An Eyre had been a forester in Hopedale in the Peak as early as 1285, and by the mid fifteenth century the family had spread itself into several branches. No fewer than six Eyres, all but one living in High Peak, figure in the Derbyshire subsidy return of 1450-1. They were a family of service par excellence, finding places in the administration of the numerous non-resident landholders of northern Derbyshire.
The younger Robert’s energy and ambition is implied by the speed with which, even before his father’s death, he won a prominent place in the service of John Talbot, the second earl of Shrewsbury. On 20 Mar. 1458 he was among the servants of the earl who offered surety that their master would pay Cromwell’s executors 2,000 marks for the Derbyshire manors of South Wingfield and Crich. A week later, he and the other sureties were enfeoffed of the Talbot lands in the county and charged to employ the issues to pay this heavy debt.
Very little is known of Eyre’s career in the 1460s despite his acquisition of his parental estates early in the decade. His obscurity is explained by the Talbot minority: the death of the second earl at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 had left a minor as heir to the Talbot lands, and the Eyres were thus temporarily without a patron. Their standing was probably also compromised by an indictment taken before the j.p.s, headed by Walter Blount*, Lord Mountjoy, at Derby on 15 Apr. 1466. Several of the family, including our MP’s brother, Stephen, were implicated in the murder of Nicholas Fox at Newbold near Chesterfield on the previous 31 Mar. If the jurors are to be credited, the crime was a particularly brutal one: after stabbing their victim with a wood knife, the assailants are said to have cut off his right hand and foot in the presence of his pregnant wife. She brought an appeal in the court of King’s bench against those indicted as principals in Fox’s death, and added to them, as accessories, a further 13 members of the Eyre family, one of whom was our MP (described as ‘of South Wingfield, gentleman’). Unfortunately nothing is known of what lay behind this crime. Its damaging effect upon the Eyres was, however, only short-term. The widow, in the customary fashion, quickly abandoned her appeal, and it is probable that the Eyres compounded with her for the murder of her husband.
For reasons not obviously apparent, Eyre became a man of altogether greater account in the immediate aftermath of the Readeption. This may have been partly due to the increased role the young Talbot earl was coming to play in local affairs. Yet this can hardly have been the whole explanation. Eyre’s career continued to flourish after the earl died in June 1473 leaving a mere boy as his heir. Before the earl’s death he was nominated to the Derbyshire bench and appointed to his first ad hoc commission of local government; thereafter, however, other acknowledgments of his local standing followed. On 12 Feb. 1474 Edward IV granted him, for the duration of the minority of the new earl, George, an annuity of £5 charged on the Talbot lordship of Hallamshire. In the following November he took a long lease of 20 years in the duchy of Lancaster demesne lands and meadows in Bradwell (in High Peak) at an annual rent of eight marks; and in February 1475 he leased lot and cope, a duty on the mining of lead, within High Peak for ten years at ten marks p.a.
Three of these grants must have been confirmations of annuity and office held by the Eyres under the previous earl, and are to be explained by the Crown’s desire to secure administrative continuity on the Talbot estates. Significantly, however, the leases of duchy of Lancaster property date from after the appointment of William, Lord Hastings, as steward of High Peak, and it is clear that the Eyres had replaced Talbot lordship with that of the new steward. This new allegiance was a natural one for the Crown had granted Hastings the wardship of a significant part of the Talbot estates, including those in the north Midlands. On 4 Oct. 1476 Hastings formally retained our MP and Richard Eyre, and by July 1480 our MP was his deputy steward of High Peak. In the following November he was pricked as sheriff and there can be little doubt that, just as he had owed his election to Parliament as a young man to Shrewsbury’s patronage, so this appointment as sheriff was due to that of Hastings.
Even, however, during these years of minority in the earldom of Shrewsbury, Eyre continued energetically to serve the Talbots. On 22 Oct. 1473 he was a juror in the inquisition post mortem taken on the death of Elizabeth, widow of the earl killed at the battle of Northampton, and he was also involved in the execution of the will of the third earl. Indeed, he was able to turn to his own advantage his dual role as executor and as one of the feoffees in the Talbot estates charged with paying Lord Cromwell’s executors for the manor of South Wingfield. In 1480 he received as much as £17 16s. 5d. from the latter for his ‘benevolentia’ in securing these payments. By 1482, although Earl George was still a minor, Eyre may have been acting as his steward. If the dating is to be trusted, at a view of frankpledge at Baslow on 14 Apr. 1483 it was presented that he, as steward, had held great courts there in usurpation of the rights of Henry Vernon†, head of the leading gentry family of the Peak.
