EUER, Sir William

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Euers were one of the oldest and most well-established families in north-eastern England. The family ostentatiously traced their descent from a sister of John de Balliol, and still held the former Balliol barony of Stokesley in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Sir John Euer†, MP for Northumberland in the Parliament of October 1307, was executed as a rebel after the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, but, this setback aside, the family generally prospered. Our MP’s father, Sir Ralph, enjoyed a particularly notable career. He represented both Northumberland (twice) and Yorkshire (on three occasions) in the Commons, but his most important role was as a servant of successive bishops of Durham, culminating in his long tenure as Bishop Langley’s steward. He also added to the family estate by marriage. His second marriage around 1381 to Katherine, one of the daughters and coheiresses of William, Lord Aton, brought him the former Vescy lands, lying principally in the North Riding and including the manor of Old Malton which became the principal seat of the family in the early fifteenth century.18 C.D. Liddy, Bishopric of Durham, 47-50; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 38-43; Med. Prosopography, xxii. 65-87. Thus, on his father’s death in 1422, Sir William inherited extensive landholdings in the palatinate of Durham (principally the manor of Witton-le-Wear), south Northumberland and north Yorkshire. In the subsidy returns of 1436 this estate was valued at as much as £160 p.a.19 DURH3/2, ff. 214-17; E179/158/38.

Sir William was already well established in northern society during his father’s lifetime. Before the end of the first decade of the century he had entered the household of Bishop Langley and around the same time his father arranged an extremely prestigious marriage for him, then aged 15, to Maud, one of the daughters of Henry, Lord Fitzhugh. The banns for the marriage had been called by the end of January 1411 and the ceremony presumably took place shortly afterwards.20 Reg. Langley, i. (Surtees Soc. clxiv),188; R.L. Storey, Thomas Langley, 117. Fitzhugh was a prominent royal servant, holding office under Henry V as successively chamberlain and treasurer of England. He also fought in France, and his son-in-law was part of his military retinue. Euer fought under Fitzhugh at the siege of Harfleur and at the battle of Agincourt, and it seems likely that he was knighted at either one or the other.21 N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 128, 345. On his return to England he continued his association with Bishop Langley. In January 1417 he was one of a large group of local notables who witnessed the formal livery of seisin of the southern part of the Tyne Bridge to Bishop Langley, a victory for the bishop in his long-running dispute with the civic authorities of Newcastle.22 Liddy, 185-6; Durham cathedral muns., pontificalia, 3.3. Pont. 3.

With his father so active in the affairs of the palatinate, it was in the North Riding that Sir William first took an active role in local administrative affairs. In July 1420 he was named to the commission of the peace in the North Riding, and in the following April he was appointed to a loan commission there.23 CPR, 1416-22, pp. 385, 463. His father’s death in March 1422 offered up new possibilities for him, but if he expected to step into his father’s central role in palatine administration he was to be disappointed. Although he was immediately named to judicial commissions in the palatinate, he did not succeed to the stewardship, which was granted instead to one of the bishop’s household, Thomas Holden*. 24 Storey, 102-3. The loss of an office he may have expected to acquire may have been a factor in the later souring of relations between Euer and Langley, although in the short term relations appear, outwardly at least, unaffected. On 13 Apr. 1424 he renewed his father’s lease of the episcopal coal and iron workings in south Durham for a term of nine years at an annual rent of as much as £112 13s. 4d. More significantly, in April 1427 the bishop entrusted him with the wardship of two-thirds of the lordship and castle of Brauncepath and other property in county Durham, then in episcopal hands during the minority of Ralph Neville, grandson and heir of the earl of Westmorland who had died in 1425.25 DURH3/38, mm. 15d, 20d.

