CORBET, Roger I

More can be added to the earlier biography.1 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 656-7.

Soon after his first Parliament, Corbet was involved in a further series of crimes to add to those in which he had been implicated in 1414. At Shrewsbury on 26 Jan. 1420, if several indictments and an appeal are to be accepted at face value, one Thomas Sporyer was fatally stabbed in the head by Philip Bent, a yeoman of More near Bishop’s Castle. When indictments were taken in the following September, before both the local j.p.s. and the steward and marshal of the Household (sitting as the court of the verge as the royal household was then in the town), several local gentry were named as accessories to the murder, among whom was our MP. Unfortunately there is nothing to give the crime a context. Tantalizingly, however, Bent was also indicted in the court of the verge for conspiring, a month after Sporyer’s murder, with Meduth ap Owen, Glendower’s son, to levy war against the King in Shropshire. This raises the possibility that those implicated with him in the murder were also involved in this conspiracy among the dying embers of the Welsh rebellion. It is, however, hard to believe that any suspicion attached to Corbet in view of his appointment at about this time as constable of Holt castle. None the less, the allegation of complicity in the murder caused him some difficulty. He was a prisoner in the Marshalsea in the term following his indictment, when a London goldsmith took the opportunity to sue him by bill for close-breaking at Shrewsbury. How long he remained imprisoned is unknown, but he was certainly free in Michaelmas term 1421, when Richard Blike* and others then stood bail for his appearance to answer the indictment in early 1422.2 KB27/638, rot. 8, rex rot. 9; 642, rex rot. 23d.

Further charges were laid against Corbet soon afterwards. At a session of the peace held at Ludlow on 23 Apr. 1422 he was accused on three counts of intimidating the agents of justice in his native county. First, he had allegedly disrupted a session of the peace held in the guildhall at Bridgnorth on the previous 6 Mar. by threatening to cut off the head and limbs of one of the sitting justices, William Lee†. Second, he was said to have assaulted and threatened Richard Parlour* at Shrewsbury on 29 Nov. 1421 when Parlour, acting as the agent of the sheriff, John Bruyn*, attempted to serve him with two writs, the one of privy seal summoning him to appear before the royal council and the other of attachment at the suit of Richard Caudray, prebendary in the King’s free chapel of Bridgnorth. Third, when Bruyn attempted to arrest him at Newport on 5 Apr. 1422 to appear in the Exchequer, Roger put his hand on his dagger and said, ‘I defye the and thyn office and y sette ryght nought by the ny by thyn arest’.3 KB27/646, rex rot. 28.

There is no evidence that Corbet suffered punishment for any of these offences, but there can be no doubt that he was a seriously disruptive figure in the county for many years. Yet this did not prevent the Crown entrusting him with the constableship of Holt castle or the burgesses of Shrewsbury from electing him as their bailiff and MP. Indeed, towards the end of his career, he seems to have acquired at least a veneer of respectability. In the summer of 1425, along two of the leading figures of Shropshire, William Burley I* and Hugh Burgh*, he was one of four men nominated to arbitrate a dispute between the townsmen and Shrewsbury abbey over the profits arising from local markets and fairs;4 The matter proved beyond them and it was John Juyn, chief baron of the Exchequer, and John Martin, j.c.p., who returned the award on 24 July: Salop Archs. Stobbs colln., 215/36. and by 1426-7 he was in receipt of an annual fee of 40s. from the preceptory of the Knights Hospitaller’s at Halston in Shropshire.5 Salop Archs. deeds 6000/4028. His marriage at about this time to a daughter of Sir William Lichfield augmented his standing. As heiress of her late mother to the manors of Kinlet (Shropshire), Eastham (Worcestershire) and other property and heiress-presumptive to her father’s more modest holdings, she promised to bring him the sort of inheritance that was generally denied a younger son. His new status is apparent in his election, with his father-in-law heading the attestors, to represent Shropshire in the 1429 Parliament. Unfortunately, however, he did not live to realize these new expectations. He died in July 1430, leaving an infant daughter as his heir.6 C219/14/1; CIPM, xxiii. 489.