In 1538, George Gill of Wyddial married Gertrude Perient. So all of those Ginns descended from Mary Gill (see post of Feb 21st 2023 ) are descended from the early Perient family of Hertfordshire and thus from the John Perient mentioned here.
I first researched John Perient (there are various spellings of his name) in the original records at what was then the Public Record Office in London (now the National Archives in Kew) nearly thirty years ago. From what I can see, my notes are still by far the most comprehensive research on the man because nobody has ever really produced a biography. He is still one of the most fascinating people I have ever researched.
In the late 1300s there is a reference in the records to a John Peraunt who in 1385 was made a Sergeant at Arms to our King Richard the Second. There were twenty or so such men, and their role (they carried a ceremonial mace) was to travel the Kingdom of England to enforce the King's orders and at times take administrative roles ("in the King's name!")
I found Peraunt several times in the records - at one time he collected a prisoner from Corfe Castle in Dorset (which I visited as a boy - it is now a ruin) and in 1405 (now in service to King Henry the Fourth) the guy took control of the Channel Islands for a time. I can find no record of him after 1409, when it is supposed he died or left the King's service. It has been suggested that he is the father of the John Perient mentioned here. I think it highly likely.
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John Perient here was born in Brittany, likely around 1370.
Brittany, though part of France, had originally been populated (as the name suggests) by Celtic Britons from the west of Britain, fleeing overseas from the invading Germanic Anglo-Saxons (later the English - I am simplifying here) who were pushing the Britons further west into Cornwall (Corn welsh) and Wales ( Welsh) the term "wealas" being Saxon for "foreigner".
So the Bretons did not feel any particular allegiance to France, and often (either for money or land or both) took service with foreign armies against the King of France.
The English had been fighting the French since 1337 (the Hundred Years War 1337-1453) and for the best part of the first hundred years were winning easily (Battles of Crecy, Poitiers etc) often under the command of Edward the Black Prince (of Wales) a great English warrior who was the first to wear the three lions on his shirt, now a symbol of England.
The Black Prince
I have read that John Perient entered service with the English and "came into England with Edward the Black Prince". This would have been difficult because Edward died in 1376 on campaign in France of dysentery, and John Perient was then about six years of age. What is more likely to have happened is that John Peraunt entered the service of the English and came into England with his family in the 1370s, particularly likely as we know that both Peraunt and Perient entered service with King Richard the Second (King from 1377 to 1399) who was a younger son of the Black Prince.
John Perient is said on his tomb to have been an Esquire to the Body to King Richard the Second (a sort of attendant and bodyguard if you will) of whom there were a number, and also his Pennon or Standard Bearer. Given that Richard reigned for over 20 years (and others are named Standard bearer) it seems likely that John Perient acquired this latter honour in the later 1390s.
So Perient had taken an oath of allegiance to King Richard, but by all accounts Richard was not a great guy. He was accounted a narcissist, a man who had an inflated idea of kingship when the notion of absolute monarchy was already beginning to weaken in England (in 1381 we had the Peasants Revolt - during Richard's reign). And so factions grew up among the nobles of England and there were several men who having royal blood, considered themselves rivals for the throne and sought to depose Dick. And one of these was Henry Bolinbroke - Richard's first cousin and shortly to be King Henry the Fourth.
Bolinbroke had been exiled to France, and supposedly spent time in Brittany. A widower since 1394, he stayed with the Duke of Brittany and his wife Joan of Navarre. Joan was 31, no great beauty and had had eight children - but she had personality and charm and Henry was smitten with her and she with him.
Now 1399 was an eventful year for Henry. First, there was something of a revolt and Henry deposed King Richard who was imprisoned. Secondly the Duke of Brittany died, Harry's dream came true and he proposed to Joan of Navarre who readily accepted. A happy ending.