In the meantime, Euer had had his first experience of service in the Commons. On 2 Nov. 1422, at the first elections held after his father’s death, he was elected to represent Yorkshire as his father had done before him. It is a reasonable speculation that a factor in his election was the support of Fitzhugh. As an executor of Henry V and a member of the minority council, it was natural that Fitzhugh should have wanted his own men in the Commons, and he probably had a more personal reason. His tenure of the valuable forfeited lands of Henry, Lord Scope of Masham, which he had by Henry V’s grant, was threatened by Scrope’s brother, Sir John, a political ally of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. In 1422, with the apparent rise to pre-eminence in England of Duke Humphrey, this was a pressing concern for him, and his son-in-law was likely to be a useful ally in the Commons.26 C219/13/1; J.S. Roskell, ‘Personnel of the House of Commons in 1422’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1940), 704-5. Fitzhugh’s death in January 1425 deprived Euer of a patron, but it did not prevent him securing, on Christmas day 1430, another election to Parliament for Yorkshire. On this occasion, his purpose in seeking election may have been to represent the interests of the palatinate, which, of course, had no MPs of its own and went unrepresented in this Parliament because Langley was confined to home by illness.27 C219/14/2; Storey, 241. Yet if Euer was indeed still Langley’s man during the Parliament of 1431, their relationship, for reasons that are unclear, very soon soured and descended into bitter acrimony. In August 1432 he was summoned to answer in the bishop’s chancery for allegedly entering without the necessary licence one of the manors of his patrimony, that of Langley; and later in the same year he was found to be in arrears for the lease of the bishop’s mines to the sum of £365 9s. 5d. Some attempt was now made to halt these escalating differences. In December Euer and Langley agreed to abide the arbitration of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, but no award was made. 28 Storey, 117-19, 256, 258-9; CIMisc. viii. 60 (pp. 34-35).

This was the prelude to a general assault on the bishop of Durham’s liberties. Euer was not the only local figure anxious that these should be curbed, and this more general resentment explains the events of the first months of 1433.29 For these resentments, most notably those of Ralph, earl of Westmorland (d.1484): A.J. Pollard, ‘Provincial Politics’, in People, Places and Perspectives, ed. Dockray and Fleming, 69-78. On 12 Feb. the Crown had issued a commission to investigate the infringements of its rights in the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. This may or may not have been aimed at the bishop, but his local enemies ensured that it became the vehicle for their own grievances. Juries assembled at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and at Hartlepool two days later laid a long litany of complaint against the bishop’s rule.30 CPR, 1429-36, p. 276; CIMisc. viii. 60; Storey, 245-62. The central argument of the jurors was that the bishop’s near-regal rights in the palatinate were not used exploitatively by Langley but that the rights themselves undermined the ancient rights of the ‘Haliwerfolc’, the men of the franchise of St. Cuthbert, which had been confirmed by a charter of King John in 1208 when the see had been vacant.31 Liddy, 208-35. The jurors at both inquisitions alleged that Langley’s government was illegal and that he had assumed every regal right which properly belonged to the King with the exception of holding a Parliament.

Meanwhile, Bishop Langley had been energetic in the defence of his privileges. Euer and his allies may have considered that the time was ripe to challenge the bishop’s authority, as for most of 1432 Langley, aged over 70 and ailing, had been languishing at his palace at Bishop’s Auckland. However, on 15 Apr. 1433 he travelled to London and looked to enlist the assistance of his influential friends on the King’s council. Armed with the ancient charters (most of which were forgeries), he began a robust defence of his rights. When Parliament opened on 8 July, he presented a petition outlining the grounds on which he exercised his palatinate jurisdiction and asked for all the returns of the February commission to be annulled and withdrawn from record in the Chancery. Euer presented a counter petition in the same assembly, claiming that the King had been disenfranchised through the lies of Langley’s predecessors as bishop (particularly Anthony Bek during Edward I’s reign), and asking that Langley’s entire exercise of his palatinate jurisdiction be revoked. The King, however, on the advice of his judges, ‘piously having compassion for the frailty of the bishop himself’ and in consideration of Langley’s long service to the Lancastrian dynasty, upheld the bishop’s rights and ordered the commission’s findings to be annulled.32 PROME, xi. 92-102; Storey, 127-9.

Euer was now in an untenable position and he was left with little option but to seek a rapprochement with the bishop. In the autumn session of the Parliament of 1433 ‘certain knights’, presumably at Sir William’s instigation, approached Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and asked him to mediate between the two men. Again, however, no award was forthcoming, and Euer faced continued harassment in the palatinate courts. On 12 Aug. 1435 it was decided in the Durham chancery that the bishop could resume the disputed manor of Langley and was entitled to its profits from the time of the death of Sir Ralph Euer. In the following February Euer sued out a writ of error in the King’s bench against this judgement, but the King’s judges upheld the decision of the bishop’s court. Euer’s dispute with the bishop had met with complete defeat, and his resentment found expression in the threat of violence. In July 1437 Langley successfully asked the King to take heavy sureties from Euer who, he claimed, was threatening him with death. Resolution came only with the bishop’s death in the following November.33 Storey, 129-34; CPR, 1436-41, p. 89.

