COLLINGBOURNE, Robert (d.1459), of Great Bedwyn, Wilts.

Collingbourne’s father Richard, who occupied the post of clerk of the peace in Wiltshire for some 23 years from 1390, represented Marlborough in the Parliament of 1402. The family originated from one or other of the villages of that name situated to the south of Marlborough and not far from Great Bedwyn. It was in the latter place that the Collingbournes took up residence, after Richard acquired a manor there. He may be regarded as the founder of the fortunes of this family of minor gentry, which rose in status during the fifteenth century mainly through service to social superiors. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 631-2; VCH Wilts. xvi. 19-20; Ric. III, Crown and People, 101-8. His son Robert, our MP, followed his example. The education which Robert received at Winchester College in company with two of his brothers, Winchester Scholars, 34, 38, 47. provided a good grounding for entry into the legal profession. A further advantage may have come from his father’s friendship with the prebendary of Bedwyn and dean of Wells, Master Walter Metford, a brother of the late bishop of Salisbury. In his will of December 1421 Metford left Collingbourne’s widowed mother a silver standing cup and 12 silver spoons. Reg. Chichele, ii. 253-4. The dean had been enfeoffed by Collingbourne’s father of messuages and land in Great Bedwyn, Little Bedwyn, Stocke, Forde and Collingbourne, which were later to pass into the possession of our MP and his wife. To this inheritance Robert added more property in the same places, and he is known to have paid rent for burgages in Great Bedwyn to Humphrey, earl of Stafford. CCR, 1441-7, p. 43; Add. Rolls 28005, 28006, 27679. He readily seized the opportunity to expand his interests in the locality. At the Salisbury assizes of July 1428 he joined the Devon landowner Sir John Dynham and William Wynard the recorder of Exeter in bringing a plea against Henry Clerk and his wife Christine for illegally ousting them from a messuage and land in Great Bedwyn. The Clerks responded that the disputed property pertained to the earl’s manor of Wexcombe, which was ancient demesne of the Crown; accordingly, the suit should be pleaded in the manor court. But Collingbourne and the rest denied this, saying that it was held of John Staplehill as of the manor of Little Bedwyn, and so pleadable at common law. The eventual outcome proved satisfactory to Collingbourne: by a final concord made a few years later the Clerks relinquished the property to him and Staplehill, and it was he who kept it. JUST1/1540, rot. 18; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), nos. 480-1. It is probable that, in the late 1440s like his kinswoman, Agnes Collingbourne, he also leased tenements in Marlborough. SC6/1055/17-19.

Collingbourne’s career as an attorney began in the mid 1420s both at the assizes held at Salisbury, and in the law-courts at Westminster, where inter alia he represented his mother in suits in King’s bench. KB27/657, att. rot. 1d; JUST1/1540, rot. 114d. While at Westminster he attracted some attention. On 12 Dec. 1426 he and a cleric named William Pencryche obtained at the Exchequer keeping of the alien priory of Langennyth in Wales for a term of 20 years, for which they agreed to render £20 p.a. and an increment of ten marks. It was later discovered, however, that custody of the priory had been granted three years earlier to Robert Bridport, the Benedictine monk whom the abbot of Evreux had presented as prior, and by the advice of the royal judges and King’s council the patent to Collingbourne and Pencryche was annulled in February 1429. CFR, xv. 157; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 530-1. The decision, which left Collingbourne seriously out of pocket, provoked animosity between the two men. Our MP’s resulting legal action against Pencryche, now archdeacon of St. Davids, Exeter, for a debt of £28, led to the defendant’s outlawry, but Collingbourne continued to pursue him, by 1435 alleging that he was owed £40. He instituted proceedings whereby distraint was to be made on the bishop of Salisbury to have Pencryche (who was beneficed in that diocese) brought to court to answer, albeit with little avail for the suit remained unresolved in 1439. CPR, 1429-36, p. 21; CP40/698, rots. 18, 372d; 715, rot. 18.

Before his first election to Parliament Collingbourne had been singled out by the wealthy Wiltshire landowner (Sir) John Stourton II* (afterwards Lord Stourton) to be a feoffee of parts of his inheritance in Essex, Somerset and Hampshire, and Stourton thought highly enough of his abilities to engage him as an attorney in the common pleas in Hilary term 1431, while that Parliament was in progress. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 112, 119; CP40/680, rot. 247d; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 125-6. Collingbourne had attended the county court at Wilton for the elections to the Parliament, and was to do so again in the following year, when Stourton was elected as one of the shire knights and he himself was re-elected to sit for his home town. During these years he regularly took on briefs for other litigants from Wiltshire, CP40/687, 688, 691, att. rots. while at the same time pursuing his own debtors for substantial sums of money, although not always with success. CPR, 1429-36, p. 158; 1436-41, p. 457; CP40/688, rots. 95, 203. More out of the ordinary, he appeared in the King’s bench in Hilary term 1433 to stand bail for a Cornish weaver and husbandman who stood accused by Joan, widow of Nicholas Jop† of Bokelly, of killing her husband. KB27/687, rot. 52.