But King Dick lived up to his name and over the twelve days of Christmas of 1399/1400 his supporters rose up and made an attempt to kill Henry at Windsor where they were having a Christmas Jousting Tournament. It is called the Epiphany Rising. Henry was warned and fled and began to raise an army. The rebels were pursued all over England being caught and beheaded (if they were lucky) or hanged, drawn and quartered (if they were not) along the way. The interesting thing is that I turned up a muster of Henry's army, and John Perient was there - the guy had seen the way the wind was blowing !
The former King Richard was quietly executed and in February 1400 Perient was rewarded for changing sides. Firstly he was made an Esquire to the Body of King Henry the Fourth. I am not sure that I would have readily trusted a guy who switched sides so easily, but there you go. And he was also I found swearing an oath of allegiance to Ralph Neville Earl Marshal of England (think head of the army) and Henry's chief supporter and brother in law. Two salaries thus came Perient's way.
Although betrothed to King Henry, Joan of Navarre had stayed on in Brittany to tidy up things there and put things in order for her children, so that they could take over the Duchy. She did not come to England and formerly marry King Henry until 1402. With her she brought her Breton entourage, these including her "damsels" ie her ladies in waiting. One of these we know was a certain Joan Risain.
John Perient married Joan Risain in about 1404, we do not have a date. I made some superficial investigation into Joan's family back in the 1990s in the Guildhall Library, and the Coat of Arms on her tomb resemble those of the Raisen family of Kernault in Brittany, but I am guessing. More research needs to be done.
The English had never been happy that King Henry had married what they considered a Frenchwoman. And they were even more unhappy that she had brought into England a lot of foreigners and that, indeed, those foreigners were encouraging more to come over and they were all being treated preferentially. There were riots on occasion and some foreigners were forced to go home. But not John and Joan. They and their heirs were granted English citizenship in 1411 and 1412 respectively and thus we find the following in the Patent Rolls:
Now he was classed as an Englishman, Perient could take land in England.
Perient was friends with two Members of Parliament, John Derham and John Ludwick. Both of these men lived near Hatfield in Hertfordshire (not far from Aston where the earliest Ginn family lived as it happens) and they encouraged John Perient and Joan to move near them. They did. Perient initially acquired the manor of Digswell (in Welwyn) and later the manors of Gobions and Lavares in Stapleford, Lockleys in Welwyn and before his death Holwell in Hatfield. John Perient owned a fair chunk of what is today Welwyn Garden City.
Henry the Fourth died in 1413. The heir was his son the famous Henry the Fifth, who by all accounts respected but was not enamoured of his stepmother Joan of Navarre. She was treated quite shabbily and denied much of her income and retreated to the country. We can assume that Joan Perient was no longer her lady in waiting
Tomb of Henry the Fourth and Joan of Navarre
We know from his tomb that Perient was now made an Esquire to the Body of Henry the Fifth. Perient was in his early 40s. This is when things start to get really interesting.
I have read history books, fiction and non fiction since I could read. An early favourite novel was "The Gauntlet" by Ronald Felton (writing as Ronald Welch). I read it in the early 1960s. A young boy was on a misty hillside where he picked up a rusty knight's gauntlet that he saw in a ditch. Holding it up and putting it on, he was transported, as if in a dream, back to the 1300s. I felt a similar experience when I started to read the extensive original documentation left from the reign of King Henry the Fifth and the real people, including John Perient, that framed the events of his reign. I was there.
The English Kings, rightly or wrongly, had been claiming the throne of France for years, that was what all the fighting had been about. A great deal of time, money and English and Welsh blood (England having control of Wales and Welsh longbowmen a treasured part of the English army) had been spilt in that pursuit.
Henry the Fifth now laid claim to the throne of France. And the years 1413-15 were years spent preparing to invade. And so we come to the Agincourt campaign,
Henry the 5th needed an army, and he raised ten thousand men of England and Wales. The men at arms, that is those fully armoured with lance and warhorse were composed of the nobility, the knights and esquires - the landed gentry. Each of those was obliged to supply men according to his lands held from the King, and Perient held four manors each held on half a knight's fee, in other words in time of war his lands demanded he supply and equip two men at arms.
