Much of Walter Biere’s early career was spent as an attorney at the central courts at Westminster; he is often found acting there for defendants in suits for debt, trespass and breach of the peace, and providing securities in Chancery for his clients’ good behaviour. He evidently established a successful legal practice attracting business from as far away as Leicestershire and Kent besides places nearer home in Dorset and Wiltshire. In 1380 he was asked to stand surety at the Exchequer for John Bedford, the newly appointed royal alnager of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and among the more interesting of his cases was a defence to charges of debt brought by the executors of Archbishop Sudbury (following the latter’s murder in the Peasants’ Revolt).
After his nomination as a j.p. in 1396 Biere made fewer appearances in the central courts, for the next 25 years devoting more of his time to the local bench and to the business of other royal commissions. In October 1398 he did, however, appear as mainpernor in the Exchequer for Thomas Cammell of Shaftesbury, his fellow Member of 1393, when the latter took over a lease of part of the Poynings inheritance. Since 1368 Walter’s kinsman, Robert Biere, had been an annuitant of Shaftesbury abbey, and his own connexion with the nunnery may have been furthered by this relationship. On 20 Jan. 1397, when up at Westminster for his third Parliament, he had taken out a royal pardon for himself, his first wife and their son John for failing to obtain a royal licence for a grant to them by the abbess, Cecily Fovent, of four shops and a solar in Shaftesbury for term of their lives;
Biere’s property was situated mainly in Shaftesbury. He lived on Gold Hill and as well as the shops granted him by the convent he owned a garden in Cop Street and a house in All Saints’ parish. In 1402 he sold the last to Robert Fovent, a kinsman of the abbess, and a few years later it formed part of the foundation of St. Katherine’s chantry in the abbey church. He also held a short lease on land at Compton Abbas, about two miles from Shaftesbury. Biere was one of four delegates sent to the shire court at Dorchester to report the results of the borough elections to the Parliaments of 1407, 1414 (Apr.), 1420, 1421 and 1422, having in the meantime, on the occasion of his own last attendance at Parliament (1417), witnessed the indenture of return for the knights of the shire for Dorset.