St Benet Fink

St Augustine Watling Street and Old Change - Robert and John Gurney

St Augustine Watling Street stood at the corner of Watling Street and Old Change in the City of London. Old Change ran from Cheapside to Knightrider Street; the parish was destroyed in the Great Fire 1666 and rebuilt by Wren, then united with St Faith under St Paul’s in 1670 and ultimately united with St Mary le Bow in 1954. The 1638 T. C. Dale return surveyed by British History Online lists the parish’s rents and tithe assessment in three sections (MS. 67, MS. 67a, MS. 68) totalling £1,700 yielding £233 5s tithe at 2/9 in the pound.^[1]

The 1567-1568 London port book gives an earlier London mercantile comparator: Richard Gurney, indexed as a haberdasher, appears in at least twelve entries. The selected May-July 1568 entries show repeated Danzig/Baltic import activity in flax, Spanish iron, and eels, with individual declared values ranging from GBP 8 to GBP 60 in the extracted sample.^[2] Alfred P. Beaven’s aldermen list then identifies Richard Gourney, Haberdasher, as alderman for Portsoken and Bridge wards, Sheriff in 1589-1590, Auditor in 1587-1589, and Master of the Haberdashers’ Company in 1589-1590 and 1596-1597; he died 5 March 1597, with PCC will 35 Cobham dated 15 October 1596 and proved 8 April 1597.^[3] The port-book haberdasher and alderman are a strong working correlation, but kinship with Robert Gourney of Old Change or the later Haberdashers’ Gournay charity remains unproved until the livery/probate bridge is pulled.

Robert Gourney was admitted to the Drapers’ Company by servitude on 16 December 1581 under master Robert Furnes, already styled “Tailor, Old Change” at admission, and worked as a Drapers’ master in roughly 14 apprenticeship- and freedom-master events between 1597 and 1622 at Old Change. He married Anne Morris of St Michael in the Querne by licence at St Magnus the Martyr on 4 April 1611, after having three children of an earlier marriage baptized at St Augustine in the 1590s (John 1595/6, Mary 1597/8, and a stillborn son 1601). His 1625 Archdeaconry of London will places his dwelling and shop in Old Change and gives the lower commercial portion to his son John Gurney.^[4][5]

John Gurney, son of Robert, was admitted to the Drapers’ Company by redemption on 11 February 1623/4 (a non-patrimony path that requires explanation since Robert was a Drapers’ freeman since 1581) and appears as a Drapers’ apprenticeship master on 3 November 1630, binding Henry Smith of Kilton, Suffolk, for seven years. In 1638 the St Augustine rents return lists one John Gurney at £10 in MS. 67a; on MS. p. 68 of the same return Joseph Huntscott (= Joseph Henscott, the Stationer named in Robert’s will as overseer) appears at £12, confirming continued parish-network presence of the same circle 13 years after Robert’s death. Boyd’s Inhabitants of London card for John Gurny of S Augustine also carries an unverified 1661 Old Change poll-tax reading, which if confirmed at image level would extend the household’s London presence well past the colonial-emigration horizon.^[6][1:1][7]

This Old Change household is the Candidate D cluster of the John Gurney case. Depth-of-detail analysis is held in research/people/john-gurney-candidate-d.md; the case-file summary is at research/case-files/john-gurney-case-file-v4.md Section 8.4.

Haberdashers’ Gournay charity

A later Charity Commission report on the Haberdashers’ Company describes “Gournay’s Charity,” a loan charity arising from Richard Gournay’s gift of 300 pounds, with annual interest intended for the poor of the Company, Christ’s Hospital, and a poor scholar studying divinity at Oxford or Cambridge. The report says the money was no longer lent at interest and had been represented by a nominal stock appropriation producing 15 pounds per year. The Richard Gournay charity is not yet tied to the direct line, but it is useful London mercantile/civic context for the broader surname network and should remain visible as a lead.^[8]