EYRE, Robert

An Eyre had been a forester in Hopedale in the Peak as early as 1285, and by the mid fifteenth century the family had spread itself into several branches. No fewer than six Eyres, all but one living in High Peak, figure in the Derbyshire subsidy return of 1450-1. They were a family of service par excellence, finding places in the administration of the numerous non-resident landholders of northern Derbyshire.8 Wright, 61-62, 167n.; E179/91/73. Our MP’s father, a younger son of Nicholas Eyre of Hope, served the Talbots, who had extensive landed interests in the High Peak, and their friend, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, whose acquisition in 1430 of the manors of South Wingfield and Crich had made him an influential figure in the north of the county.9 The first earl of Shrewsbury, Sir John Talbot and Cromwell were feoffees of the er. Robert in 1446: CAD, vi. C4368. For his service to Cromwell: C237/43/191; Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Cromwell pprs., Misc. 355, m. 3. These powerful connexions may provide the context for the elder Robert’s marriage to the heiress of the manor of Padley (in Hathersage near Hope), although it is at least as likely that the marriage predates their formation.10 There is a tradition that the bride made this marriage in spite of her father’s objection that the groom’s father was under the ban of the church for murder. No evidence has been found to substantiate this, but, interestingly, the groom was himself tried and acquitted of murder in 1430: Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Jnl. xxiv. 78-81; JUST3/13/2. The marriage had taken place by Dec. 1431 when Eyre was described as ‘of Padley’: Feudal Aids, i. 276. In any event, the acquisition of the Padley estates elevated the Eyres above the ranks of the minor gentry and brought them the manor-house at Padley (which still survives in part).11 Trans. Hunter Arch. Soc. iv. 262-7; A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 427-8. The Padley lands explain why the elder Robert was assessed on a respectable annual income of £26 in the subsidy returns of 1435-6 (more than five times the income attributed to his elder brother Nicholas), and why, a few years later, he was considered wealthy enough to be distrained to take up the rank of knighthood.12 E179/240/266. They also facilitated the successful career of our MP, the eldest of his ten sons, who had the ability to exploit the family’s new-found standing.

The younger Robert’s energy and ambition is implied by the speed with which, even before his father’s death, he won a prominent place in the service of John Talbot, the second earl of Shrewsbury. On 20 Mar. 1458 he was among the servants of the earl who offered surety that their master would pay Cromwell’s executors 2,000 marks for the Derbyshire manors of South Wingfield and Crich. A week later, he and the other sureties were enfeoffed of the Talbot lands in the county and charged to employ the issues to pay this heavy debt.13 Cromwell pprs. Misc. 303; C139/178/58. Later evidence shows that the surety and feoffee is not to be identified with his father: C139/46/52; Cox, ii. 190. The strength of this connexion is made yet more apparent by the parliamentary election held in the county court at Derby on 8 Nov. 1459, when Eyre was returned in company with his neighbour Robert Barley*, another feoffee of the earl. There can be no doubt that their return was engineered by Talbot, who, as one of the leaders of the militant Lancastrian party, had every incentive to secure the election of his own men to the assembly intended to attaint the Yorkist lords. His influence explains the highly irregular nature of the Derbyshire electoral indenture: all 30 electors were from the north of the county, and four of them were members of the Eyre family.14 C219/16/5; Wright, 115-16. Robert, even had he been in possession of his parental estates, was not of sufficient standing in his own right to have won election in normal circumstances. Without the earl’s active support he would not have been elected.

