BARLEY, Robert (c.1409-67), of Barlow, Derbys.

The Barlows had held the manor of Barlow near Chesterfield since the time of Edward II. S. Glover, Derbys. ii. 94. By the fifteenth century they had divided into at least two branches and it is impossible accurately to identify our MP’s father. His grandfather was, however, almost certainly another Robert Barley, described as ‘of Barlow Lees’ when named as a tax collector in Derbyshire in 1410. He was assessed on the respectable income of £20 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1412; and, as steward of the Derbyshire courts of Sir Thomas Chaworth*, was indicted as a common maintainer before justices of inquiry in 1414. CFR, xiii. 182; Derbys. Chs. 831; KB9/204/2/45. He died before 1425 and his son and heir may have been any one of the several Barleys then active in a minor way in local affairs. Perhaps the most likely candidate is Roger Barley, who served in the retinue of Sir Philip Leche†, in the Norman campaign of 1417 and had a royal grant in tail-male of land in the bailliage of Caux to the annual value of 300 francs. C64/11, m. 39. If he was our MP’s father, this would help explain why the young Robert embarked on a military career. On 8 Mar. 1430, at about the time as he came of age, he sued out letters of protection as about to depart for France in the retinue of Sir John Cobham, and it may be that he remained there long enough to witness Henry VI’s coronation in Paris in December 1431. C76/112, m. 18.

On his return Barley found the local peace disturbed by a violent dispute between his neighbours, Sir Henry Pierrepont* and the Foljambes, and he gave his support to the former. On 14 Sept. 1432 he allegedly joined Pierrepont in an assault on the younger Thomas Foljambe at Chesterfield and was duly indicted when royal justices of oyer and terminer came to the county to investigate these disturbances in April 1434. In the following Trinity term he appeared in the court of King’s bench to plead self-defence, and in 1439 he was later able to purge himself by making a small fine to the Crown. S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 130; KB9/11/16d-17; KB27/693, rex rot. 6.

In the meantime it is likely that Barley had been to France for a second time. Late in March 1436 he received a letter from Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, as captain of Calais, addressed to him as the duke’s ‘trusty and wel-beloved Squier’. It instructed him to ‘shape you to be ready in all hast with such men as ye goodly may gete’ to repulse the threat to the town posed by the duke of Burgundy. It is not known whether he served on Gloucester’s subsequent expedition. Indeed, had the family not preserved the letter and produced it before the heralds on their visitation of Derbyshire in 1611, there would be no evidence of our MP’s association with Gloucester. Genealogist, n.s. vii. 5. If it is true, as stated in some of the pedigrees, that he married into the wealthy family of Delves, the connexion may have been established through military service. His putative bride was the daughter of a younger son. J.C. Cox, Notes on Churches Derbys. i. 67.

All else that is known of Barley’s career relates to local politics. He is to be distinguished from his namesake, a servant of the Exchequer: CCR, 1441-7, p. 312. Confusion may arise because, on one occasion, the latter acted as mainpernor for a royal grant of land in Notts.: CFR, xviii. 107-8. In 1441, when Ralph, Lord Cromwell, found himself the victim of the depredations of Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, he sat on a petty jury before commissioners of oyer and terminer to try Grey’s servants. This jury appears to have been suspected of partiality for, on 13 Sept., our MP and his fellow jurors took the precaution of securing from Lord Grey’s men a release of all actions of decies tantum. CCR, 1441-7, p. 30. Barley makes few other appearances in the records during the 1440s, perhaps because his modest estates were still burdened by the interests of his mother. She was alive at least as late as April 1446 when she, then resident at Chesterfield, made a grant of property at Gonalston in Nottinghamshire. Add. 70512 (formerly BL, ms. Loan 29/60), f.162. It is likely that she died soon afterwards, but her survival may have been a factor in determining him to follow a military career in the 1430s. In any event an improvement in his economic circumstances is implied in the increase in his subsidy assessment from £13 in 1435-6 to £20 in 1450-1, a rise of particular significance in the context of the general under-assessment of incomes in the later returns. E179/240/266; 91/73.

