ST. PIERRE, Urian

More may be added to the earlier biography.1 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 283-4.

The conclusion of the dispute between St. Pierre and Nicholas Gerard† over property in Shrewsbury, Coleham and Abbey Foregate provides an instructive example of the relationship between verdicts at law and dispute settlement in fifteenth-century England. On 25 Feb. 1409, before royal justices commissioned to hear the assize of novel disseisin pending between them, a jury of Shrewsbury returned a verdict in favour of Gerard in every point of issue and awarded him costs and damages of 40 marks. And yet it was not this verdict that ended the dispute. St. Pierre sued a writ of attaint against the jurors, and on 29 June 1410, just before the county grand jury was due to appear at Westminster, the dispute was settled by a private agreement, an agreement that offered him significant compensation for the surrender of his claim to the disputed property.2 KB27/595, rot. 80; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. liv. 102-4.

As MP for the borough in the Parliament of 1423, St. Pierre and his fellow Shrewsbury MP, John Perle*, were required to find surety in the massive sum of 1,000 marks that the borough community would keep the peace to the abbey of Shrewsbury. The abbot had complained, in a petition to the Lords, that a group of prominent burgesses, including Perle but not St. Pierre, had violently disrupted the abbey’s fair in the previous August. Although the fair again proved a matter of dissension between abbey and community when St. Pierre was bailiff in the following year, the matter was resolved through a comprehensive arbitration award made by John Juyn, chief baron of the Exchequer, and John Martin, j.c.p., in July 1425.3 SC8/71/3550; D.R. Walker, ‘Shrewsbury in the 15th Cent.’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 155-6; CP40/655, rot. 476d; Salop Archs., Stobbs colln., 215/36.

According to a seventeenth-century pedigree St. Pierre died leaving two daughters. Two male members of the family, however, were active in Shrewsbury’s administration in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. One of whom served as bailiff in 1491-2.4 Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxix), 424-5; Walker, 406-9.