BERKELEY, Sir Laurence

Sir Laurence was a wealthier man than implied in the earlier biography.1 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 200-1. In the subsidy returns of 1436 his annual income was assessed at as much as £90.2 E179/192/59. By this date his estates were no longer burdened by the dower interest of his mother, although she may have died only shortly before. In Easter term 1436 a plea was pending against the administrators of her goods: Leics. Village Notes ed. Farnham, iv. 315. He was also a more malign influence on local affairs than suggested in that biography. In the early 1440s a petition to the chancellor claimed that he was guilty of abusing his position as sheriff. The complainants alleged that, through the medium of his under sheriff Thomas Sampson, he had ‘embesseld’ two writs directed against them, taking from them a bond in £100 as insurance against any action by the plaintiffs on whose suit the writs had been awarded. The plaintiffs had duly recovered the sum of £20 against Berkeley, and, although the complainants had compensated him for this loss, he had ‘of gret males’ sued them on their bond.3 C1/11/206. Such allegations are more or less routine, but the same cannot be said of another charge laid against him, namely that he and his son were the instigators of a murder at the house of their neighbour, Sir Henry Pleasington*, at Whissendine. According to a petition presented to the Commons in the Parliament of November 1449 by Alice Bermycher, a group of 30 armed men, acting on the command of the two Berkeleys and Hugh Boyville*, sheriff of Rutland, had come to Pleasington’s house at 11 p.m. on the previous 19 Oct. and murdered her husband, Thomas. To conceal the crime, Boyville, as sheriff, had then empanelled before the Rutland j.p.s at Uppingham on 30 Oct. a jury composed entirely of the tenants and servants of the Berkeleys. Further, Thomas Berkeley had come to the sessions with 45 men with the intention of abducting her and since then had threatened her with death or detention if she dared sue an appeal. If, however, the Berkeleys prevented an indictment before the j.p.s they did not have the same success with a coroner’s jury: at Ketton on 23 Oct., before Thomas Stokes, one of the Rutland coroners, they were indicted as accessories to Bermycher’s murder. Their actions appear to have been the function of a dispute that involved other leaders of the Rutland community. Shortly before the murder the county’s peace had been seriously disrupted by a violent quarrel between John Chiselden* and Everard Digby* over the parkership of Ridlington. Later evidence shows that Bermyger’s death was associated with this quarrel. According to a petition presented by Digby in Parliament in the spring of 1450 (probably at the same time as Alice presented hers), Chiselden raided his property at Stoke Dry on 2 Mar. with the failed aim, among other things, of abducting Alice to prevent her suing an appeal against her husband’s murderers. This implies that our MP was involved in their dispute as a supporter of Chiselden. Alice duly sued her appeal against our MP and his followers in Hilary term 1451, but for an unknown reason it was quickly abandoned. In Michaelmas term 1452 Berkeley further improved his position by pleading a royal pardon in bar to process in the King’s suit against him. He also moved on to the offensive by suing Alice’s master, Digby, for illegally maintaining her in her appeal. This case was still pending in Easter term 1454, and is the last reference to Berkeley’s dispute with Digby.4 SC8/96/4800; 105/5244; KB27/759, rot. 38; 766, rex rot. 5d; CP40/771, rot. 322.

Other new references show Berkeley playing a less contentious part in local affairs. In 1423 he entered a bond to Roland St. Liz that Sir Thomas Chetwode of Chetwode in Buckinghamshire, the husband of his wife’s sister, would abide arbitration in a dispute over property in Rutland and Northamptonshire once of Sir Richard St. Liz†.5 Lansd. Ch. 145. In April 1440 he and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Woodford, headed the witnesses to the settlement made on the marriage of their wives’ niece, Anne Sherard, to Anthony Mallory; and six years later they and many other local worthies witnessed a declaration concerning the death of a baby daughter born to Anne’s brother, Robert Sherard of Stapleford.6 Leics. RO, Sherard mss, DE1431/216, 481; E. Acheson, Leics. in 15th Cent. 91-92, 247. Later, on 14 May 1455, Berkeley was one of those to whom Elizabeth Colvill, daughter and heiress of the wealthy Lincolnshire esquire, Richard Casterton, granted her lands in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Hertfordshire and Wiltshire. Even here, however, he managed to arouse contention. In the last year of his life, he was the subject of another petition to the chancellor when William Grimsby* and others claimed that their ward, John Colvill, presumably Elizabeth’s heir, had been abducted, reportedly by the ‘counseill and supportacion’ of Sir Laurence.7 KB27/777, rot. 45; C1/26/137.

Berkeley had at least one daughter, Joan, who married the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Nicholas Bowet of Rippingale.8 Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc. i), 194.