At the end of the 1440s Barley was foolish enough to come into conflict with Cromwell, who, as lord of the manor of Dronfield, numbered among his near neighbours. According to an action sued by Cromwell in the court of King’s bench in Michaelmas term 1450, our MP had broken his close and houses at Dronfield, cutting down and taking away wood on 8 Oct. 1449. A letter, written on 13 Mar. 1451, throws an interesting light on the negotiations attendant upon this suit. It shows that Barley had already attached himself to another of his powerful neighbours, John Talbot, son and heir apparent of the earl of Shrewsbury and a friend of Cromwell. In these circumstances it was natural that Barley should have turned to Talbot for help: the anonymous correspondent, referring in passing to the trespass action, remarks that, although he had understood that Talbot had agreed with Cromwell that the matter should be concluded out of court, it now appeared that the suit was to be tried nisi prius. The correspondent’s information was correct: a jury was summoned to appear before the assize to be held at Derby on the following 7 May. He seems also to have been correct in believing that a compromise settlement was in agitation. The jurors did not appear at the assizes, and, after Cromwell and Barley had come in person to the court of King’s bench in Hilary term 1452, the matter disappears from the rolls. SC1/51/59; KB27/758, rots. 18, 64d; 759, rots. 34d, 46d; 761, rot. 50d. The later part of Barley’s career was dominated by his service to Talbot, who succeeded to the earldom in 1453. In the Trinity term of that year he was one of over 80 men appealed in the court of King’s bench by one John Walwyn for murder. No details of the offence appear and the appeal was quickly dropped. It is, however, clear that the alleged murderers were Talbot servants for they were headed by such senior members of the Talbot retinue as the Yorkshiremen Thomas Wortley of Wortley and Thomas Everingham of Sheffield. KB27/769, rot. 85. Barley’s election to represent Derbyshire in the Parliament of 1455 was another aspect of his service to the new earl, for Talbot was anxious to be represented in the Commons after the equivocal role he had played in the campaign leading to the first battle of St. Albans. A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 72-75.

The earl was not, however, Barley’s only important associate at this date, for he had already established a friendship with the wealthy gentry family of Blount. Walter Blount* was his fellow MP in 1455, and soon after the end of the Parliament they are again found acting together. Late in 1456 they were named among the administrators of the goods of Walter’s father, Sir Thomas Blount†, and as the two arbiters in a dispute between our MP’s neighbour, William Rollesley of Brampton, and the abbot of Beauchief. A Croke, Fam. Croke, ii. 802-3; Notts. Archs., Craven Smith Milnes mss, DD.CW Ib/5. This association is a significant one and indicates that Barley’s election in 1455 is not to be explained only in terms of the political needs of the earl of Shrewsbury. The election came in the aftermath of serious disturbances in the county, most notably the sack of Walter Blount’s manor of Elvaston by a confederation of Derbyshire gentry headed by the Longfords. Further, on 2 July 1455, the day before the election, Walter’s brother, Thomas*, had led an assault on some of the family’s opponents in what appears to have been an attempt to prevent them reaching the shire court. This gives added significance to the fact that, unusually for a Derbyshire election, many of the attestors were drawn from the north of the county, including our MP’s relative, John Barley, and other adherents of the earl of Shrewsbury, such as John Pole of Hartington, who headed the list of attestors, and Edmund Lovet*, who was himself returned to represent Derby in the same Parliament. KB9/280/26; C219/16/3. There can thus be no doubt that the mutual co-operation of the earl and the Blounts was responsible for Barley’s return.

During the later 1450s Barley continued to be active on the earl’s behalf. When Shrewsbury acquired the manor of South Wingfield from Cromwell’s executors he appointed him as the steward of his courts there, and in March 1458 he was one of those to whom the earl conveyed his Derbyshire estates to raise the purchase price of this valuable manor. Blore, 39-40, 97; C139/179/58. His appointment to the county bench is also explicable in terms of his service to the earl, for it came during his lord’s term as treasurer of England. Explicable in the same terms is the appointment of William Barley as escheator in Notts. and Derbys. in Nov. 1456, a month after Shrewsbury became treasurer. William may have been our MP’s yr. son. Although our MP was in receipt of the commission of the peace for only little more than three years, it was an important period in the local political fortunes of his master. On 6 Dec. 1457 Humphrey Bourgchier*, husband of one of Cromwell’s coheiresses, forcibly entered South Wingfield, and it is not surprising to find that Barley was one of the j.p.s before whom the relevant indictment was taken at Derby on the following 10 Jan. KB9/288/22.