Very little is known of Eyre’s career in the 1460s despite his acquisition of his parental estates early in the decade. His obscurity is explained by the Talbot minority: the death of the second earl at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 had left a minor as heir to the Talbot lands, and the Eyres were thus temporarily without a patron. Their standing was probably also compromised by an indictment taken before the j.p.s, headed by Walter Blount*, Lord Mountjoy, at Derby on 15 Apr. 1466. Several of the family, including our MP’s brother, Stephen, were implicated in the murder of Nicholas Fox at Newbold near Chesterfield on the previous 31 Mar. If the jurors are to be credited, the crime was a particularly brutal one: after stabbing their victim with a wood knife, the assailants are said to have cut off his right hand and foot in the presence of his pregnant wife. She brought an appeal in the court of King’s bench against those indicted as principals in Fox’s death, and added to them, as accessories, a further 13 members of the Eyre family, one of whom was our MP (described as ‘of South Wingfield, gentleman’). Unfortunately nothing is known of what lay behind this crime. Its damaging effect upon the Eyres was, however, only short-term. The widow, in the customary fashion, quickly abandoned her appeal, and it is probable that the Eyres compounded with her for the murder of her husband.15 KB9/313/66; KB27/825, rot. 15.

For reasons not obviously apparent, Eyre became a man of altogether greater account in the immediate aftermath of the Readeption. This may have been partly due to the increased role the young Talbot earl was coming to play in local affairs. Yet this can hardly have been the whole explanation. Eyre’s career continued to flourish after the earl died in June 1473 leaving a mere boy as his heir. Before the earl’s death he was nominated to the Derbyshire bench and appointed to his first ad hoc commission of local government; thereafter, however, other acknowledgments of his local standing followed. On 12 Feb. 1474 Edward IV granted him, for the duration of the minority of the new earl, George, an annuity of £5 charged on the Talbot lordship of Hallamshire. In the following November he took a long lease of 20 years in the duchy of Lancaster demesne lands and meadows in Bradwell (in High Peak) at an annual rent of eight marks; and in February 1475 he leased lot and cope, a duty on the mining of lead, within High Peak for ten years at ten marks p.a.16 CPR, 1461-7, p. 419; DL37/56/72, 76. The farm of the duchy meadows may not have been profitable. In Feb. 1483 he was discharged of ten marks in arrears because the ‘encreasse and multitude’ of royal game meant the farm could not be levied: DL42/19, f. 117v. Similar, if less substantial benefits came the way of some of his relatives: on the same day as he received his annuity, John Eyre was appointed parker of Worksop, a Talbot estate; on the following 21 Apr. William Eyre was appointed to the same office in the Talbot lordship of Sheffield; and, on the same day that our MP leased Bradwell from the Crown, Stephen Eyre leased a mill in Hayfield in High Peak.17 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 419, 441; DL37/56/73.

Three of these grants must have been confirmations of annuity and office held by the Eyres under the previous earl, and are to be explained by the Crown’s desire to secure administrative continuity on the Talbot estates. Significantly, however, the leases of duchy of Lancaster property date from after the appointment of William, Lord Hastings, as steward of High Peak, and it is clear that the Eyres had replaced Talbot lordship with that of the new steward. This new allegiance was a natural one for the Crown had granted Hastings the wardship of a significant part of the Talbot estates, including those in the north Midlands. On 4 Oct. 1476 Hastings formally retained our MP and Richard Eyre, and by July 1480 our MP was his deputy steward of High Peak. In the following November he was pricked as sheriff and there can be little doubt that, just as he had owed his election to Parliament as a young man to Shrewsbury’s patronage, so this appointment as sheriff was due to that of Hastings.18 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 94-95; W.H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 118-19, 128, 144.

Even, however, during these years of minority in the earldom of Shrewsbury, Eyre continued energetically to serve the Talbots. On 22 Oct. 1473 he was a juror in the inquisition post mortem taken on the death of Elizabeth, widow of the earl killed at the battle of Northampton, and he was also involved in the execution of the will of the third earl. Indeed, he was able to turn to his own advantage his dual role as executor and as one of the feoffees in the Talbot estates charged with paying Lord Cromwell’s executors for the manor of South Wingfield. In 1480 he received as much as £17 16s. 5d. from the latter for his ‘benevolentia’ in securing these payments. By 1482, although Earl George was still a minor, Eyre may have been acting as his steward. If the dating is to be trusted, at a view of frankpledge at Baslow on 14 Apr. 1483 it was presented that he, as steward, had held great courts there in usurpation of the rights of Henry Vernon†, head of the leading gentry family of the Peak.19 C140/46/51; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, De L’Isle and Dudley mss, U1475/Q17/4, m. 3d; Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. xxiii. 31.

