The man who represented Liskeard in the 1433 Parliament cannot be identified beyond reasonable doubt, for there were at least two men of this name active in Cornwall at the time. On balance, it seems most likely that it was John Bere of Brynn, a member of a family which was to provide two other MPs in the reign of Henry VI, rather than his more obscure, if wealthier, namesake from Tregarne near Helston in the far south-west, who sat in the Commons.
It has not been possible to establish John’s position in the Bere family of Brynn conclusively, but it seems likely that he was a brother of Thomas and William Bere, his near contemporaries in the Commons, and his relative obscurity suggests that he was a younger son. John’s return to Parliament stands isolated in his early career. It is possible that it owed something to the influence of the sheriff of Cornwall, Sir Thomas Arundell*, for there is a suggestion that the Beres were connected with the greatest of the Cornish gentry, the Arundell family of Lanherne. If John deliberately sought election, he may have made this decision on account of the violent dispute between the tin merchant Robert Borlase of Borlasevath (in St. Columb Major) and the brutal local esquire Richard Tregoose* into which he and his putative brothers had been drawn. Tregoose was later to accuse the three Beres of having been among a group of local gentry headed by Sir John Arundell II* of Trerice who in September 1433 had conspired to have him indicted on trumped-up charges of raping a 15-year-old virgin, and he claimed the huge sum of £1,000 in damages.
Perhaps while sitting in the Commons, Bere was able to develop connexions of the highest importance, for he is next recorded, with his putative brother Thomas, in the retinue accompanying Cardinal Beaufort to the Congress of Arras in the summer of 1435. John may have been introduced to Beaufort through the good services of the influential Renfrew Arundell*, who had sat in Parliament with him as one of the Cornish shire knights, and who likewise sailed across the Channel in Beaufort’s retinue.
Yet, barely a year later Bere found himself in rather more serious trouble. He and his neighbour Richard Trenans of Withiel had quarrelled with John Lamanva, a Cornishman in the service of William Normanton, one of the clerks of Chancery. Lamanva had used his connexions at Westminster to procure a writ of attachias against his opponents, and the sheriff of Cornwall, the influential Thomas Buttockshide†, took Bere into custody.
The later years of John’s life are obscure. He is last recorded for certain in the spring of 1466, when (alongside his namesake John Bere of Bodmin),