CHALERS, Sir John

The Chalers family had been established in England since the Conquest, its most notable possessions being two manors in Whaddon in Cambridgeshire, and Wyddial and Reed in Hertfordshire. Sir John’s grandfather and father both represented Cambridgeshire in Parliament,5 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 507-8. but although he himself took part in the administration of this county, as sheriff for two terms, and maintained close links with certain of the local gentry, his public activities were focused on Berkshire. This was so even before he acquired jure uxoris the manor of Lyford, and his early place of residence in the county is not recorded. He attended the Berkshire elections held at Wallingford on 28 Sept. 1435,6 C219/14/5. even though he may well have still been living at the family seat in Cambridgeshire. Together with his father, and described as ‘of Whaddon, gentleman’, John was sued in the court of common pleas by Richard Nordon, a London tailor, for a debt of £4 4s. 7d., and both of them were outlawed for failing to appear to answer the charge. However, in November 1436 they secured royal pardons of outlawry.7 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 5, 6. John’s entry into the royal household preceded his father’s death, and he was listed among the esquires of the hall and chamber in the early 1440s.8 E101/409/9, f. 36v; 409/11. He may have been in the King’s service on his coronation expedition to France in 1430: E101/408/11, f. 2. Following his father’s death on 7 Feb. 1443, he duly took possession of his inheritance.9 C139/108/20; CFR, xvii. 263. The income this provided is uncertain; the £33 p.a. suggested by jurors at his own inquisition post mortem was in all probability an underestimate, given that knights were expected to have a landed estate producing at least £40.10 C140/25/28.

If John’s marriage to the heiress Maud Cowdray had not yet taken place, it was to do so within the next few years, and probably before his election to Parliament. It brought him an interest in properties at some distance from his Cambridgeshire home, for Maud held in jointure by a settlement made in 1438 by her former husband, William Vyell, the manor and advowson of Claverham in Somerset, and her dower may have included lands at Shenington in Oxfordshire.11 Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 91; C140/36/25; VCH Oxon. ix. 142 (which errs in stating that William Vyell was still alive in 1453). Besides this, she was possessed of Lyford, which had been settled on her and Vyell, also in 1438, by her mother Margaret (the coheiress of various former Cowdray and Popham estates), who had taken as her third husband Robert Long*, the prominent Wiltshire lawyer. Under the terms of this arrangement the Vyells paid the Longs £10 p.a. during Margaret’s lifetime, but thereafter would hold the manor in tail and free of charge.12 CP25(1)/13/83/24; VCH Berks. iv. 289. Maud had married Chalers by 1449, when, following the death of her half-brother, Thomas Wayte, she inherited more of her late mother’s lands, this time sharing them with her sister, Margaret, who had married Long’s son, John*. In this way Chalers acquired jure uxoris a moiety of the manor of Barton Stacey in Hampshire and the manor of Hartridge in Berkshire.13 C139/133/12; CFR, xviii. 152. Maud and her sister also stood to inherit on the death of Isabel, widow of John Romayn, the entailed manors of Titcomb and Haslewick, Berkshire, and in 1450 they brought an action in the common pleas against Isabel and her then husband, Nicholas Banaster, for wasting their inheritance, claiming damages of £200. They finally inherited these properties on Isabel’s death in 1453, and partitioned them between them.14 CP40/756, rot. 68d; 757, rot. 397; VCH Berks. iv. 209 (which wrongly states that Maud and Margaret were Margaret Popham’s daughters by her 2nd husband, William Wayte); C139/150/32; CFR, xix. 78-79. Once again, the precise value of these holdings is not known, and little weight should be given to the improbably low figures given in inquisitions. Chalers and his wife experienced long delays before they were able to take possession of her interitance; in each case a year elapsed after the deaths of Wayte and Isabel Romayn before the formalities were completed. In the hope of obtaining yet more land, they then laid claim to the manor of Padworth in Berkshire, which had belonged to Maud’s grandfather, Edward Cowdray* of Herriard, alleging that her uncle Peter Cowdray had unjustly disseised them in February 1453, but in this action they appear to have been ultimately unsuccessful.15 CP40/775, rot. 411; VCH Berks. iii. 414. Chalers entered a bond in £200 to Cowdray in 1456 to abide by a settlement of the manor: Hants RO, Jervoise of Herriard mss, 44M69/C/458. Successive assizes of novel disseisin eventually, in 1460, found in favour of Sir John and his wife and awarded them the manor, but the Cowdrays contended that there were errors in the proceedings, and continued to pursue the matter after the change of regime: KB27/807, rots. 85-86.

