TURBERVILLE, William

The Turbervilles of Bere Regis could trace their descent from Sir Payn de Turberville, who came out of France with the Conqueror and was granted the lordship of Coity in Glamorgan by William Rufus. From the 1240s the main Dorset branch was seated at Bere, where they held the hundred as well as the manor by grant of the earl of Pembroke,5 Hutchins, i. 136-8; Feudal Aids, ii. 11, 28; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 382. and a member of the family first represented the county in Parliament in 1305. William’s grandfather, Sir Richard Turberville†, did likewise at least three times, while his father represented Dorset in the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388.6 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 672-3. William’s inheritance from his father, whom he succeeded in 1420, included besides Bere, the manors of Winterbourne ‘Vifash’ and Combe, along with property at Sturminster Marshall, Lytchett Minster and Hamworthy. According to the tax assessments of eight years earlier, these were worth some £50 p.a., even though the manor-house at Bere had been destroyed by fire in the first decade of the century and had needed to be rebuilt. During his lifetime William added to these holdings the manor of ‘Hymbury’ (perhaps Lymbury in Marnhull).7 Feudal Aids, vi. 423; C139/27/17.

William’s mother Margaret, who survived her husband, continued their long-running dispute with the abbess and convent of Tarrant, the Turbervilles’ neighbour at Bere. At an assize of novel disseisin of 1414, the abbess had successfully brought an action against Sir Robert and Margaret with five other members of their family, including the young William, whereby she had recovered possession of some 650 acres of land and a moiety of a fulling mill, which she claimed had been granted to the abbey by Henry III.8 C1/69/261; C260/127/7c. The Turbervilles were also alleged to have disseised the lawyer Robert Craford† of property in Bere, which Craford recovered against them at the assizes: JUST1/1527, rot. 6d. Unfriendly relations with the abbess were to persist for many years to come,9 CP40/635, rot. 373; 696, rot. 125. exacerbated by the belligerent attitude of our MP. William also argued with his younger brother, Robert, about property bequeathed to the latter by their father, and so acrimonious did their quarrel become that on 15 July 1426 he had to be bound over in £200 to hand over to his sibling land in Winterbourne Kingston which Sir Robert had purchased, and to pay him an annual rent of eight marks from his manor of Combe.10 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 275-6. Robert was also favoured in an entail of substantial estates belonging to their maternal relations, the Carews, as devised by their uncle Nicholas Carew† (d.1432), so that in the event of the deaths without issue of their cousin, another Nicholas Carew*, and his two nieces and sister, first Robert Turberville and then his older brother would stand to inherit.11 C1/18/36. However, this never came to pass.

Through his first marriage, contracted early in the 1420s,12 The couple had a papal licence for a portable altar in Oct. 1426: CPL, vii. 450. Joan’s previous husband, Walter Inteburgh, who had been treasurer and receiver-general for Thomas of Lancaster, the lt. of Ireland, had died intestate at some point after Mar. 1421: CP40/699, rots. 26d, 59d, 652. to the only child of Nicholas Toner, William acquired the manor of Turners Puddle on the river Piddle near Bere,13 Hutchins, i. 211-12, says that Joan died seised of the manor in 20 Hen. VI, and indeed a writ de diem clausit extremum was issued on 4 Dec. 1441, for Joan, late the w. of Walter Inteburgh (CFR, xvii. 196), but no inq. post mortem has been found. together with Joan’s dower portion of other property in the neighbourhood which, when held by her previous husband Walter Intebergh in 1412, had been valued at £40 p.a.14 Feudal Aids, vi. 431. With the help of his cousin Nicholas Carew and Dorset gentry such as John Latimer*, Turberville ensured that his principal manors were entailed on his and Joan’s children.15 C139/142/22.

Turberville attested the shire elections held at Dorchester on 26 Mar. 1425, when Sir Richard Stafford* and John Newburgh I were returned. Both men appear to have been connected with the administration of the Dorset estates of Edmund, earl of March, who had recently died, and Turberville may have been associated with them in this regard, for four weeks later he was a member of the jury called to give evidence in the county town at the earl’s inquisition post mortem.16 C219/13/3; CIPM, xxii. 486. In the spring of 1430 he crossed to France in the retinue of Reynold, Lord de la Warre, on the major expedition accompanying the young King for his coronation,17 DKR, xlviii. 269. although he returned home by the Hilary term of 1431 and before that event took place.18 Then attending the ct. of common pleas in person, to sue a local labourer for stealing timber and crops worth £20 at Bere: CP40/680, rot. 30. Having been elected to the Parliament assembled between 8 July and 21 Dec. 1433, he was among the knights of the shire commissioned to distribute tax allowances in their respective counties and to provide a list of those considered eligible to take the general oath against the maintenance of malefactors.19 His brother Robert was among those he listed: CPR, 1429-36, p. 382. Yet, even while these processes were in train, Turberville himself was allegedly engaged in breaking the law. John Seymour I*, the sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, subsequently petitioned the chancellor to complain that on 7 Apr. 1434, when his under sheriff Robert Collingbourne* was holding a tourn, Turberville had arrived with a number of trouble-makers and so menaced him that he dared not proceed and the jury he had summoned were too intimidated to make any presentments.20 C1/12/140. The precise cause of Turberville’s ire is not recorded, but he clearly bore a grudge against Seymour for detaining £24 8s. owing to him for his parliamentary wages. He alleged in the court of the Exchequer that although Seymour had received the writ de expensis at the close of the Parliament and had levied the sums due to Turberville and his fellow MP Sir John Chideock* from their county, he had refused to hand over his share.21 E5/503. Significantly, Turberville was never returned to Parliament again, and save for his appointment as a tax collector – a lowly task for someone of his standing – he was never given further responsibility for any tasks of royal administration.

