Perneys first comes to notice in May 1408 when he was one of the jurors summoned from Billingsgate Ward to attend the husting court of London. He had no doubt set up in business by then, although the first specific reference to him as a fishmonger occurs almost two years later. He and the other administrators of the estate of Walter King, a grocer who died intestate, were then suing George Longville for debt—without much apparent hope of success.
Some of Perneys’s income was invested in land. According to the lay subsidy return of 1412, he could expect less than £3 a year from his London property, but it looks as if his major acquisitions in the City were made well after this date. The land and tenements which he settled upon his widow, Joan, lay in the parishes of St. Martin Outwich, St. Benedict Fink and St. Margaret, Bridge Street. He already owned premises in the last of these parishes when, in December 1429, Robert Ramsey of Essex leased him a neighbouring tenement called ‘Le Sunne’ at an annual rent of 11 marks, payable in part to a chantry priest at the fishmongers’ church of St. Magnus the Martyr. Between November 1421 and March 1427 a shop in Bridge Street, a tenement and wharf in St. Stephen’s Lane, and a second tenement in Pudding Lane were all conveyed to the MP jointly with others, so it is by no means clear if his interest was that of owner or trustee. He probably acted in the latter capacity where dwellings elsewhere in London were concerned. By the time of his death Perneys also held the manor of Bensham in Croydon, together with extensive farmland in that part of Surrey.
The three London fishmongers, John Prophet II, Robert Hurlebatte and Nicholas James, each in turn named Perneys among their executors, thereby involving him in at least two lawsuits for the recovery of debts, as well as in a third action brought in the court of Chancery by Joan, the widow of John Rous II, as a result of alleged extortion on James’s part. The latter’s other executor, Thomas Badby, subsequently claimed that Perneys had withheld over £386 belonging to the deceased, but was awarded less than half of the sum after taking Perneys’s own executors to law in March 1435. On at least two occasions our Member obtained formal custody of the goods and chattels of other tradesmen, holding these in trust for the use of their nominees.
Perneys rose to become mayor of London at the end of his life, after 16 years’ continuous participation in civic government. His public career really began with his election to the House of Commons, but some months before being returned to Parliament in October 1416 he was appointed to recover a loan of 10,000 marks advanced to the Crown by the people of London on the security of the wool subsidy. He attended at least nine of the parliamentary elections held in the City between 1417 and 1433 (when he was present as mayor); and in 1425 he arbitrated in a property dispute which had come before the court of aldermen.
Perneys made his will on 25 Mar. 1434 and died within the year. He was buried in the church of St. Margaret, Bridge Street, to which he left £40 for building works and the foundation of a chantry. His bequests to his wife, brother and two surviving sons came to £290, above unspecified sums set aside for charitable purposes. Besides their dispute with Thomas Badby, his executors faced the problem of recovering 100 marks from the Fishmongers’ Company as compensation for obligations entered into on its behalf by Perneys for the purchase of premises in London: they eventually took their case to law, but the outcome is not recorded. Perneys’s feoffees also appear to have created difficulties by failing to release their title to his property in the City, and it was not until after 1442 that his second son, Henry, obtained a secure title to his inheritance.