Almost immediately after his father’s death Chalers had been given tasks of local government as befitted his new status as a landowner and his rank among Henry VI’s esquires. During his first shrievalty of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, in 1444, Thomas Kerver of Reading was arrested on charges of treason after he was reported making seditious statements about the King, and Chalers, having been made responsible for Kerver’s safe custody and his appearance to stand trial, brought him under heavy guard to London. His expenses were covered by a grant of 40 marks, warranted to ‘oure welbeloved squier’ on 29 Mar. 1445, although delays at the Exchequer meant that this was not actually paid until a year later.16 E404/61/284; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 454. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1445, most likely at the coronation of Queen Margaret of Anjou, Chalers had been knighted. He had also successfully applied for a royal licence to grant land to the chantry founded by John Bateman in the church at Burrough Green, Cambridgeshire. In this benefaction he was associated with several other leading members of the local gentry such as Laurence Cheyne* and Gilbert Hore*, and it may be that they were acting on behalf of Edmund Ingoldisthorpe* to whom the right of presentation to the chantry belonged.17 C143/450/7; CPR, 1441-6, p. 358.

Sir John was described as a ‘King’s knight’ on 12 Aug. 1446 when he was allotted a tun of red wine every year, and as a knight of the Household when he took out a pardon on 16 Nov. following.18 CPR, 1441-6, p. 456; C67/39, m. 3. He was currently serving as sheriff again, this time in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. This proved a difficult and thankless task, in which he became liable for substantial costs incurred while attempting to levy the Crown’s revenues, especially as the King had granted out certain liberties and franchises, thus diminishing the traditional profits. At the end of his term in the autumn of 1446 he petitioned to be discharged in accordance with the statutes which forbade sheriffs from serving consecutive terms, but nobody else could be persuaded to take on the office. Reluctantly, Chalers carried on as sheriff for another year. In the course of that term a further breach in the law occurred when despite the prohibition regarding the return of sheriffs as MPs he was elected to the Parliament summoned to meet at Bury St. Edmunds in February 1447. However, he did not go so far as to return himself: he entered the Commons as a representative for a county outside his bailiwick. Undoubtedly, Sir John’s place in the royal household was a significant factor in his successful candidacy, and it may be noted that as sheriff he was responsible for making the returns of two of his colleagues at Court: Robert Stonham*, an esquire of the chamber (as MP for Huntingdonshire), and William Cotton*, the clerk of the great wardrobe, as Member for Cambridgeshire. On 15 Nov. 1447, at the end of his shrievalty, Chalers hastened to obtain letters patent formally exempting him from holding royal office again, and in February following he managed to use his personal contact with the King to secure authorization of an allowance of 100 marks in his accounts at the Exchequer to cover costs he had incurred in his two consecutive years as sheriff.19 CPR, 1446-52, p. 110; E159/224, brevia Hil. rot. 19.

Chalers attended the Cambridgeshire elections on 8 Oct. 1450, when he and (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe headed the list of 15 named attestors, all said to be resident in the county.20 C219/16/1. It was unusual for men of their rank to be present at the shire court on these occasions, but no other irregularities in the return have been noted. Chalers was associated with Ingoldisthorpe again in 1453 as his co-feoffee of the manor of Great Raveley and lands in Sawtry, Huntingdonshire, on behalf of the late John Hore* and his son Gilbert, who intended the properties to be donated to Ramsey abbey.21 E326/4458. Meanwhile Sir John had been persuaded to serve as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire again, in 1451-2, and it was the Berkshire election which he attested in 1453. There were undoubted irregularities on that occasion, for the sheriff, John Roger I*, conducted the proceedings at his own place of residence instead of at the county court and one of those returned was his own son. The other shire knight chosen was one of Sir John’s associates in the Household, John Norris*, long a favoured esquire for the King’s body and former treasurer of the great wardrobe. Chalers was currently acting as a feoffee for Norris, and was to continue to be linked with him for at least six years longer, most notably helping him to settle property on his third wife.22 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 407, 423, 476; E326/5620, 10412; C140/22/45. On 1 Sept., during the King’s illness and by authority of the Parliament, he was accorded a special pardon covering all trespasses, conspiracies, offences and concealments committed before the previous 31 May. This pardon may have come in useful the following year when John Stourton II*, now Lord Stourton, the former treasurer of the Household, brought an action against him in the Exchequer court for unjust detinue of the sum of £26 13s. 4d. which had been assigned to the Household on the revenues of his bailiwick as sheriff.23 CPR, 1452-61, p. 138; E13/145B, rots. 13d-15. The case was adjourned in each succeeding term until Trin. 1456, but no judgement was recorded. Yet the barons of the Exchequer ‘for certain allegeaunces that ben made amonges them’, chose to ignore the pardon with regard to amounts outstanding on Chalers’s accounts as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and persisted in proceeding against him. Not until April 1455, after Henry VI’s recovery, was Sir John able to obtain strict instructions from the King to the barons to secure his discharge.24 E159/231, brevia Easter rot. 4.