Another reason for Turberville’s exclusion from public office may have been the aggressive renewal in the 1430s of his family’s quarrel with the abbess of Tarrant, who protested about his usurpation of her rights of jurisdiction at Bere, and the way his servants had wrongfully levied tolls and imposed fines on her tenants. In 1435 she brought further pleas of trespass against him, alleging that over the previous 11 years he had wrongfully had hundred courts conducted at Bere in his name, and had made a forcible entry into her property in the local forests, causing damage to the sum of £50. A jury at the assizes held in Dorchester in 1438 found in her favour, upholding her claims that the hundred and its court pertained to the abbey, which was also entitled to other privileges which Turberville had usurped. Damages of £100 were awarded against him. However, as it was found that the abbess had falsely accused him of trespass and he was acquitted on this particular charge she remitted the damages to him.22 CP40/680, rot. 397; 699, rot. 458.

Turberville did not lack for important connexions among the gentry of the shire. He was called upon to witness deeds, and acted as a feoffee for the prominent family of Newburgh, from which he selected his second wife.23 Hutchins, iv. 443; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 481-2; Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 345; CP40/779, rot. 515. This wife, Edith, brought him more land in Dorset as her dower from her earlier marriage to Henry Gouvitz, who like our MP came from an ancient family of Norman extraction long settled in the county.24 Hutchins, i. 456; iii. 695, 703. Turberville attested the Dorset elections for a second time in 1442, when his brother-in-law the lawyer John Newburgh II was chosen as a shire knight.25 C219/15/2. During the 1440s he occasionally brought suits in the court of common pleas, for example in 1447 against tenants for wasting the lands of his inheritance and cutting down valuable timber and crops, and against an Exeter merchant for a debt of £40.26 CP40/745, rots. 53d, 166d. In this period, too, he came to be associated with James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, a newcomer as one of the leading landowners of the region, as the earl’s co-feoffee of the manor of Sutton Walrond on behalf of the wealthy John Roger of Bryanston, who died in October 1450.27 CPR, 1446-52, p. 411; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 162.

Turberville himself died earlier the same year, on 5 July. It is possible that like William Stafford*, another member of the Dorset squirarchy who died just 12 days before him, he met his death while engaged in combating Cade’s rebels in Kent. The executors of his will, which has not survived, were his widow Edith and her brother John Newburgh II. Turberville’s heir, John, the eldest of his four sons by his first wife, and then aged 28,28 C139/142/22; CP40/768, rot. 75. died childless in October 1456, leaving as his successor his next oldest brother, Richard.29 C139/166/26. In transactions completed two years later the main Turberville estates were entailed successively on Richard’s two younger brothers of the whole blood, and then on his half-brothers (born to our MP’s second wife, Edith Newburgh), both of whom were called John. The machinations of Edith’s brother John Newburgh II presumably lay behind the provision that the final remainder was to fall to him. Newburgh clearly had some kind of financial hold over Richard,30 Dorset Feet of Fines, 385-6. Further transactions of 1476 confirmed the entail in the male line: CCR, 1476-85, no. 140. who after Newburgh’s death in 1484 attempted to recover possession of his mother’s manor of Turner’s Puddle which the deceased had seized. He said he entrusted the manor to the lawyer to hold to his use (and that may indeed have been the purpose of an enfeoffment made in 1459), but that Newburgh had contrived to settle it on his own younger son, another John Newburgh†. The latter asserted that his late father had paid Richard 300 marks for the manor, and had received from him a formal quitclaim of his title. Richard then changed his plea, arguing that he had mortgaged the property to Newburgh senior for 160 marks, and although he had offered to refund the money Newburgh refused to accept it. Not surprisingly, he lost his suit.31 C1/110/9-13; Dorset Feet of Fines, 386-7. Even so, Bere Regis and the other manors he had inherited from our MP were in his possession when he died in 1504, and duly descended in his line.32 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 957; iii. 382. Meanwhile, Richard’s half-brother, Sir John Turberville, a beneficiary in the will of his uncle John Newburgh,33 PCC 20 Logge (PROB11/7, f. 149). had led a distinguished career under Henry VII, during whose reign he was made constable of Corfe castle, marshal of the Household and treasurer of Calais. Like his father and their ancestors Sir John sought a seat in the Commons, and was returned for Dorset in 1491 and 1495.