John Smith

Who is John Smith?

John Smith was an English genealogical antiquary and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1621 to 1622.

Smith was the son of Thomas Smith of Hoby, Leicestershire and his wife Joan Alan, daughter of Richard Alan, citizen of Derby. He was educated at the free school, Derby and then went in 1584 to Callowden to wait on Thomas Berkeley, son and heir of Henry Berkeley, 7th Baron Berkeley. He studied under the same tutor, and he went up with the young lord to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1589. In 1594 he was admitted to the Middle Temple, and two years later, having completed his studies there, returned to the Berkeley family as household steward. In 1597 he took the more lucrative and important office of steward of the hundred and liberty of Berkeley. About the same time he took up his residence at Nibley, Gloucestershire, where in time he acquired two adjacent manor-houses, "adorned with gardens and groves and a large park well wooded." The Berkeleys were so generous to him that the family jester is said on one occasion to have tied Berkeley Castle to the church with twine "to prevent the former from going to Nibley." As steward of the manor, Smith had charge of the muniment-room at the castle, and, devoted himself to studying the valuable material which had accumulated there over the centuries. He eventually wrote a history of the lives of the first twenty-one lords of Berkeley, from the Norman conquest down to 1628.