CHALERS, Robert

The Parliament of 1447 met at Bury St. Edmunds, well away from London and Westminster, meaning that MPs had little opportunity for pursuing their own commercial or legal affairs while it sat. In common with many of the other poorer and far-flung English boroughs, Liskeard must have had difficulty in finding local men prepared to undertake the long journey to eastern England, for it ended up returning two obscure outsiders, Chalers and Thomas Costantyn*, to sit on its behalf. Both were from East Anglia, so the journey to Bury was far less of an undertaking than one from Cornwall.

A lawsuit that came to pleadings in the court of common pleas in 1470 described Robert ‘of Whaddon, Cambridgeshire’, indicating that he was from the old Cambridgeshire family of Chalers, members of which had regularly sat in the Commons as knights of that shire since Edward I’s reign. He was therefore surely related to Sir John Chalers* of Whaddon, who represented Berkshire in the same Parliament of 1447. For chronological reasons it is unlikely that he was Sir John’s son, although he may have been the knight’s brother.1 CP40/835, rot. 118; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 507-8; VCH Cambs. viii. 144. Sir John Chalers was only 33 years old at the time of the Bury Parliament, and so too young to have an adult son sitting alongside him in the Commons. Perhaps a lawyer, he must have travelled to Bury with the blessing of the Liskeard community, for at least one of his sureties, John Colys*, had impeccable local credentials, and had in fact himself represented the borough in the Commons in 1426.2 C219/15/4. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs were William Herteshorn* and Richard Haynowe, who claimed that Chalers owed them £10, a debt arising from a bond he and two associates from Kirby Bedon in Norfolk (Henry Smyth, ‘gentleman’, and Henry Smyth, ‘husbandman’) had entered into with them at Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1449. In response, Chalers asserted that Herteshorn had issued a quitclaim of all suits and demands to the same two associates in 1454, a release that he evidently believed extended to him, but the plaintiffs riposted that Herteshorn had not put his name to any such document.3 CP40/835, rot. 118. While this suit, which appears not to have come to trial, proves his link with Whaddon, Chalers also possessed interests elsewhere in East Anglia, since it was as ‘of Hoxne, Suffolk, alias of Norwich’ that he received a royal pardon in June 1472.4 C67/49, m. 28.