None the less, although Euer was undoubtedly damaged by the leading part he had taken in the unsuccessful attack on the bishop’s liberties, the Crown was not prepared to deprive itself of the services of one who had a contribution to make to the defence of the border. On 8 Nov. 1436 he was appointed sheriff of Northumberland, and a week later he indented to serve as captain of the castle of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Although his tenure of the captaincy was brief, he proved an active officer, granting safe-conducts and acting with other Northumberland gentry to secure the redress of border grievances.34 CFR, xvi. 303; Rot. Scot. ii. 296-7, 299.

The succession of Robert Neville, younger brother of the earl of Salisbury, to the bishopric of Durham, gave Euer an opportunity to regain his position in the palatinate. In May 1435 his younger brother, Robert, had been retained to serve the earl and the latter’s mother Joan, dowager countess of Westmorland; and the Euers built on this relationship to win a prominent place in the service of the new bishop. Robert succeeded Holden as the bishop’s steward, and in May 1438 Sir William was reappointed as a justice of the peace.35 Private Indentures (Cam. Miscellany, xxxii), 121; DURH3/42, mm. 5, 8. More strikingly, on the following 10 Nov. Bishop Neville retained our MP for life in peace and war for an annual fee of £20.36 DURH3/46, m. 13. Further patronage followed which effectively laid to rest his personal grievances from Langley’s time. On 1 July 1440 Bishop Neville pardoned him of all intrusions into the manor of Langley, and in June 1443 he renewed his profitable lease of the episcopal coal-mines for 23 years at the same annual rent as before.37 DURH3/42, m. 11; 43, mm. 1-2.

Euer’s enhanced status explains why he now became a beneficiary of royal patronage. In October 1438 the Crown appointed him steward of the extensive lordship of Holderness, recently come into the King’s hands by the death of Anne, dowager-countess of Stafford, although he served only for the few months before her son, Earl Humphrey, succeeded to his mother’s estate.38 CPR, 1436-41, p. 204. More significantly, in November 1440 he and his son, Ralph, secured a grant of the valuable wardship and marriage of Edmund, son and heir of the Northumberland landowner, Sir John Hastings, agreeing with the treasurer of England, Lord Cromwell, to pay a modest £100, far below the value of the marriage alone. Unfortunately for the Euers, however, the Crown’s entitlement to the wardship was contested by John, son of Sir John Middleton*, who in the summer of 1441 abducted Edmund from their custody. Although Sir William secured an award of damages, it is unlikely that the grant proved as profitable as it first appeared.39 CFR, xvii. 175-6, 184-5, 192; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 132-3, 264; E159/222, brevia Easter rot. 5d; E28/71/7.

The ongoing dispute over the Hastings’ wardship may explain why Euer was anxious to secure election to the Parliament of January 1442. Once again he looked to secure one of the seats for Yorkshire, where despite his commitments in the palatinate and Northumberland he had remained active. His two previous elections imply that, even though his main interests lay elsewhere, he was an acceptable candidate, yet the election, in company with Sir Thomas Saville*, presents some unusual features which imply that it may have been contested. Remarkably, the indenture names as many as 451 attestors. No previous indenture for any county had named more. It is usually assumed that long indentures denote a contested election, and it may be that this was the case here. There is, however, no evidence to give a context to such a contest, and an alternative explanation is perhaps to be preferred. The point at issue may have been the mode of election rather than the identity of the elected. Until the electoral statute of 1429 it had been the unique tradition in Yorkshire that the indentures named only the attorneys of the more important suitors of the county court, and it may be that this difference in the mode of recording elections betokens one in the mode of election with the county having an unusually restricted franchise. If so, the wider county community may have sought to exploit the statute, which established the 40s. franchise, to break the monopoly of the greater suitors. On this reading, the long indenture of 1442 marks their victory. On 20 July 1442, that is, after the Parliament had concluded, the justices of assize in Yorkshire were commissioned to inquire into the electoral proceedings, but unfortunately their proceedings do not appear to survive.40 C219/15/2; C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), i. 221-2; ii. 98-100; CPR, 1441-6, p. 108.