Soon after his term as sheriff, Eyre played a part in the famous dispute within the wealthy gentry family of Plumpton, which, although resident in Yorkshire, had substantial landed interests in the Peak. As a friend and feoffee of Sir William Plumpton*, he was drawn into the litigation between the heir male, Sir Robert Plumpton, Sir William’s eldest surviving son, and the heirs general, Sir William’s grand-daughters. In the autumn of 1482 the latter and their husbands, John Rocliffe and John Sotehill, sued him in Chancery for detinue of charters concerning the manor of Elton and other property in Derbyshire and Staffordshire; Eyre replied that the charters concerned property which Sir William intended for Sir Robert, and there can be no doubt that he was acting in the interests of the latter. Later Henry Foljambe brought a similar action, claiming charters concerning the same manor of Elton, but Eyre, as a consequence of the earlier action, had already surrendered the Plumpton charters to the master of the rolls. In any event Foljambe’s claim appears to have been a speculative one. This is the last we hear of Eyre’s involvement in the matter, although he preserved until his death the closest of associations with Sir Robert Plumpton.20 C1/62/376-80; Plumpton Letters (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. viii), 266, 274.

Like others of Hastings’s retinue, Eyre retained his place in local affairs after his lord’s execution in June 1483. Indeed, he had already formed an attachment which was likely to be of considerable advantage in the changed political circumstances of that summer. Soon after coming of age in 1477, the young Francis, Lord Lovell, had appointed him as his steward of his north Derbyshire manor of Holmesfield. Lovell’s high standing with the new King Richard III probably explains why our MP was able to find a place in the service of the man responsible for Hastings’s death, a good illustration of the artificial nature of the affinity Hastings had built up as a broker of royal patronage. Under Richard III he held household office as one of the gentlemen ushers of the hall, and his kinsman John Eyre served as a yeoman of the Crown. When the King was at the Staffordshire monastery at Burton-upon-Trent on 31 Mar. 1484, he rewarded our MP with the grant of an annuity of ten marks assigned on the honour of Tutbury; and later in the same year Eyre secured the confirmation and extension of the duchy farms he had held from the mid 1470s.21 R. Horrox, Ric. III, 247; DL42/20, ff. 25v, 72v, 82-82v, 86. He was named to two commissions of array in 1484, but there is no evidence to show whether he took up arms for the King during the Bosworth campaign.22 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 400, 490. His continued presence on the Derbyshire bench after Henry VII’s accession hardly suggests that he suffered from his links with Richard III, and it is probable that the lessening of his recorded activity in local government reflects advancing years rather than declining political credit.

Little is known of the last years of Eyre’s life. In the summer of 1490 he acted as the sole arbiter in a minor dispute between his friend, Sir Robert Plumpton, and his cousin, Ralph Haugh of Elton. In 1492 his eldest son, another Robert Eyre, allegedly led an assault on another member of the family who had taken service with (Sir) Henry Vernon. Soon after, our MP was himself involved in a poorly-documented dispute with John Power. This resulted in a decree of the royal council in November 1495 that Power should be restored to whatever Eyre had taken from him.23 Plumpton Letters, 81, 86, 276; KB27/928, rot. 41; KB29/124, rot. 20d; CPR, 1494-1509, p.397; Sel. Cases in Council (Selden Soc. lxxv), 56. Early in the following year Eyre secured the renewal of his lease of the duchy lands in Bradwell, which he had first taken in 1474, and was appointed to a commission of array. He last appears in an active role on 20 Aug. 1496 when he joined with his son and heir in making a grant as feoffees of the late Christopher Staley of Hope.24 Wolley Ch. II. 79; Sheffield Archs. Bagshawe (Eyres of Hassop) mss, BagC/1851; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 68. He died shortly before 7 Nov. 1497 when a writ of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery. No inquisition has survived.25 CFR, xxii. 590.

