RODD, James (d.c.1666), of Hereford, Herefs.

A younger son from a minor gentry family seated on the border between Herefordshire and Radnorshire, Rodd inherited only £6 13s. 4d. in cash and a bond for £30 from his father. PROB 11/103, f. 287. By 1603 he was already established in Hereford as a mercer but he rose to local prominence following the death in 1604 of his cousin William Price, a Merchant Taylor of London, who was on close terms with Thomas Clarke, Hereford’s town clerk and father of James Clarke*. Price left Rodd £300 and appointed him an executor of his will, a responsibility which brought with it control over several charitable bequests in Hereford, the most significant of which was for the endowment of a projected new hospital. Administering the will brought Rodd into contact with the highest ranks in the city’s government, as one of the overseers was a Hereford alderman. Ibid. ff. 365v-8v; Cal. Of Docquets of Ld. Kpr. Coventry ed. J. Broadway, R. Cust and S.K. Roberts (L. and I. Soc. spec. ser. xxxiv), 258.

With Price’s bequest behind him, Rodd’s business was sufficiently successful for him to make significant purchases of land in Herefordshire, including Yazor manor, seven-and-a-half miles north-west of Hereford, which he bought for £1,000 in 1613. C2/Jas.I/W17/42; Robinson, 204, 317. Three years later he served as mayor after the king quashed the election of John Hoskins*. Returned for the city to the third Jacobean Parliament, he left no trace on its records. Sheriff of Herefordshire when parliamentary elections were next held, and a party to Hereford’s election return in 1625, C219/39/108. he apparently never sought re-election.

Rodd paid £10 as composition for knighthood in September 1630. Add. 11051, f. 135v. His daughter Anne married Richard Seaborne, a client of John, 1st Viscount Scudamore (Sir John Scudamore*), who served as deputy steward of Hereford in the 1630s and was returned for the city for the Short and Long Parliaments. Vis. Herefs. (Harl. Soc. n.s. xv), 117; I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart Eng. 96. Rodd was a royalist during the Civil War, when he was appointed to the county bench. However, according to one parliamentarian contemporary he was one of the least active members of the king’s wartime administration in Hereford. Although no longer a magistrate after the war, he remained an alderman in Hereford and in December 1646 signed the letter from the corporation to Sir Robert Harley* informing the latter that he had been elected high steward of the city. He received a free pardon for his royalism the following year. ‘An acct. of Herefs. in the First Civil War’ ed. I. Atherton, Midland Hist. xxi. 149; LJ, viii. 547; ix. 116. He drew up his will on 3 June 1665, in which he bequeathed £10 to the poor of Hereford, and added a codicil five days later. The will was proved on 17 Apr. 1666. Rodd’s great-granddaughter Lucy brought Foxley to her husband Robert Price† in 1681. PROB 11/320, ff. 122v-3.