Henry Booth enjoyed a remarkable and long career, and more about it can be added to the earlier biography.
Booth and many of his neighbours in southern Derbyshire benefited greatly from the Lancastrian usurpation in 1399. He actively supported Henry of Bolingbroke after his landing at Ravenspur and thereafter embarked upon a legal career. His practice was chiefly local and centred in Derby, where he represented clients at the bailiffs’ court. In 1400 he served as an arbiter in a dispute between the Derby bailiffs and a townsman, and on occasion he also acted as an attorney at the county assizes.
Booth also employed his friendship with these knights to assist him in the unscrupulous acquisition of a significant landed stake in the county. With Sir Nicholas Montgomery he was among the feoffees of Robert Fraunceys of Ticknall, and in 1410 Fraunceys’s widow, Joan, daughter of John Took of Sinfin, conveyed to him property in Egginton which had been settled on her by her father on her marriage. If this was not to the disinheritance of her own daughter (who was probably dead by this date) it was to that of her brother, John Took, who had an interest in remainder on the failure of her issue, and a significant dispute ensued. In 1420 a compromise was reached whereby Booth conveyed a life interest in the estate to the unmarried John Took, with remainder to his own issue. By March 1428, probably after Took’s death, the estate had come into Booth’s hands.
Booth also managed to acquire Robert Fraunceys’s manor of Arleston. Complex legal manoeuverings failed to secure the disinheritance of Robert’s nephew, Ralph Fraunceys, but Booth’s friendship with the wealthy Derby merchant, Thomas Stokkes*, the husband of Ralph’s daughter and eventual heiress, eventually brought the manor to the Booths. In 1418 Ralph surrendered his interest to the couple in return for an annual rent of four marks; and ten years later the manor was settled on our MP.
The duchy manor of Sinfin, which adjoined Arleston to the north, was acquired by Booth under similar circumstances. In 1409 debt had forced its tenants, the Tooks, to put it into the hands of their kinsman John Fynderne and then to mortgage it to Booth. After the dispute had erupted between John Took and Booth over the latter’s purchase of the Tooks’ Egginton estate, Booth’s tenure of Sinfin was deemed unacceptable. In March 1412 a deal was agreed. Fynderne was to pay 141 marks to Booth for title to the property; Fynderne was then to mortgage the property for 12 years, both to recompense himself and to pay Took’s debts; and at the manor’s restoration to Took at the end of this period, Fynderne was to have a contingent remainder settled upon him.
Booth’s increasing prosperity was achieved at the expense of good relations with his brother-in-law John Fynderne, and in June 1416 the matters of difference between them were put to the arbitration of Thomas Staunton* and Elias Stokkes*. A number of the points settled dealt with the disputed estates in Egginton and Sinfin, while others concerned Booth’s role in Fynderne’s dispute with Repton priory over the manor of Potlock. Although Booth had previously helped the prior (his employer) in this affair, and he could not ‘pour sa honeste overtment este encountre le dit priour’, he promised that henceforth he ‘ferra ascun brocage as jourrours enbraceours ou ascun autre persone’ against Fynderne. He undertook also not to furnish the prior with any of the manor’s title deeds and to return all those in his possession to Fynderne; this strongly suggests that he had been treacherously supplying the prior with muniments from the Fynderne archive. Another point conceded was that Booth would no longer disturb Fynderne’s tenure of the office of steward of Burton abbey – a post which he had probably held since at least 1400 and one which Booth was evidently trying to usurp.
By Fynderne’s death in 1420, the two men had sufficiently patched up their differences for Fynderne to trust our MP as a feoffee for the settlement of his estate upon his young son and heir, and Booth can probably be credited with bringing about the comprehensive settlement of the Fyndernes’ dispute with Repton priory in 1422.
Throughout the 1420s, a good deal of Booth’s time was taken up with the affairs of the Leche family. This involvement appears to have been the force motivating his parliamentary career. On his death in July 1420, the noted soldier. Sir Philip Leche†, son of Sir Roger, left most, if not all, of his estates in the hands of Booth and a clerk, William Pirton, as his feoffees and executors of his will.