Whatever the circumstances of his election, the Parliament of 1442 proved to be an event of great significance in Euer’s career. The defence of the sea and the protection of English merchants was a major concern of the Commons in this assembly. A petition asked for a force of eight capital ships and 14 smaller vessels, carrying a total of 2,260 men, to guard the English coast for six months in the second half of 1442 and a further eight in the following year, and asked for the appointment of eight captains to be chosen from ‘knyghts and worthy Swyers of the West, of the South, and of the North, so that no cuntre shuld be dispesid’. The government accepted the plan, albeit in a curtailed form, and in June Euer was one of four captains named to serve under the overall command of Sir Stephen Popham*. Interestingly, of those appointed only Sir John Passhele had not sat in the preceding Parliament (the other two captains were Miles Stapleton* and John Heron*). Popham indented to serve with 565 men, while the others agreed to serve with 1,695 men between them. The musters were originally to be taken at Winchelsea on 31 July, but there were delays. Euer was instructed to arrest shipping in Kingston-upon-Hull and Newcastle-upon-Tyne in June, and by the following month he had assembled all but 75 men of his agreed force of 547 and five vessels, despite the port of Hull being ‘desolate and utterly destitute of any shippes or other vessailes or maryners’. On 20 Aug. he left Hull for Great Yarmouth, where he remained for six days, before finally mustering at Southampton and setting sail for the open sea. By the end of October he and the 490 men of his retinue were back in Hull.41 PROME xi. 373-5; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 106, 108; E28/70/62-63; E159/222, recorda Mich. rots. 21d, 25.

The 1442 expedition proved a costly and difficult affair for Euer and the other captains. As the mayor and aldermen of Hull made clear, the difficulties he had encountered in assembling his retinue and its shipping had led to ‘grete hevynesse, damage and costage of the said knyght’. Worse followed. On 19 May the Exchequer had made a prest of £1,910 15s. to Euer, Stapleton and Heron, and in Trinity term 1444 Euer and Stapleton were arraigned before the barons of the Exchequer and committed to the Fleet prison for failing to render account for the monies they had received for wages. In his defence Euer claimed that the prest had been delivered to all of them and that he should account only for his share, namely the sum of £636 18s. 4d. He was forced to petition the King for redress, and on 19 Dec. 1445 a privy seal writ finally instructed the barons to make fine and cease all process against him.42 E159/222, recorda Mich. rots. 21d, 25. Euer also experienced difficulties with the men under his command. Shortly after his return he presented a petition in Chancery against his kinsman, Thomas Claxton, whom he had retained to serve with him for three months. Claxton and other soldiers, it was alleged, had departed after only two months’ service ‘to the grete and notable coste and losse’ of Sir William.43 C1/16/285.

The remainder of the 1440s saw Euer continue to be involved in the administration of both Yorkshire and the palatinate of Durham. In November 1444 he was pricked as sheriff of Yorkshire, and despite his friendship with the Nevilles he found himself sued in the Exchequer of pleas by both the earl of Salisbury and the earl’s brother, William, Lord Fauconberg, for failure to honour tallies assigned on the county’s issues. It may have been the burdensome nature of his term of office that led him to sue out, on 29 Nov. 1448, letters patent exempting him from further service as sheriff and other local responsibilities.44 CFR, xvii. 303: E13/144, rots. 48d, 52d, 55d; CPR, 1446-52, p. 220. That reluctance to hold office did not, however, extend to Parliament, and on the following 13 Jan. he was returned for the fourth and last time as one of the knights of the shire for Yorkshire, and his younger son, Henry, was returned as one of the burgesses for Scarborough. His fellow knight on this occasion was Sir James Strangeways*, who was married to his niece, Elizabeth Darcy, and was another man with close connexions to the Neville family as well as a family tradition of service in the palatinate of Durham. Indeed, the affairs of the palatinate and the Nevilles probably lay behind the return of Euer and Strangeways to the Commons.45 C219/15/6. The return was made by the sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir John Conyers, Strangeways’s brother-in-law, and bro. to Euer’s own son-in-law, Christopher. The beginning of 1449 saw renewed fears of a Scottish descent on northern England, and on 3 Feb., a week before the opening of Parliament, the bishop of Durham, the earl of Westmorland and other northern lords were instructed to remain in the north rather than travel to Westminster for the forthcoming Parliament. It may be that it was the experience of Euer and Strangeways in the affairs of the border region that recommended them for service in the Commons at a time of heightened tension with the Scots. In the grant of the wool subsidy made in the Parliament’s third session previous concessions made to Lord Fauconberg, then absent in France, to meet the expenses of Roxburgh castle were confirmed. The Yorkshire MPs’ contribution may have been important in safeguarding grants already made for the defence of the borders in the light of a rapidly deteriorating situation in France.46 PPC, vi. 65.

