The American Connection

PENOYRE, PENNOYER, PENOIR, PENOYAR, PENOYE, PENNAIRD etc.

On September 8th 1635 Robert Pennoyer left London on the Hopewell and landed at Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. in November 1635. Who was he and how was he connected to the Penoyres of the Moor, Clifford, Herefordshire, U.K.?

He was baptised in Bristol, England, on 21st November 1614 and was the son of Robert Butler, alias Pennoyer, a glove maker of Bristol, who married Robert’s mother, Alice, on 13th February 1614 in Bristol, after the death of his first wife, Elizabeth Margaret (nee Chambers), in September 1613., leaving two sons, William and Samuel. Robert Butler was born in about 1580 near Hay, Hereford and grew up as the son of Thomas Butler, a weaver of Llanafon, Dorstone, Hereford. According to evidence to an inquiry into William’s property in 1687 given by Robert Butler’s niece, Anne (nee Butler) Croys, because Robert “happened to be present when a man was killed . . . going to disguise himself he did alter his name to Pennoyre.” Taking his wife Elizabeth and sons William and Samuel with him he fled to Bristol and from thence on went by the name of Pennoyre or Pennoyer, as did the two sons of his first marriage and Robert and two other children of his second marriage.

It seems unlikely that a man on the run presumably under suspicion of murder would have taken on the unusual name of Pennoyre unless he had reason to do so. His niece Ann Croys also told the inquiry that Robert “was never reputed or taken to be the son of Thomas Penoyre of the Moor, but the son of Thomas Butler, weaver.” But it is possible that Thomas Butler’s wife, whose name is unknown, could have been a Penoyre even if an illegitimate one. In a lawsuit in 1629 concerning property called Llanerch-y-coed near the boundary of Cusop and Dorstone parishes, Thomas Penoyre’s great-grandfather, another Thomas Penoyre of the Moor who died in 1547, was said about three weeks before his death to have summoned the curate of Cusop and a number of others to his bedside and dictated his last Will and Testament in the hearing of them all, in which he left everything to his oldest legitimate son Hugh/or Howell “willing him to take all and to bee good to two base sons and a base daughter.” It is possible that the ‘base’ daughter or a granddaughter could have married Thomas Butler the weaver, in which case she might well have told her son Robert that his grandfather or great grandfather had been a Penoyre.

In 1635 young Robert would have been 21. On the list of passengers on the ‘Hopewell of London’ travelling to Boston, America, on the voyage which left Bristol in September 1635 were the names: -

Robert Pennaird, 21, Turner

Thomas Pennaird, 10

Spelling was erratic in the seventeenth century and many variations of Penoyre appear in all the documents of that age. It was not uncommon for children to be sent on the vessels crossing the Atlantic then with a view to their finding work and making a life in America where labour was in demand, particularly for work on the land. It is known that Robert Butler (Pennoyer) had two children by his second wife Alice as well as Robert, and that one of them was a daughter Eleanor who also emigrated to America, presumably later. It is likely that Thomas Pennaird, 10, was Robert’s younger brother, but nothing else is known about what happened to him, so he may have died young.

The first mention of Robert Pennoyer in the Massachusetts Bay Records is that he fled from the colony rather than answer to the Court for an attempted seduction or rape. In 1648 a complaint was made against him in the New Haven Colony that he was “complained against for drinking wine and becoming noisy and turbulent and abusing the watchman.” Later he became a well respected citizen, marrying first Elsie Marshall in 1652 at Stamford, Fairfield County, Connecticut, and after her death in 1666 Mary Elizabeth Scofield, a widow, in 1671. He had six children, died in about 1680 at Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York, and was the founder of the Pennoyer family in America.

His older half-brother William Pennoyer (1603-70) was apprenticed to a vintner at the age of 16 but left Bristol for London and became a successful merchant. As a strict Puritan he and his business partner Maurice Thompson supported Parliament’s 1641 operations to subdue the Catholic rebellion in Ireland, and received land in Ireland as payment. He was involved in the sale of cloth, tobacco, and gunpowder and carried out many profitable trading ventures overseas, including purchasing saltpetre in India and shipping “naggs” from England and “steeres” from Virginia to Barbados, where he owned sugar plantations and established sugar mills. These must have entailed the use of slave labour, and his ships are recorded to have carried cargoes of slaves from Guinea in West Africa. In 1637 he married Martha Josselyn but all their five children died in infancy. He died childless and was a generous benefactor to schools in Norfolk and Hay-on-Wye, as well as Christ’s Hospital of which he had become a Governor in 1659. In 1668 he was elected a member of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and In his Will left the income from a 92 acre farm in Norfolk to provide money for two Fellows and two Scholars at Harvard, with preference to be given to descendants of his younger half-brother Robert Pennoyer, one of the oldest scholarships in America.

William Pennoyer’s exact contemporary, Thomas Penoyre of the Moor (1602-1680) did not accept that William was related to the Penoyres of the Moor. In the inquiry into William’s property in 1687 referred to above Simon Brace of Clifford, a close neighbour of Thomas Penoyre, said he had heard him “angrily deny any relationship between himself and William Pennoyer.” William, however, was eager to claim kinship. In 1638 he sent two letters to Thomas Penoyre asking for payment for a gown and some lace, silk and mohair which he claimed Thomas had bought three years before.

Both letters are addressed on the outside of the paper “To his Cozen Thomas Pennoyre this” and “To his Loving Cozen Mr. Thomas Pennoyre at the Moor,” and begin respectively “Cozen Thomas Pennoyre” and “Loving Cozen Mr. Thomas Pennoyre.”

“London the 17th of September 1638

Cozen Thomas Pennoyer. I have often written to you too Pay my cozen John Butler the rest of the money due to mee from you which hetherto I Perceive you have not Paid, wherefore I desire you spedily to pay him elce I shall justly say that you dele dishonestly in kepeing mee soe long withoute my monny laid oute of pur . . you. I intrete you that I may not but . . . Trouble for my due

your William Pennoyer

Payd the 25th of May 1635 for Mr. Thomas Pennoyer

For dieing and wat’ring a goune 0. 7. 0

Pd. a porter for brining ye stuff 0. 0. 3

Pd. the Taylors Bill for makeing up the

goune and for 2 doz of lace beside 2. 6. 11

for one pece of mohaire 2. 12.00

for half ounce of silke 0.00.02

for a Box 0.00.02

for 1 Letter 0.00.02

______

5.08.00

It hath bene now thre yers and 4 moneths

out of purce which if it be just I refer to you to judge”

There is no record of whether the debt was ever paid. The bitterness between the two men was no doubt exacerbated during the Civil War when the Penoyres of the Moor were melting down the family silver for the Royalist cause and William Pennoyer was at one stage delivering a thousand barrels of gunpowder a month to the Parliamentary forces. The Penoyres of the Moor recovered all their lands after the death of Cromwell in 1658 and the restoration of Charles II but it seems that William’s business interests declined. Although he had been elected the Master of the Clothworkers’ Company in 1657, a position of some status and responsibility later held by the diarist Samuel Pepys, his name did not appear in the Court List of the Clothworkers’ Company. He lived in Bishopsgate in London all his life, through the Plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Helen’s in 1670.