Sometimes difficult to distinguish from family namesakes, Bisley was perhaps a son of John Bisley†, a lawyer who sat for Gloucester in several of Richard II’s Parliaments. To confuse matters, he had an elder brother of the same name, although contemporaries used the sobriquets ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ (or ‘elder’ and ‘younger’) to differentiate between the two men. It was therefore as ‘junior’ that the subject of this biography was returned to the Commons of 1426, in order to distinguish him from the man who represented Gloucester in seven Parliaments from 1406 to 1421.
We first hear of Bisley in inauspicious circumstances, as a principal in the murder of Thomas Compton, then one of the bailiffs of Gloucester, in the summer of 1412. By September that year news of Compton’s death had reached the Crown, which commissioned Sir John Berkeley†, William Walwayn, John Deerhurst, Robert Gilbert* and Roger Ball†, along with Compton’s co-bailiff, Richard Chamberlain, and the sheriff of Gloucestershire, Sir John Greyndore†, to inquire into the circumstances of his death. On 27 Sept. Walwayn, Deerhurst, Gilbert, Ball and the sheriff presided over a hearing at Gloucester and took indictments against Bisley, his nephew William Pope and the tailor Richard Derham, for murder and against those said to have incited, assisted and sheltered them, including Bisley’s brother and the prior of the local Augustinian monastery of St. Oswald’s. According to the indictments, on the previous 6 Aug. Bisley, Derham and Pope, a merchant by trade but then also one of the bailiffs’ serjeants, had attacked Compton in Westgate Street, where Bisley and Pope had cut him down with their swords. Immediately after the killing, Bisley and Pope had fled to the latter’s house in Oxbode Lane, where they had received the assistance of William and Thomas More, Walter Wade and others. Armed with a couple of guns, hot water, molten lead (‘plumbo calido’), bows and arrows and other weapons, these accomplices had held out against Compton’s co-bailiff until the elder John Bisley had helped them to escape and find shelter on the prior’s manor of Pirton, just outside Gloucester, later in the day. A female servant of Bisley’s, named Christine, was accused of having sheltered her master a week later, as was the elder John, who was charged with having done likewise at Sandhurst and Gloucester on 15 Aug. The jury also indicted Bisley’s brother, for procuring and inciting him and Pope to kill Compton.
On 3 Nov. 1412 the elder John Bisley and seven others accused of either direct or indirect involvement in the murder – Walter Bouer, Margery the former wife of Robert Swaynsey, Simon Broke† and his wife Joan and William and Thomas More – appeared at Westminster and were committed to the Marshalsea prison. Brought into the court of King’s bench, they pleaded not guilty and sought a trial by jury. By then, however, an appeal brought by Compton’s widow Margery in the same court was pending and the trial was suspended. In the meantime, the elder John and his associates obtained bail. In substance, the appeal told largely the same story as the indictments, providing more detail on some aspects of the murder and its aftermath and less on others. According to Margery Compton, Bisley and Pope had killed her husband with sword strokes to the head, at the incitement of Margery Swaynsey and Joan Broke and with the assistance of Joan’s husband and Derham, and had afterwards received succour from the elder John and 12 other townspeople.
The two principal appellees, Bisley and Pope, by then both outlawed, finally surrendered themselves to the authorities at Westminster in Trinity term 1413, when they, accompanied by Simon Broke, appeared in person in King’s bench. Just as he had done in the previous Michaelmas term, Broke declared that he was not guilty and Bisley and Pope entered a like plea. The latter was also able to produce a royal pardon, dated 20 May that year. After one postponement, there was a trial at Gloucester’s spring assizes of 1414, where a jury declared all three men not guilty of the crimes of which the indictments and the appeal charged them. Following the proceedings at Gloucester, they personally delivered the records of the trial to King’s bench. To do so they were required to journey to Leicester, the venue for the first Parliament of that year, where the court was also then sitting. It was not until the spring of 1420 that a jury sitting at the Gloucester assizes likewise acquitted another of those implicated in Compton’s death, John Bisley senior.
In spite of the verdict in his favour, Bisley had quite evidently played a principal part in the death of Thomas Compton, a fact recognized by an out-of-court settlement. Of unknown date, this agreement was mediated by Sir William Beauchamp† of Powick, Richard Mawarden† and others. It required Bisley to pay the widowed Margery compensation of £20, but he subsequently reneged on his undertaking to do so, thereby placing his surety, Thomas Raa of Gloucester, in legal jeopardy. Raa described his predicament in a petition requesting that Bisley should come before the King’s council to explain himself. Addressed to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, keeper of the realm, and apparently dating from the early 1420s, the petition lacks any endorsement and there is no record of its outcome.
Unfortunately, none of the evidence relating to Thomas Compton’s murder explains the exact circumstances of the crime. Possibly it was related to serious divisions within the ruling oligarchy of early fifteenth-century Gloucester, or perhaps to merely personal – albeit venomous – animosities. Whatever the case, it is striking that the victim died partly at the hands of William Pope, one of his own officers. As for Bisley, it is impossible to tell whether the affair had repercussions for his involvement in the administration of Gloucester, where his only known appointment was that of master of the local hospital of St. Margaret. Although he gained election to the Parliament of 1426, it is worth noting that his brother was then one of the bailiffs of Gloucester and would have played a central part in making the return.
Upon the election of the elder John to his penultimate Parliament, Bisley was one of those who stood surety for him.
At the time of his election to Parliament, Bisley was at odds with John Wyche, prior of Llanthony by Gloucester. Some time before July 1430, he successfully sued Wyche in the borough court for unjust detinue of chattels worth five marks, an outcome that the prior subsequently challenged in King’s bench. By 1434, the two men were quarrelling over another matter, the prior’s claim that Bisley should pay him rent for his shop near the high cross. There are references to both of these disputes in Wyche’s still extant register. Another of the surviving records from the priory is a volume containing a terrier of its lands and a record of testamentary bequests made to it. Dating from the early 1440s, by which stage John Garland was prior, it hints at further conflicts between Bisley and the priory. Where the terrier lists those properties in Eastgate Street that he held of the priory, it employs the phrase ‘ut pretendit’, suggesting that the canons were questioning his right to them.
The terrier was the work of Robert Cole, one of the canons of Llanthony, who was nevertheless to help the burgesses in the following decade, by compiling a comprehensive rental for the town in 1455. Bisley was almost certainly dead by that date, for the rental refers to him as if he were no longer alive. It lists the properties which he – and previously Robert Butt – used to hold and records that a tenement in Northgate Street ‘wherein John Bisley lately dwelt’ was now occupied by another John Bisley, perhaps his nephew Thomas’s son.