Little evidence survives of Euer’s career during the 1450s, although it is evident that, as he advanced in years, he participated less and less in public affairs. In June 1450 Bishop Neville appointed a commission to inquire whether Euer had damaged the episcopal coal and iron mines by cutting through the ‘forbarres’, but there is nothing to suggest that this betokened any wider breakdown in his cordial relations with the bishop.47 DURH3/44, m. 9. After Bishop Neville’s death in July 1457, Euer continued to serve in the palatinate administration under his successor, Laurence Booth, the keeper of the privy seal and a former chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was named to the new bishop’s first judicial commissions in the following December, and on 1 Jan. 1458 his lease for the episcopal coal and iron mines was renewed, albeit only for one year.48 DURH3/48, mm. 1-2.

None the less, Booth’s close connexions to the court and the antagonism between the queen and the junior branch of the Neville family may have faced Euer with difficult choices as civil war approached. There are some indications that he repudiated his earlier service to the earl of Salisbury. In December 1459 he was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array, and, more significantly, after the attainder of the Yorkist lords his son and heir, Ralph, was appointed receiver-general of Salisbury’s forfeited estates in Yorkshire.49 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 528, 559. Ralph went on to fight and die in the Lancastrian ranks at the decisive battle of Towton on 29 Mar. 1461, but it must remain an open question whether his father shared his partisanship. Sir William’s appointment in December 1460 to a Yorkist commission of oyer and terminer, raises a doubt, and it may be that old age relieved him of the need to openly commit himself.50 Vis. Yorks. 112: CPR, 1452-61, pp. 652-3.

Even so, the death of his eldest son on the losing side at Towton made it difficult for Sir William to adapt to the change of regime. On 13 May 1461 at York before the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Robert Danby, he and three of his surviving sons (Robert, Henry and William, later archdeacon of Salisbury) contracted to pay fines to Edward IV of as much £2,000 each. Yet these fines, no doubt intended to act as a suspended penalty, were quickly cancelled, and Sir William passed into retirement.51 CPR, 1461-7, p. 39; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 293. He is last mentioned on 17 Sept. 1464 when Bishop Booth instructed the sheriff of Durham to inquire into Euer’s complaints that men of the county of York and of the palatinate had been taking coal from his mine called ‘Le Toftes’. He died not long after and a writ of diem clausit extremum was issued from the Durham chancery on 20 July 1465.52 DURH3/50, mm. 6-7. Euer’s widow, Maud, outlived him by little more than a year. She made her will on 12 Feb. 1467 and died shortly afterwards (Bishop Booth issued a writ of diem clausit extremum in respect of her lands on the following 17 Mar.). She asked to be buried next to her husband at the Gilbertine priory in Old Malton and made bequests of cash, livestock and silverware to each of their surviving sons and three daughters. All three of the latter had married into northern families, namely those of Conyers, Ughtred and Ogle. After making provision for her soul at Malton priory, the Franciscan friary at Hartlepool, and the churches of Witton-le-Wear and St. John Auckland in the palatinate of Durham, Maud left the residue of her estate to her sons for the benefit of her soul.53 Test. Ebor. ii. (Surtees Soc. xxx), 284-6; DURH3/50, m. 8d.

Sir William’s heir was his grandson, another William, the son of Ralph Euer by Eleanor, daughter of John, Lord Greystoke. He was almost certainly a minor when Sir William died, and it was not until 18 Aug. 1468 that he made a fine of £30 in the Durham chancery and was granted livery of his grandfather’s estates.54 DURH3/49, m. 3. Knighted soon afterwards, in 1471 he was one of the Yorkshire knights fined for their support of the earl of Warwick and the Readeption regime. He recovered his position, however, and became one of the mainstays of the government of the north in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, serving the earl of Northumberland until the latter’s murder in 1489.55 C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 183; M.A. Hicks, Ric. III and his Rivals, 394. In 1544 Sir William Euer (d.1548), the great-great-grandson of our MP, was summoned to Parliament as Lord Euer; and the family continued to be one of the leading families in the north of England until end of the seventeenth century, when they died out in the male line.56 CP, v. 179-83.