thomas had other siblings, is the amount of his inheritance, which is seemingly small for the only son of one of the wealthiest merchants in London. The amount of 40 pounds appears in many similar documents of the time. The amount might have been what it legally took to insure the temporary well being of a minor. Likewise for the father of Roger Carpenter, there is no other logical candidate except the William Carpenter ‘spycer’ in the early 1300s. William exhibits all the same trade and political activity characteristics of the later Roger. There were no other Carpenters of similar social standing in London at the time. William’s son must have been Roger. Roger must have been the father of the Richard who appeared in several property litigations in the surrounding London area in the late 1300s. Roger had various properties and connections to the St. Benedict parish in Shorhog, an area close by Fleetstreet and St. Clement Danes, where all the other Carpenters (and a Richard Carpenter) resided in the late 1200s and the 1300s. Shorhog and Holebourn seem overlapping. Thus we can assume the William Charpenter de Holebourne was the father of Roger. Both were ‘spycers ’. William de Holebourne and Edward Charpenter of St. Clement Danes must be related. Edward and a William appear together in a ship salvage related document on the coast of Dorcet. The surnames of both are rendered by the telltale ‘Charpenter’, indicating denizen status. Edward’s son was a documented wine importer and wool exporter. Well known spycers were importers of wine in addition to their nominal profession. The cloth making and retailing professions in England, according to my reading, only come into their own in the mid 1300s, when English home-manufactured cloth begins to dominate the markets of Europe. That Richard and his sons would begin to move into these professions would have been only natural. From the mid 1300s on England really begins its history as a manufacturing nation and English cloth was the starting place. Bruce Carpenter