In the early 1430s Collingbourne was sometimes employed by sheriffs of Wiltshire to receive writs on their behalf in the law courts. CP40/684, rot. 130 More responsibility attached to his appointment by Stourton as under sheriff in Gloucestershire for the duration of his shrievalty of 1432-3, and this was immediately followed by service for John Seymour I* as his under sheriff in Somerset and Dorset. An under sheriff’s duties were not always routine and lacking in incident, as is clear from a petition Seymour sent to the chancellor. He complained that on 7 Apr. 1434, when Collingbourne was holding a tourn in his name in Dorset, William Turberville* had turned up with a number of trouble-makers and so threatened him and intimidated the jury that the proceedings had to be brought to a close. C1/12/140. During this term as an under sheriff Collingbourne was listed among the leading men of Wiltshire required to take the generally-prescribed oath against maintenance. CPR, 1429-36, p. 371.

Collingbourne once more attested the parliamentary elections for his home county in 1435, this time endorsing Seymour’s election as a shire-knight, and on the same occasion he himself was returned to the Commons for a third time, now as a representative for Marlborough. That he continued to be a member of Seymour’s circle is clear from the list of witnesses to a conveyance made in his interest in 1441: headed by Sir John they included a number of the latter’s kinsmen and friends, among them John Sturmy* (Seymour’s uncle of the half-blood), who had accompanied Collingbourne to the Commons ten years earlier. It had been for Sir John Stourton that our MP had again served as under sheriff in Gloucestershire, that same year, C219/14/5; CCR, 1441-7, p. 43; CP40/720, rot. 119d. but there was no conflict of interest involved here, for Seymour, like Collingbourne, was numbered among Stourton’s feoffees. Our MP also served Stourton as a trustee for the performance of a settlement on his daughter Joan and her husband Richard Warre*, and in January 1442 he received an assignment at the Exchequer on his behalf. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 321; E403/743, m. 9. He had attested the Wiltshire elections to the Parliament then in progress, and was to do so again in 1450, in company with his son William. On the latter occasion their kinsman John Russell II* was elected for the county, and Collingbourne not only attested the sheriff’s indenture but also stood surety for Russell’s attendance in the Commons. In the following year Russell named him among the feoffees of his Wiltshire lands. C219/16/1; C140/42/44.

In his final years Collingbourne, now usually designated ‘esquire’, continued to be associated with the Seymours. Wilts. Hist. Centre, Savernake Estate mss, 9/6/22-24. At his death on 27 Feb. 1459, Bodl. e. Mus. 2, ff. 518-19 (a breviary belonging to the church of Great Bedwyn, which lists obits of local people, including three members of the Collingbourne family). his heir was his son William. E. Kite, Wilts. Brasses, 38 held that it was Collingbourne’s ‘da. and h.’ Joan (d.1495) who m. (1) Richard Holt (d.1458); and (2) Constantine Darell* (d.1508). But Holt, the only son of Richard Holt*, is known to have married c.1443, Joan, da. and h. of William Chamberlain* of Southampton, and the same Joan was party with her husband Constantine Darell to deeds of Oct. 1495: C139/120/43; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1255; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 514; Southampton RO, terrier SC13/1/1; Black Bk. Southampton, ii (Soton Rec. Soc. 1912), 162-3. The latter attained some local prominence after Edward IV granted him in 1461 custody of the royal park at Ludgershall, and he retained the keepership of the manor and town of Ludgershall at farm until the King’s death. CPR, 1461-7, p. 15; CFR, xx. 53-54; xxi. no. 654. He grew in stature too after he inherited the estates of the late John Russell in 1471, and was appointed not only as sheriff of Wiltshire, but also of Somerset and Dorset. In King Edward’s household he occupied the post of serjeant of the pantry, C140/42/44; CCR, 1476-85, no. 49. and wearing the royal livery he processed with his sovereign’s hearse to Windsor on 18 Apr. 1483. Such was William’s devotion to Edward and his son that he could not bring himself to accept Richard of Gloucester’s usurpation. As the supposed author of the doggerel lampoon which began ‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovell the Dog’, he was hanged, drawn and quartered in December 1484, and his estates declared forfeit to the Crown. Letters and Pprs. Ric. III ed. Gairdner, i. 8; Ric. III, Crown and People, 104-8; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 510, 519-20, 542; Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 278; KB9/952/3-17. On their eventual return to the Collingbourne family they were divided between William’s two daughters. VCH Wilts. xvi. 19-20.