Eyre’s career was one of service and there is more to illustrate his relationships with greater men than with his neighbours of his own rank. Nonetheless, the marriages of his many siblings and of his own large brood of children created a wide kinship network, which, although centred on north Derbyshire, spread into neighbouring shires. Most of these marriages were into families on the borderline between the gentry and the yeomanry and resident in the immediate neighbourhood of the Eyre estates, such as, for example, the marriage in about 1481 of his own daughter, Agnes, to Richard Stafford of Eyam.26 Bagshawe mss, BagC/1163-4. Others, however, were far better matches, and one of these was his own to Elizabeth Fitzwilliam of Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire. There can be little doubt that this was made during the lifetime of his father and was brought about by the mutual association of the fathers of bride and groom with Ralph, Lord Cromwell. It, in turn, led to the marriage of his youngest brother, Stephen, to Elizabeth’s kinswoman, Katherine, daughter of Nicholas Dymmock of Kyme (Lincolnshire). Baronial lordship was also the context for the marriages of his brother, Ralph, and nephew, Nicholas, to the two daughters and coheiresses of a servant of the Talbots, William Oxspring of Oxspring in south Yorkshire; and that of yet another brother, Edmund, to a minor heiress from the vicinity of the Talbot manor of Worksop in north Nottinghamshire.27 Plumpton Letters, 313; J. Hunter, S. Yorks. 355; Cox, ii. 232; Familiae Minorium Gentium (Harl. Soc. xxxviii), 549.

A further indication of the range of Eyre’s connexions is provided by the arrangements he entered into on 30 Dec. 1471 for the marriage of his son and heir to Elizabeth, daughter of Nicholas Huddleston. The trustees for the implementation of the settlement on Eyre’s part were his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Thomas Fitzwilliam I and II*, his younger brother, Roger Eyre, and, more surprisingly, three townsmen from Nottingham, namely Richard, son of Thomas Alestre*, Richard’s brother-in-law, Thomas Bingham, and Thomas Wymbissh.28 Harl. Ch. 83 E 32; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 819. Conspicuous by their absence from his range of associates are the more substantial gentry of his native society, a product of the comparative remoteness of the highlands of the north of Derbyshire and the dominance there of non-resident lords from outside the locality. Nonetheless, by the early 1470s the Eyres were becoming substantial enough in their own right to overcome these restraints. In 1473 our MP’s daughter, Joan, married Thomas Meverell, heir of a well-established gentry family with estates in the south-east of the county and Staffordshire; and it was probably in the same decade that another of his daughters married another member of the Staffordshire gentry, John Draycott of Paynsley in Draycott.29 Add. Ch. 27514; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 55. More significantly, in 1491 his niece Elizabeth, daughter of Stephen Eyre, married John Curson of Kedleston, heir of one of the leading Derbyshire families.30 E150/732/7. It may be that our MP’s son and heir had been brought up in the Curson household. When, as a young man, he took out a royal pardon in Feb. 1474, ‘of Kedleston’ was given as one of his aliases: C67/49, m. 6. The family’s rise to prominence was completed in the career of our MP’s grandson, Arthur: in 1499 he was contracted in marriage to one of the eight daughters of Sir Robert Plumpton (for the handsome portion of 250 marks), and was later the first of the family known to have taken the rank of knight.31 Plumpton Letters, 137; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 652.

A brass to the memory of Eyre and his wife survives in the church of Hathersage, decorated with the arms of Eyre, Padley and Fitzwilliam. Formerly it also commemorated their seven sons, two of whom died in infancy, and two daughters, but several of these figures have now been lost.32 Cox, ii. 233. Robert’s branch of the family failed in the senior male line on the death of Sir Arthur, whose daughter and heiress married into the Fitzherberts, and the main Eyre line became that descended from our MP’s brother, Stephen, settled at Hassop. This survived until 1853.33 Ibid. 234; Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Jnl. lxxxiv. 1-51.