CLYVE, William

There is no evidence that Clyve held office at Worcester, even though his fellow citizens held him in sufficient regard to elect him to two successive Parliaments. A namesake served as one of the bailiffs of Worcester in the mid 1380s, so it is possible that he was a native of the city, where he possessed a tenement in ‘Wenehalestrete’ and also held other properties in the right of his wife. In addition, he had an interest of some sort in a tenement in Cripplegate Street, which he and Thomas Andrewes leased out to two other men in 1441.2 Worcester Chs. 22, 41; Collectanea (Worcs. Historical Soc. 1912), 43-44; KB27/747, rot. 76.

Known as a ‘gentleman’,3 KB27/748, rot. 18d; CP40/754, rot. 337d; CFR, xviii. 244; C131/70/11. Clyve was almost certainly a member of the legal profession and probably the attorney of that name who found work in the court of common pleas at Westminster.4 J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 487. Whether he was the William Clyve appointed to a comm. of gaol delivery for Hereford castle in Nov. 1446 is another matter: C66/463, m. 9d. He may also have been the William Clyve who pursued suits against several individuals in the same court in the mid 1420s, over the alleged detinue of sums of money or chattels in London. The defendants included an innkeeper and baker who respectively resided near the New and Old Temples, and it is possible that the plaintiff was a member of one of those inns of court.5 CP40/663, rot. 320d. In the following year, a husbandman from Warwickshire received a pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for not appearing in the common pleas to answer William Clyve and Agnes Hichecombe, the executors of Richard Hichecombe, over a debt of £10, again contracted in London.6 CPR, 1422-9, p. 374. Although the identity of this William is far from certain, it is worth noting that the MP married an Agnes, even if it is impossible to prove that she was Hichecombe’s widow.

Lawyer or not, the MP stood surety on behalf of others in the common pleas on several occasions: in 1444, for example, he and Thomas Oseney* of Worcester (certainly a member of that profession) acted as such for Norman Washbourne. In the same decade, he was also a party to several lawsuits in the same court and that of King’s bench. In 1441 he appeared in person in the common pleas to sue several men and women from Staffordshire and the city of Worcester for debt or for detaining goods from him. He took action there in 1444 as well – this time through an attorney – against Thomas Wybbe, a ‘gentleman’ from Worcester, and John Pembroke of Evesham, again over an alleged debt.7 CP40/662, rot. 460; 719, rot. 152d; 732, rots. 390, 436; 749, rot. 116; 754, rot. 337d; KB27/726, rot. 24d; VCH Worcs. iii. 271-2. By the later 1440s, Clyve was caught up in disputes with John Hertilbury, prior of Worcester, and a fellow citizen, John Porter, both of whom sued him for trespass in King’s bench. In his suit, which came to pleadings in Hilary term 1448, Hertilbury alleged that the MP and his wife had broken into a close belonging to him at Worcester and assaulted five of his men and servants. The five included John Malvern, another monk of Worcester priory, and Robert Clyve, possibly a relative of the MP. Through their attorney, Thomas Luyt*, the Clyves denied the prior’s claims, asserting that the property upon which they had allegedly trespassed was held by them in Agnes’s right. Both sides agreed to refer the matter to a jury and, in the interests of neutrality, the court directed the ensuing writs to one of the coroners of Worcestershire, because Hertilbury had acknowledged that the sheriff, Thomas Lyttleton, was among those to whom he paid an annual retainer. As for Porter, he took action against Clyve for trespassing on a close belonging to him at Worcester, but the judges of King’s bench referred his suit to the bailiffs of the city, since it fell within their jurisdiction.8 KB27/747, rot. 76; 748, rot. 18d.

