Adam Moleyns

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 from 1441 to 1446. 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

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.