In 1415 King Henry was ready to invade France. Sadly, in April of that year we know that Joan Perient died, likely in childbirth and leaving several infants. We must assume that John Perient relied on servants to bring those up as in July he was ready to depart.
Back in the day I read an article which said that a certain Sir Harris Nicholas had said that Perient had gone with the 1415 expedition that led to the Battle of Agincourt. So I scuttled off to the Guildhall Library in London to find the book. It turned out that that dated from 1832, and the author had himself scuttled off, this time to the British Museum and had turned up the passport records (every English gentleman going needed a passport from the King to leave the Kingdom) of the officers of the expedition from the Norman Rolls (I have seen the entry) from which he knew that Perient had gone to France in 1415. But he estimated the number of the little bundle of men that went with him, and in that estimate he was wrong.
Harris was correct as I say, both Perient and his friend and fellow King's Esquire Nicholas Aldwick were granted passports (3rd June 1415), and they were said to be "in the retinue of the King". Now these words are important, this means that they were in the King's own unit, who would be called the King's Guard today, the sort of Housecarls of the Saxon King Harold at Hastings in 1066, the men who had sworn the English "Blood Oath" to die in battle around the King.
I cannot tell you that Perient definitely fought at the Battle of Agincourt, though he probably did. What I can tell you is that he went on the campaign and, incredibly, I can even tell you the names of the men who went with him. Life is short, and we are dead a long time, so I consider myself privileged to have read an original document from 1415 which is truly amazing, what is called the Agincourt Roll.
I was always a fan of the late Christopher Hibbert, researcher and historical writer. And at the time I was researching Perient, I had a copy of Hibbert's "Agincourt". Now Henry the Fifth led three expeditions to France, and Hibbert found a document that listed one of those armies, but which was the question, it was undated. The argument went that it was the first expedition, crucially because several prominent men in the list were known to have been dead before the second expedition, indeed some died on the first, a persuasive argument. Since I did my research in the 1990s, it appears to have become accepted generally that the document in question is a complete list by name of the men who went on the first invasion of France by King Henry the Fifth.
The Agincourt Roll (E/101/51/2 at the National Archives) is a remarkable thing. It is like a huge roll of wallpaper, a foot or more wide, being pages of parchment sewn together. It lists every man who went, down to the meanest soldier. Perient was required to supply two men at arms (known as "Lances" in the Roll) and six archers, the names
Lances
John Perient Esquire
Richard Hames Esquire
Archers
Richard Bassett
Thomas Toryton
John Teringham
Henry Smith
Thomas Rodhaw
Richard Welsh
I was later delighted to discover that Richard Hames and Dick Bassett were both mentioned in Perient's will, so they survived two campaigns and remained close to him. It seems likely Dick Bassett was the senior archer, perhaps the man centre left below.. It is also likely that Richard Welsh was a welsh man, a lot of archers in the English army were. These men had been bred to the bow since early childhood, skeletons discovered show that they were incredibly muscular with distorted chests, an English longbowman's arrow with a bodkin point could easily pierce plate armour or chain mail or be driven four inches into a block of oak. The longbowmen terrified the French, with good reason, there was no greater disgrace for a French aristocrat in full armour on warhorse, than to be brought down by an English peasant's arrow.
English archers at Agincourt
The English army gathered at Southampton in July 1415 and landed in France (Normandy) in August, obviously the best time of the year to cross the English Channel.
They laid siege to Harfleur, a French stronghold. This was the scene of Shakespeare's great speech in the mouth of Henry the 5th calling on the English army "once more into the breach dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead". But the truth is that there was a small French garrison, the English army mostly sat outside the walls getting dysentery and other diseases there being too many men in too close a proximity without sanitation, and, after negotiations with the French garrison the French surrendered and marched out. Not much glory there then.
