POPE, Stephen, of Gloucester.

Stephen was possibly the brother of the prominent Gloucester goldsmith, John Pope, and uncle to Thomas Pope. By the autumn of 1364 he had acquired property including 11 shops in Hereford through marriage to the heiress of Thomas Ledbury, but he continued to reside in Gloucester (where, in March 1379, as a juror, he assisted the bailiffs to make a valuation of the goods of a fellow burgess), and in the summer of 1387 he sold his Hereford holdings to Richard Nash.Cal. Hereford Cathedral Muns. (NLW 1955), no. 502; CP25(1)83/48/15; C131/26/7; Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 1016. By 1384 he had become Gloucester’s coroner, an office he was still holding when elected to Parliament for the only recorded time. At some unknown date he was appointed coroner of the shire as well as for the town, but in May 1390 the sheriff was instructed to replace him as being ‘too aged’. However, Pope was still alive some nine years later, having in the meantime served on a jury in July 1392, at an inquest concerning property alienated in mortmain by Thomas Pope. Before February 1397 he was suing John Carles and his wife Alice for debt in the court of common pleas. He is not recorded after 1398, when he stood surety for a brewer seeking licence to trade in Gloucester.C145/417/8; CPR, 1396-9, p. 132; Gloucester Guildhall, roll 1352.