At the time of his death, in June 1397, Sir Richard Byron owned land in the Lancashire villages of Butterworth, Royton and Ashton-under-Lyne, as well as the ancestral manor of Clayton which (with its extensive appurtenances in and around Manchester) had belonged to the family for at least three centuries. Through his wife, Joan, he had moreover gained possession of widespread estates in Lincolnshire centred upon the manors of Gedney, South Stoke, Croxton and Obthorpe, some of which he had previously, in 1383, settled upon trustees. Joan retained these properties, together with her own family seat at Colwick, until her death many years later, leaving her young son, John, to inherit whatever holdings in Lancashire had not already been assigned to her as dower. The wardship and marriage of the boy were given by Richard II to Sir Ralph Radcliffe, but in September 1400 Henry IV rescinded the grant in favour of his ‘trescher et foial chevalier’, Sir John Assheton II, who agreed to pay an annual farm of 80 marks to the Crown. We do not know when Byron married Margaret, the daughter of John Booth I, but the couple’s own child, Elizabeth, was betrothed in 1415 to Assheton’s son, Thomas (‘the Alchemist’), thus strengthening further the connexions between these three powerful Lancashire families.
Meanwhile, in October 1412, Byron was retained by Henry IV at an annual fee of £10 payable for life from the revenues of Cheshire. This annuity was later charged to the account of the receiver of Lancashire; and both Henry V and his son confirmed it in return for Byron’s subsequent ‘good service’. By the time of his next appearance, in 1415, as an executor of the will of Sir William Boteler, Byron had also been rewarded with a knighthood, although there is no evidence to suggest that he had, like Boteler, taken part in Henry V’s first invasion of Normandy. On the contrary, his attention was fixed far nearer home as a result of a quarrel with his mother, who claimed to have been kidnapped by him in March 1415, abducted to Lancashire, and forced, in the presence of the mayor of Wigan, to promise that she would not alienate any of her estates. She seems, however, to have been convinced that he was acting on the ‘excitation’ of his father-in-law, John Booth, whom she believed had encouraged him to rob her of valuable muniments and goods worth over 400 marks. The outcome of this dispute (which reached the court of Chancery) is not recorded, but on Joan’s death, in 1426, all of her property did, in fact, descend to Sir John as he had hoped. He also acquired holdings in Alton (Staffordshire) and Huddersfield (Yorkshire), although their provenance is now hard to determine. Throughout this period Byron successfully established himself as a leading figure in the Lancashire community. In 1416, for example, he acted as a juror at the Lancaster assizes; and three years later he was chosen as one of the county representatives to perform military service in the national defence. He and his wife were, furthermore, able to secure a licence from the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield permitting them to maintain portable oratories at Clayton and Begerworth.
How far Byron was actually able to assist his father-in-law in the House of Commons remains a matter of conjecture, but relations between the two men and their families seem, if anything, to have grown even more cordial than before. In March 1422 they both undertook to guarantee the readiness of one of Booth’s relatives to join Henry V’s retinue in France; and towards the end of the decade Byron and two of his brothers-in-law, Robert and William (the future archbishop of York), together devoted a considerable amount of time to their duties as trustees of the late Thomas de la Warre, rector of St. Mary’s, Manchester. A man in Byron’s position naturally had other important connexions (such as Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and William Gray, bishop of London, both of whom employed his services as a mainpernor), but on the whole he was chiefly reliant upon his close-knit family circle. Notwithstanding a dispute over boundaries which caused a temporary rift between them, Byron could count upon the support of his son-in-law, Thomas Assheton, who was present in 1429, along with Sir William Atherton, Sir Thomas Booth and other well-wishers to return him to his second Parliament.
In comparison with what had gone before, Byron’s last years proved comparatively tranquil. Already, in 1442, after the death of his eldest son, Richard, he had assumed custody of his grand daughters; and at the end of the decade he married one of the girls on very advantageous terms to the son of a neighbouring landowner. He had by then become involved as plaintiff in two lawsuits (one for debt and the other for trespass) fought before the court of common pleas, but neither case reached a verdict, and he was obliged to admit defeat. The success of his two brothers-in-law, Laurence and William Booth must, however, have more than compensated for this reversal. William (the then bishop of Coventry and Lichfield) had already permitted Byron to make use of a portable altar; and in January 1450 the two kinsmen joined with Laurence (who was, like his brother, later to become archbishop of York) in the endowment of a chantry at Eccles parish church, where John Booth the elder lay buried. Byron himself died at some point over the next two years. In June 1452 William Bassett of Staffordshire offered guarantees of 1,000 marks that he would not challenge the title of two of Byron’s four surviving sons, Nicholas and Ralph, in their inheritance. Although he was, in fact, one of Byron’s younger children, it was to Nicholas that most of the family property descended, and his own son, John, subsequently fell heir to the entire estate.