Chalers served as a j.p. in Berkshire for some eight years, but his concern for law and order extended beyond this locality and into East Anglia, for he had been among those, headed by Lord Scales, who gave information to the justices of King’s bench about the riots instigated by Robert Ledham of Norfolk in the years 1452-3.25 Add. Ch. 16545. It seems clear that he remained loyal to Henry VI right up to the end of his reign and perhaps beyond. In April 1455, when as we have seen he was particularly favoured by the King, he was summoned to attend a great council on 21 May as one of just two men from Berkshire (the other being Edward Langford*, his fellow member of the Household),26 PPC, vi. 340. so it is quite likely that he was with the royal entourage when it was attacked at St. Albans on the following day. Yet after the Yorkist victory he did keep his seat on the Berkshire bench. He took out another exemption from holding office on 5 Aug. 1458.27 CPR, 1452-61, p. 434.

Sir John’s continuing loyalty may have owed something to his association with John Norris, and also to his links with Thomas de la Mare†, neither of whom wavered in their support for the house of Lancaster.28 Both he and Norris were de la Mare’s feoffees: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1053, and he and de la Mare were active as Norris’s feoffees in 1459 and 1463: C140/22/45. It transpires from allegations later made by the committed Yorkist Sir Robert Harcourt* that on 11 June 1460 Chalers, together with a number of other prominent royalists (including (Sir) Edmund Hampden*, Edward Langford and Thomas Tresham*), forced their way into Harcourt’s property at Stanton Harcourt, took him prisoner and held him captive for seven weeks (until after the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton). Among those who also stood accused of this assault in the King’s bench that Michaelmas term was Sir John’s son-in-law John More, an Oxfordshire esquire. Sheriffs were ordered to arrest them and bring them to court the following term, but the continued disruption of the civil war effectively ensured the postponement of legal proceedings.29 KB27/798, rot. 63; CP40/808, rot. 355.

Needless to say, Chalers was not appointed to any royal commissions for a long time after Edward IV came to the throne, and for a few years even his whereabouts are uncertain. It was not until December 1464 that he and his wife were accorded royal pardons. The fact that in this pardon Maud was described as ‘kinswoman and heir of Edward Cowdray’ suggests that further complications had arisen over her inheritance. Indeed, a commission of inquiry was set up in the following month to look further into the Cowdray descent.30 C67/45, m. 7; CPR, 1461-7, p. 390. Sir John’s final years are shrouded in obscurity. He is last mentioned, in February 1467, as a feoffee of property in Buckinghamshire,31 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 410-11. and died on 17 Dec. following. He was buried in Whaddon church. The male line of the family ended with him, leaving the Chalers estates in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire to be divided between his three daughters:32 C140/25/28; VCH Cambs. viii. 150. Alice (c.1436-1478),33 C140/66/26. the wife of John More, Margaret (c.1440-1478), surprisingly still unmarried, but afterwards the wife of Henry Moigne,34 C140/71/52. and Anne (c.1443-1494), the wife of a John Harcourt. The identity of the latter is something of a mystery, although it is possible that he was Sir Robert’s son and heir of that name.35 Sir Robert Harcourt’s s. and h. John, who died in 1484, did indeed leave a widow named Anne. However, it was Anne Chalers’s da. Margery (b.c.1476), who inherited the Chalers manors of Reed and Wyddial when she died in 1494, and not John Harcourt’s s. and h. Robert†, said to have been b.c.1468 or c.1472 (CIPM Hen. VII, i. 329, 995; iii. no. 1118), so doubts as to John’s identity must remain. It may be suggested that some-such recently-forged link with Sir Robert had led the latter to take no further legal action against Chalers for the assault and imprisonment he had allegedly suffered at his hands in 1460; Chalers had not been among the other survivors of those events who were charged in the court of common pleas in the spring of 1463.36 CP40/808, rots. 188, 342, 355. Perhaps he had bought his freedom by agreeing to the Harcourt match with its promise that the Harcourts would thereby acquire a portion of the Chalers estates. A partition was ordered in March 1468, saving Sir John’s widow her dower.37 CFR, xx. 244; CCR, 1468-76, no. 20. Following Maud’s death, just three years later, her own inheritance passed together with her holdings in Somerset to James Vyell, her son by her first marriage.38 C140/36/25; CFR, xxi. no. 147.