Unusually for one of Westbury’s MPs in the period, Colville appears to have resided in the borough at the time of his return. His parentage has not been established beyond reasonable doubt, but it is likely that he was a son or other kinsman of Robert Colville, a merchant from Bristol. Certainly, Bernard possessed connexions in that town. It was here that in 1448 he witnessed a quitclaim by the Wiltshire esquire William Bessels and his wife Agnes to another Bristol merchant, Richard Haddon, of a house in Broad Street that had formerly belonged to Nicholas Philpot, and he was appointed one of the attorneys charged with delivering formal seisin of the property to the grantee.
It is not clear whether any outside influence played a part in Colville’s two successive returns for the borough of Westbury in 1453 and 1455, and it is possible that he had simply established himself in the locality. On the second of these occasions he may have been present in the shire court, but damage to the return makes it impossible to be certain. Perhaps it was Colville’s legal, or at least clerical, expertise which attracted the electors of Westbury to his candidature, for in 1461-2 (after Edward IV’s accession) he was serving as clerk of the court of the duchy of Lancaster’s lordship of Trowbridge. In this capacity, so the lawyer Thomas Tropenell* (himself no stranger to sharp practice) complained, he had ‘for money ... without authority or commandment’ admitted John Bourne the younger to the office of constable of Trowbridge castle (a post regularly disputed in the reign of Henry VI).