ORME, William

The Ormes had been established in Derby for at least a generation before the time of our MP. Roger Orme was named to a jury from the town in 1414 and was still alive in August 1421 when father and son were named together in a bond. At this date our MP was a merchant living at Lichfield in Staffordshire but he later returned to live in Derby, perhaps on the occasion of his father’s death.1 KB9/204/2/34; CP40/658, rot. 107. In April 1430 he sat on a jury in the town before justices of gaol delivery; in the following year he was elected as one of the town’s bailiffs; and on 27 Mar. 1432 he was returned as MP, an election which he himself attested as one of the town bailiffs.2 Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Jnl. xxiv. 79; C219/14/3. His return came at a time when the borough was riven by faction and this is likely to have influenced the result of the election. According to indictments laid before the commissioners of oyer and terminer in Derby on 1 Apr. 1434, both Orme and his fellow MP, Robert Colman*, were implicated in the violent confederacy led by Nicholas Meysham*, the purpose of which was to overturn the customs of the borough and replace them with others of the confederates’ own making. Described as a barker, Orme was indicted by a jury of townsmen as one of those who had carried ‘billes et gundaxes’ and other weapons in the town continuously since June 1430, and, more significantly, as an accessory to the murder at Meysham’s hands of one Nicholas Gomon on 10 May 1433.3 KB9/11/17d, 18. Our MP was also named as an accessory to the murder in a parlty. petition and an appeal by Gomon’s widow: SC8/113/5619; KB27/691, rot. 55d. Although the victim is said to have been murdered in Derby, he did not die until the following Sept. when he succumbed to his injuries in London: KB27/779, rex rot. 21. To these indictments one of the two grand juries added a closely related one: Orme was said to have been among those who, on the day of Gomon’s murder, formed a confederacy for mutual maintenance with their own livery of caps of diverse colours, pretending that the distribution of this livery was for the support of a priest to celebrate divine service in the church of St. Mary in the town. The grand juries also claimed that he had illegally received livery from Sir Richard Vernon* at Derby on Christmas Day 1429 and from Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, at Codnor on 20 Apr. 1433. This last indictment raises the possibility that Meysham’s faction had Grey’s support, for two other of Meysham’s followers, Colman and Thomas Stanley, were also indicted for receiving that lord’s livery. In Easter term 1435 all three pleaded in King’s bench that they had legally received Grey’s livery as his household servants.4 KB9/11/15d, 17, 17d; KB27/696, rex rot. 16d. Orme was also called upon to answer the appeal of Isabel Gomon as one of the accessories to her husband’s murder, but she quickly defaulted, presumably after the defendants had compounded with her for damages.5 A jury to try the King’s suit on the appeal appeared at Westminster in Mich. term 1435, but the plea roll does not record the verdict: KB27/694, rot. 4. The evidence of indictments arising from another episode of disorder a few years later demonstrate beyond doubt that Orme was a close follower of the volatile Lord Grey and so add weight to the supposition that Grey had played a part in the earlier disorders. Late in 1439 Grey and the lesser members of his retinue embarked on a series of violent offences that provoked further visitations of royal justices of oyer and terminer. The original indictment files no longer survive, but the writ files and controlment rolls show that our MP was among over 160 men indicted for supporting their lord. Trespass indictments were laid against him by juries from both Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and his failure to answer led to the promulgation of outlawry against him in both counties. His outlawry in the Nottinghamshire county court on 18 Mar. 1443 is the last record of the case in the controlment rolls. By this date he may even have been in receipt of a fee from Grey: in 1441-2 he received a payment of £6 from the collector of the lord’s rents at Breadsall near Derby.6 KB29/75, rots. 25, 27; Nottingham Univ. Lib., Middleton mss, Mi 5/167/91. His close connexion with Lord Grey rules out the possibility that he is to be identified with his more important namesake, a minor Lincs. esquire in the service of Grey’s enemy, Ralph, Lord Cromwell: Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. iv. 41.

Thereafter Orme presumably took the trouble of suing a pardon to put himself back on the right side of the law. He next appears in the records on 18 Jan. 1449, when he attested Derby’s parliamentary election, and he is again named as an attestor to the elections held in October 1449 and March 1453. By this latter date he had entered the service of Walter Blount*, whose younger brother Thomas* was returned to represent the borough at the 1453 election. Evidence for his service to the Blounts is provided by an indictment taken before the powerful oyer and terminer commission which sat at Derby in July 1454. A jury presented that a large gang headed by Sir Nicholas Longford had, on the previous 27 May, planned to lay waste and pull down Orme’s dwelling house in Derby and to despoil his goods on their way to sack Blount’s manor at Elvaston.7 KB9/12/1/13 (printed in Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Jnl. xxxiv. 45). After this narrow escape he appears very infrequently in the records. He attested the borough parliamentary election on 16 July 1455, and in 1458 he was one of many co-defendants with his master, Blount, in actions of conspiracy and maintenance. Later, in the accounting period 1 Aug. 1465 to 13 July 1467, he is recorded as paying the alnage on the sale of a ‘dozen’ of cloth. In the meantime, John Orme, a yeoman of Derby, had been named among those Derbyshire men to be arrested in the wake of Edward IV’s accession. He may have been our MP’s son and heir.8 C219/16/3; KB27/790, rot. 106; E101/343/21; CPR, 1461-7, p.32.