Henry Dennis (sheriff)

Henry Dennis (Feb 1594 – 26 June 1638) was High Sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1629. He was lord of the manor of Pucklechurch, Gloucestershire. The Dennis family produced more Sheriffs of Gloucestershire than any other family. Like many members of the Gloucestershire gentry he refused to take a knighthood at the coronation of King Charles I in 1625, for which he paid a composition of £25.

He was baptised in February 1594 in the parish church of St Thomas a Becket, Pucklechurch. He was the eldest son and heir of John "Dennys"(d.1609) the angling poet, by Elianor Millett, daughter of Thomas Millett of Warwickshire. He was aged only 15 on his father's death. The Denys family became established in Gloucestershire in about 1379 when Sir Gilbert Denys(d.1422) moved from Waterton, Bridgend in Glamorgan, Wales to marry the young widow Margaret Corbet(1352–1398), the sole heiress of her paternal manors of Siston, Alveston and Earthcott Green. The family name changed from its mediaeval spelling after about 1600 to Dennis. The earliest record of the family is in a Glamorgan Latin charter of 1258, where Willelmus le Deneys appears as a witness to an exchange of land between Gilbert de Turberville of Coity Castle and Margam Abbey. This early form of the name in Norman French can be translated as "The Dane", and the name was generally Latinised to Dacus, the adjectival form of Dacia, the mediaeval Latin name for Denmark.

He married twice:

He had the following two sons by his first wife:

It is not known with certainty which house in the village was the caput of the manor, that is to say the "manor house", in which the Dennis family would have lived. The manor appears to have had no resident lord of the manor until after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, before which time the manor was held as demesne lands of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The Denys family had held the farm of Pucklechurch from about 1400, and were resident at the adjacent manor of Siston, thus no manor house was needed. The canons of Bath & Wells did however regularly visit their manor to hold a manorial court, and there must have existed a suitable hall-type building for this purpose. It is thought however that the cadet branch of the Dennis family, which became lords of the manor after the Dissolution, lived in the 17th-century house now called "Moat House", but shown on tithe maps as "Great House", also known formerly as "Old Hall". This house now retains only the right-most three of what are believed to have been its original seven gables to its front elevation. The ground floor front left room was formerly the ante-room to the great hall and has a fine plaster ceiling with large Tudor roses at its corners, with in its centre a ribbed pattern with fruit and flowers, and fully panelled walls. In the roof one arched-brace collar truss and one pair of windbraces survive, probably over the former solar wing.

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