David Hanmer

Sir David Hanmer, KS, SL (c.1332—1387) was a fourteenth century Anglo-Welsh Justice of the King's Bench from Hanmer, Wales best known as Owain Glyndŵr's father-in-law and the father of Glyndŵr's chief supporters.

After being called to the bar, Hanmer is recorded as having served as advocate in a case involving a breach of contract between a lessor and the lessee regarding the lessor's failure to make proper repairs to the leased property. In 1376, Hanmer was appointed a serjeant-at-law. As a contemporary of Chaucer, a rough portrait of Hanmer as a serjeant-at-law may be found in Chaucer's depiction of the Sergeant of the Lawe in the Canterbury Tales. In 1377, Hanmer was elevated to the position of King's Serjeant. He served the Crown in that capacity as a legal adviser to Richard II and Richard's government, represented the king in court, served as a prosecutor in criminal cases and a representative in civil ones, and held a higher rank and power in the lower courts. In his first year as a King's Serjeant, Hanmer sat in Parliament with Sir John Cavendish and others of the judiciary in judgment on a case involving a grant of the late king's grant to the widowed Countess of Huntingdon, said by some to have been Elizabeth of Lancaster, but was more probably the widow of the famous Guichard d'Angle.

On 26 February 1383, Hanmer was appointed the sole Justice of the King's Bench. The position was one of the highest to which an attorney could aspire. From 1383 through 1387, Hanmer was summoned to and sat in Parliament as one of the triers of petitions in the House of Lords. Hanmer's fellow triers included , Constable of England; Henry le Despenser, Bishop of Norwich; Walter Baron Fitzwalter (d. 1386); and Baron Cobham of Kent (d. 1408). Other triers of petitions included John Bokyngham, Bishop of Lincoln, and Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

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