Soon after his term as sheriff, Eyre played a part in the famous dispute within the wealthy gentry family of Plumpton, which, although resident in Yorkshire, had substantial landed interests in the Peak. As a friend and feoffee of Sir William Plumpton*, he was drawn into the litigation between the heir male, Sir Robert Plumpton, Sir William’s eldest surviving son, and the heirs general, Sir William’s grand-daughters. In the autumn of 1482 the latter and their husbands, John Rocliffe and John Sotehill, sued him in Chancery for detinue of charters concerning the manor of Elton and other property in Derbyshire and Staffordshire; Eyre replied that the charters concerned property which Sir William intended for Sir Robert, and there can be no doubt that he was acting in the interests of the latter. Later Henry Foljambe brought a similar action, claiming charters concerning the same manor of Elton, but Eyre, as a consequence of the earlier action, had already surrendered the Plumpton charters to the master of the rolls. In any event Foljambe’s claim appears to have been a speculative one. This is the last we hear of Eyre’s involvement in the matter, although he preserved until his death the closest of associations with Sir Robert Plumpton.
Like others of Hastings’s retinue, Eyre retained his place in local affairs after his lord’s execution in June 1483. Indeed, he had already formed an attachment which was likely to be of considerable advantage in the changed political circumstances of that summer. Soon after coming of age in 1477, the young Francis, Lord Lovell, had appointed him as his steward of his north Derbyshire manor of Holmesfield. Lovell’s high standing with the new King Richard III probably explains why our MP was able to find a place in the service of the man responsible for Hastings’s death, a good illustration of the artificial nature of the affinity Hastings had built up as a broker of royal patronage. Under Richard III he held household office as one of the gentlemen ushers of the hall, and his kinsman John Eyre served as a yeoman of the Crown. When the King was at the Staffordshire monastery at Burton-upon-Trent on 31 Mar. 1484, he rewarded our MP with the grant of an annuity of ten marks assigned on the honour of Tutbury; and later in the same year Eyre secured the confirmation and extension of the duchy farms he had held from the mid 1470s.
Little is known of the last years of Eyre’s life. In the summer of 1490 he acted as the sole arbiter in a minor dispute between his friend, Sir Robert Plumpton, and his cousin, Ralph Haugh of Elton. In 1492 his eldest son, another Robert Eyre, allegedly led an assault on another member of the family who had taken service with (Sir) Henry Vernon. Soon after, our MP was himself involved in a poorly-documented dispute with John Power. This resulted in a decree of the royal council in November 1495 that Power should be restored to whatever Eyre had taken from him.
Eyre’s career was one of service and there is more to illustrate his relationships with greater men than with his neighbours of his own rank. Nonetheless, the marriages of his many siblings and of his own large brood of children created a wide kinship network, which, although centred on north Derbyshire, spread into neighbouring shires. Most of these marriages were into families on the borderline between the gentry and the yeomanry and resident in the immediate neighbourhood of the Eyre estates, such as, for example, the marriage in about 1481 of his own daughter, Agnes, to Richard Stafford of Eyam.
A further indication of the range of Eyre’s connexions is provided by the arrangements he entered into on 30 Dec. 1471 for the marriage of his son and heir to Elizabeth, daughter of Nicholas Huddleston. The trustees for the implementation of the settlement on Eyre’s part were his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Thomas Fitzwilliam I and II*, his younger brother, Roger Eyre, and, more surprisingly, three townsmen from Nottingham, namely Richard, son of Thomas Alestre*, Richard’s brother-in-law, Thomas Bingham, and Thomas Wymbissh.
A brass to the memory of Eyre and his wife survives in the church of Hathersage, decorated with the arms of Eyre, Padley and Fitzwilliam. Formerly it also commemorated their seven sons, two of whom died in infancy, and two daughters, but several of these figures have now been lost.