Porter hailed from an insignificant family but one with an association with the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. In 1400 both Robert and Peter Porter were in receipt of fees from the Beauchamps, and our MP later won social advancement in the service of Richard Beauchamp, who succeeded to the earldom in 1401.
Porter’s prominent place in the Beauchamp retinue explains why he took a greater part in the administration of Warwickshire, not least in his three elections to represent the county in Parliament, than his modest birth justified. It also, at least in part, explains his acquisition of a landed estate, lying in and around Solihull, worthy of his new status. In the latter lies the chief interest of his career, and the retinue provided the framework in which he made these acquisitions. In 1425, for example, he leased (for the term of his life at a rent of 100s. p.a.) the manor of Monkspath from one of the earl’s principal retainers, Sir William Mountfort*, the earl himself being party to the deed of lease. Such leases were generally uncontentious – although this one later led to litigation – but a gentry family could not be founded on leases alone, and Porter was also an aggressive purchaser of land.
Much more controversial was Porter’s acquisition of the manor of Eastcote and Longdon. In 1426 he prevailed upon the aged and dying Thomas Archer to surrender the manor, perhaps through the agency of Archer’s wife, who is said, in later hostile testimony, to have accepted £5 for her labour in the matter. This may not have been the only irregularity. Much later, the disinherited son and heir, Richard Archer, produced testimony that not only was the manor bound by entail but, at the time of the surrender, his father, in his eighties and bed-ridden, had been out of his mind. One of Richard’s witnesses colourfully claimed to have heard the dying and deranged Thomas say that one might make ‘good mete’ of an old window or of a ‘dede stoke’. The dispute was to be a long-running one, although it was mainly fought out after Porter’s death.
Porter’s apparent readiness to behave so unscrupulously can have done little to endear him to his neighbours. A disputed purchase also lies behind his quarrel with another Solihull man, William Hore. This troubled him in the mid 1430s. In 1436 Hore sued him for trespass against the statutes of livery, claiming that, on 28 Mar. 1434, Porter (then in office as escheator) had given 2½ yards of woollen cloth for a gown and cap to each of 18 local husbandmen and tradesmen, including two kinsmen, Henry Porter, a husbandman of Solihull, and William Porter, a mercer of Birmingham. The real matter in hand, however, was not Porter’s alleged disregard of statute, but rather some 100 acres of land and 27s. of annual rent in Solihull. This is the implication of an indictment taken at Solihull before the county j.p.s.: Hore and others were accused of forcibly entering on our MP’s possession. Porter also brought private actions for close-breaking at Solihull and Eastcote against Hore, who is likely to have come off the worst.
Porter’s standing made him a formidable rival for men like Hore and even for more significant figures like Archer. That standing had found expression in his election to Parliament on 8 Jan. 1431 and in his nomination as escheator two years later.
A self-made esquire of substance, Porter headed the attestors to the county election of 1435 and was named second among those present at the next election on the last day of 1436.
On his return Porter’s career quickly resumed its established course, and he was elected to represent his native county in the Parliament which assembled at Westminster on the following 12th Nov.
In the early 1440s Porter was active in the service of Henry Beauchamp, who had succeeded his father as a fourteen-year-old. He served the young Henry, as he had served Earl Richard, as surveyor of the chace of Sutton Coldfield; and in 1444 he negotiated with the authorities of Coventry for a loan on Henry’s behalf.
This third election to Parliament came in special circumstances. The court, readying itself to move against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was more than usually anxious to secure support in the Commons, and this explains Mountfort’s return as a household esquire in an election conducted by another household man, Thomas Everingham*. Porter’s election cannot, however, be explained in the same terms. It is rather to be seen in the context of the exceptional nature of the indenture of return: it names only men of lesser gentry rank and below and, uniquely for a fifteenth-century Warwickshire indenture, it assigns a place of residence to 14 of the 16 electors. Strikingly, seven of them came from Solihull, among whom were four of those to whom Porter had allegedly distributed livery in 1434, including, quite remarkably, two smiths. Clearly Porter exerted himself to secure his own return, and it is probable that the election was irregular as a consequence of his manipulation rather than of Household intervention.
This burst of activity has no obvious explanation, but it may be that it was provoked by crisis and difficulty in Porter’s private affairs. The rival Archer claim to the manor of Eastcote and Longdon was in active agitation. Early in 1448 Porter’s son and heir, Baldwin, was assaulted by Archer’s men, and although Archer waited until the moment of our MP’s death before seizing the manor, the anticipation of such an act must have been very real in Porter’s last years.
Porter died on 27 May 1448, while in office as sheriff, but no writ of diem clausit extremum was issued until the following October and then not for Warwickshire, where the bulk of his lands lay, but only for Northamptonshire. An inquisition was held in response on 5 Nov., ennumerating his holdings as land in Yelvertoft with one-third of the advowson of the church there, held for term of his life by the grant of Countess Isabel, and, jointly with and in right of his wife, the manor and advowson of Little Oakley.