Soon after, Booth and Pirton were also in dispute with another of the Leche sisters, Isabel, and her formidable husband Sir Sampson Meverell. On 27 Feb. 1423 an assize in Derby found that the two men had been unjustly disseised by the Meverells of a tenement in Tideswell.
The defendants remained at large, however, and Booth again sought remedy in Parliament. At the election held in Derby on 30 Sept. 1423, the sheriff Sir John Cockayne returned him as one of the knights of the shire, and in the assembly which convened a month later Booth and Pirton presented a petition against the Meverells, echoing the charges made in the indictment and making further ones. They claimed that the Meverells had threatened jurors in a plea of re-disseisin, and, when this failed to prevent a verdict being returned against them on 31 Aug. 1427, they and their armed supporters had lain in wait to kill the petitioners at Bubnell and in Cheshire. The petition asked that the Derbyshire sheriff be ordered to proclaim that unless the Meverells and their allies appeared before the justices of the common pleas and gave sureties of the peace, their goods would be forfeit.
The Meverells’ petition told an unsavoury tale. They claimed that Booth and Pirton had obtained the verdict in the assize of 1423 through the embracery of the jurors and the favour of the sheriff Cockayne. Yet worse, to execute the judgement of the assize, they had entered the manor of Bubnell with 300 armed men, manhandling Isabel Meverell, who was then heavily pregnant, and dragging her from the manor by her arms. Having taken possession, they conveyed the manor to Lord Talbot to procure his maintenance, and he installed his men there. The Meverells were particularly incensed that Booth and Pirton wasted Sir Roger Leche’s money on retaining ‘maintainers, embracers and other malefactors’ to delay their appeal against the assize and to bring feigned actions of debt and trespass against Sir Sampson. This campaign of harassment, they stated, was meant to force them to release their right to the Leche estate to Booth and Pirton. They complained also of the latter’s treatment of Anne’s husband John Legh, whom they had had arrested and held in prison until he made surety to them that he would not bring suit against them for any of Sir Roger’s lands. The petitioners asked that Booth and Pirton be examined about these allegations in Parliament, but the outcome is not known.
Booth’s election as knight of the shire for Derbyshire in 1427 may also have been procured so that he might further his interests as trustee of the Leche estate, although it was probably not until the Parliament of 1429 that Richard Mynors brought a petition against him and Pirton, accusing them of dereliction in their duties as feoffees of Sir Philip’s father, Sir Roger. He claimed that they owed him 200 marks as arrears of an annuity of 16 marks that Leche had granted him in return for his manor of Willersley, now in the hands of Ralph Leche. The petition was heard before the duke of Gloucester on 3 Nov., but it does not seem that the petitioner secured redress. Ralph Leche held Willesley in 1431, and after Mynors’ death in 1436 an inquisition post mortem jury (which included at least four of Booth’s retainers and allies) found that Mynors had held no lands in the county.
In 1439, when his title to the manor of Arleston was under threat, Booth resettled the estate upon his son John in tail-male, with contingent remainders to Humphrey, earl of Stafford, and after him to Henry VI. His intent in creating these remainders was recognized all too clearly by the rival claimant to the manor, William Dethick, who petitioned the earl to have the matter brought before his council. ‘Perceiving the feebleness of his title’, he alleged, Booth had settled these remainders ‘to the entent as well to have [the earl’s] assistance, supportation and favour as to delay [Dethick] of his suit by an aid prior of the king’. The earl’s response to the petition is not known, but Dethick’s suit did not ultimately succeed.
It was probably in the last decade of Booth’s life that what seems to be a satirical depiction of him was drawn in the margin of a manuscript of The Canterbury Tales and other literary works by Chaucer, Lydgate and Hoccleve. Despite its secular content, this anthology is thought to have been written at Leicester abbey and compiled over several years, beginning in about 1450. The drawing is found on the first folio of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and although now faint, it appears to depict a boar’s head wearing a serjeant’s coif – ostensibly a parody of Booth’s armorial seal of argent three boars’ heads erect sable – above which is written ‘h bothe’.
According to an inscription that was once on a wall in the church of Barrow-upon-Trent (the parish church of Arleston) in which he was buried, Booth died on Friday 8 July 1446. He had outlived by five years his wife Isabel, who had chosen to be interred with her family in the chapel of Findern.