Now Henry had invaded with just over two thousand men at arms and about nine thousand archers. It is said that about four hundred men at arms died at Harfleur, mostly of disease. Another four hundred were so ill that they had to be shipped home, unable to fight. Many of those later died or were never to campaign again. Three hundred men at arms were left to garrison Harfleur and to guard the rear of the English army, because Henry had begun to realise that the French army greatly outnumbered his, that they were coming for him and he had to get back to England quickly. So he was determined to take what was left of his force including perhaps 900 men at arms back to England and, incredibly he chose to do that by marching north across part of France to Calais, which was an English possession, then to sail for home. But he was marching across the face of the advancing French army and it was now September, moving into October and the weather was turning wet, the ground was muddy and many of the English were ill and getting sicker by the day, there was a shortage of food.
I have always thought that Perient was one of that "band of brothers" as Shakespeare called them. He was to campaign with Henry again and Henry as we shall see , kept his close entourage and "body" knights and esquires with him, so I am pretty sure he was there.
Now I am not going to retell the story of the Battle of Agincourt, but suffice it to say that on 25th October 1415 as many as 40,000 French men faced an English army of less than 10,000 men. The English could have surrendered, as ever they decided to fight.
The day went pretty much like the Battle of Waterloo went exactly four hundred years later in 1815. The English stood their ground, did not retreat a foot and let the French attack them in wave after wave. There were in fact too many Frenchmen on a narrow front, they got in each other's way, Dick Bassett and his fellow archers were protected from French cavalry by dug in sharpened stakes and released volley after volley of arrows and the French men at arms were hit and fell, only to be chopped down on the ground by our mean at arms, or less gloriously stabbed through the eye pieces of their armour by the side daggers of the archers. It was not pretty. At the end of the day there were some ten thousand French dead, the English had no more than five hundred casualties, mostly wounded. It was a miracle on the Feast Day of St Crispin Crispianus. Shakespeare says it best, puts words in the mouth of Good King Harry once more. I could not have said it better myself -
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
In 1832, Sir Harris Nicholas came up with the names of some five hundred or so of the men at arms who fought at Agincourt two of these I noticed were King's Esquires, but he said himself that he was some four hundred short. Nobody will ever know the full list.
The English army returned to London to great acclaim. Perient had lost his wife. He never married again.
King Henry the 5th was a determined man. In 1417, he raised some twelve thousand men and invaded France again. He was more successful this time. After a savage massacre the English army took Caen in Normandy. They then laid siege to Falaise. I know Perient and his little band of brothers were there because they are mentioned in the Norman Rolls, and Perient was sent through Normandy with a Power of Attorney from the King. In June 1418 our army was as Louviers and Perient was there, as were his men, but they were not named - just mentioned as his retinue..
Rouen surrendered in 1419 and that was it. Henry the 5th set up his Head Quarters in Mantes, and I know Perient was there which reinforces my assertion that where the King was, so was Perient.
By 1420 our army was at the gates of Paris and the French surrendered. Henry dished out rewards to many of his men, offering Englishmen castles and landholdings in France if they were stupid enough to accept. Most declined, realising that they would never be able to leave their French possessions securely, and would be in constant battles with the French to keep them. Because while the English had beaten the French, they did not have the population to conquer France.
In 1420 Perient was about 50. You never hear of him in the King's service again. He was not in Henry's third campaign of 1421/2. He was clearly too old to campaign again
.From what I can see Perient returned to England and concentrated on building up his landholdings and refurbishing his manors - particularly that of Digswell where he lived. It is at this time that I believe that he commissioned the manorial brass at Digwell, one of the finest in England. Like the Pharoahs he was preparing for his death and a memorial. For the record, Perient was never knighted, though one or two of his Perient descendants were.
Perient's will was made on 10th April 1432, he was in his early 60s. He is said to have died on the Monday before St George's Day (23rd April) 1432 (Inquisition Post Mortem). He was the greatest of the Perients of Hertfordshire and it was a privilege to research him.
He left £200 to build a Chantry Chapel (where a priest would say prayers for him and Joan) at Digswell Church which still stands and is where he and Joan are buried. You can visit them whenever you wish, they have lain there undisturbed for some 600 years.
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