It was probably also in the later 1440s that William Stevens† sued Clyve in the Chancery, for the bill in question refers to a dispute between Clyve and John Malvern. The bill is more than a little opaque, and it reads like a complaint on behalf of Malvern and others rather than Stevens himself. According to Stevens, Clyve had previously procured false sureties of the peace to stand for him in the Chancery in relation to that dispute. Initially ‘sotelly disceyued’, that court had afterwards declared the sureties, purportedly two gentlemen, Ralph Bery of Skipton and Pers Trevyng of Bodmin, and a couple of merchants, John Colchester of London and Thomas Gode of Colchester, as invalid, for lack of sufficient proof of their identities. The bill went on to state that Malvern and ‘divers others’ had secured the arrest of Clyve on numerous occasions for breach of the peace, although Clyve had managed to secure writs of supersedeas in order to stay their proceedings against him. As a result, Malvern and his associates feared they would no longer have any recourse at law, were they to suffer physical harm at the hands of Clyve.9 C1/16/520.

At the beginning of 1450, Clyve initiated at least three lawsuits of his own in the common pleas, where again he appeared in person. Malvern and John Hertilbury featured in two of these actions, which were probably linked to the dispute heard two years earlier in King’s bench. First, he claimed on behalf of the King and himself that the two monks, along with Thomas Prat, a franklin from Kempsey, and the corviser, Robert Twynyng, late of Bordesley, had forged deeds and evidences relating to his lands and tenements at Worcester, in breach of the statute against such forgeries passed by Henry V’s first Parliament (1 Hen. V, c. 3). Secondly, he accused Hertilbury and Malvern of having assaulted and threatened his tenants, causing them to desert their tenancies. Both suits were still pending over a year later. The third lawsuit dealt with an apparently unconnected matter, the failure of a miller and innkeeper from Worcestershire and John Erlyche, a gentleman from Herefordshire, to render the money or goods he claimed they owed him.10 CP40/756, rots. 284d, 363; 760, rot. 372d; PROME, ix. 19-20.

It was convenient for Clyve to appear in court in person with regard to these lawsuits, for he was already in Westminster attending the penultimate session of his first Parliament, that of November 1449. Previously, during the first session of the same assembly, he and his fellow burgess, John Newton I*, had joined the west Midlands esquire, Humphrey Stafford of Frome, and others in entering a statute staple at Westminster. The statute was intended to ensure that Stafford and his associates would pay 500 marks to Joan, widow of Sir William Lichfield*, and William Walwyn, Lichfield’s stepson, presumably in connexion with Stafford’s marriage to Lichfield’s grand-daughter and heir, Margaret Corbet. Newton was re-elected alongside Clyve to the following Parliament. The two men must have had a good relationship since Clyve stood surety for Newton when the latter acquired a grant of the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Worcestershire and Worcester in May 1452.11 C131/70/11; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 657; CFR, xviii. 244.

However it came about, the association with Stafford would prove extremely troublesome. In the spring of 1457 the sheriff of Herefordshire, (Sir) John Skydemore*, arrested Humphrey for failing to meet the terms of the statute staple of 1449, although he returned that he had not found any of the esquire’s co-debtors in his bailiwick. Attached to the return were the findings of an inquisition he had held at Hereford on 8 Apr. 1457, namely that neither Clyve nor the others had possessed any lands or goods in Herefordshire when they had entered the statute, or at any time since.12 C131/70/11. By then Stafford had fallen out with John Talbot, 2nd earl of Shrewsbury. On 30 Dec. 1456 he had been outlawed for failing to appear at Westminster to answer a suit in King’s bench over the alleged forging of charters in breach of the statute of Henry V that Shrewsbury and his eldest son, Sir John Talbot, had brought against him at Westminster, and by the following June he was a prisoner in the Marshalsea. His failure to answer the Talbots’ suit had consequences for his sureties, since it prompted the Crown to initiate proceedings against them. It is somewhat ironic, in light of the previous action of his own against Malvern and Hertilbury for breach of the very same statute that Clyve was among those sureties. Yet he and his co-sureties in turn failed to respond to those proceedings, and by Michaelmas term 1462 they themselves were on the verge of incurring outlawry as a result.13 KB27/796, rex rot. 18d; 806, rex rot. 12; CCR, 1454-61, p. 190.

Thereafter Clyve disappears from view, but Agnes Clyve was still alive in the early 1480s. Probably by then a widow, at some stage in the first year of Richard III’s reign she conveyed a plot of land beside the river Severn to the prior of Worcester.14 C131/70/11; Worcester Chs. 112.