John de Rednesse

John de Rednesse (died after 1386) was an English born judge who served four times as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.[1]

He was the son of Stephen de Rednesse, whose family took their name from the village of Reedness in the then West Riding of Yorkshire. He is first heard of in 1327 when he received a royal pardon for killing one of his servants. He is unlikely to have been more than twenty at the time, since he was still alive almost sixty years later. Between 1335 and 1342 he served as Commissioner for the Peace in Yorkshire.[2]

Modern-day Reedness, John's birthplace

He came to Ireland in 1344 as a justice of the King's Bench. In 1346 he was appointed Lord Chief Justice; he was later demoted to second justice of the King's Bench, and was then reappointed Chief Justice. In all he served four terms as Lord Chief Justice.[3] Such rapid changes of personnel on the medieval Irish bench were not uncommon, but they normally resulted from a clash between rivals for office; in Rednesse's case, unusually, he was replaced on each occasion by a different man. In his later years a rival did emerge in the person of Richard de Wirkeley, Prior of the Order of Hospitallers, who was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1356, but he was quickly replaced by Rednesse, and ordered by King Edward III not to intermeddle with the office.[4]

Rednesse was finally removed from office in 1361. He returned to England, where he spent his later years in his native Yorkshire. He served on a Commissioner for the Peace in 1374.[5] In 1386, by which time he must have been far advanced in years, he was one of several local landowners who were asked to conduct an inquiry into the illegal digging of a watercourse in the Holderness region, which was causing a nuisance.[6]