Likewise, it was as a servant of Shrewsbury that, on 8 Nov. 1459, Barley was elected again to represent Derbyshire, on this occasion with Robert Eyre*, another of the gentry of the north of the county who counted among the earl’s adherents. By this date Shrewsbury had abandoned his earlier equivocation and firmly committed himself to the militant Lancastrian party. His star was thus very much in the ascendant when elections were held in the immediate aftermath of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge. Given the contentious agenda that this Parliament was to address, he was no doubt anxious (although for rather different reasons than in 1455) to secure the presence of some of his own men. There is no direct evidence to show what, if any, measures he took to ensure a favourable result to the Derbyshire election. What is clear, however, is that the election was held in the presence of an electoral body that was far from ordinarily constituted. The return is irregular in three ways: first, each of the 30 attestors was, uniquely for a Derbyshire return of this period, assigned a place of residence; second, these attestors were almost exclusively drawn from the north of the county; third, none of the leading men of the county were present. Thus, just as in 1455, it seems that the earl employed his influence to secure Barley’s return. C219/16/5; Wright, 115-16.

Barley’s service to Shrewsbury brought with it some indirect benefits. Without it, not only would he have lacked the weight to claim a place in Parliament, but he would have not been able to marry his daughter Agnes to the heir-apparent of one of the leading Derbyshire families. In 1458 she was contracted to Thomas, son and heir-apparent of John Cockayne of Ashbourne. Our MP was able to provide her with a marriage portion of 100 marks, a respectable sum for the daughter of a lesser esquire, but not enough, in normal circumstances, to command such a match. Wright, 207, 211, 219-20. The explanation probably lies in the desire of the Cockaynes, whose political and economic fortunes were in decline, to attach themselves indirectly to a lord who was powerful both locally and nationally.

Such dependence on the part of our MP, however, also had its drawbacks, particularly in the volatile political circumstances of the late 1450s. Shrewsbury’s death at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 effectively marked the end of Barley’s public career, and he was removed from the bench. None the less, he was not without his own, albeit slight, connexions with the victorious Yorkist party. According to the pedigrees, in the late 1420s a daughter of the Barley family (perhaps our MP’s sister) had married a long-serving servant of Richard, duke of York, John Vincent of Braithwell in the West Riding. This identification is confirmed both by heraldic evidence and the appearance of our MP among Vincent’s feoffees. Harl. 6070, ff. 254v, 256v, 257v; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 239. Further, a later Chancery case shows that Barley numbered among his own feoffees Henry Pierrepont†, whose grandfather he had aided against the Foljambes in the early 1430s: Pierrepont fought for the Yorkists at the battle of Towton and was well rewarded by Edward IV. Whether these connexions aided our MP at the change of dynasty can only be a matter for speculation. Indeed, the feoffment to Pierrepont may date from after this change. Even so, it is clear that Talbot’s death did not leave him politically isolated. C1/61/181; Nottingham Med. Studies, xxx. 90-91.

A monumental inscription, now lost, in the church of Barlow shows that Barley died on 15 Aug. 1467. The tomb slab survives: it is incised with full length figures of a man and a woman under pointed canopies, the former clad in plate armour, and was once decorated with the arms of Cockayne and Vincent. Add. 6670, f. 186; Cox, i. 65-67. He was succeeded by his eldest son, another Robert, who had already begun to play a part in local affairs. As early as Mar. 1455 he had been named on a petty jury panel at Chesterfield to try (Sir) William Vernon* for felony: KB9/12/2/285. The history of the Barleys remained bound up with that of the Talbot earls of Shrewsbury long after our MP’s death. Robert Barley (d.1533) was the first husband of Bess of Hardwick, who later married George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury (d.1590), and at the end of the sixteenth century the manor of Barlow was purchased by the Talbots. Glover, ii. 94; CP, xi. 713; Add. 28113, f. 23.