BECHE, John

A member of a family established at Colchester since the mid fourteenth century or earlier,7 Colchester ct. roll 1458-9, D/B 5 Cr69, m. 21d. Beche is difficult to distinguish from various namesakes, although he was perhaps the son of the John Beche of Colchester who died early in Henry V’s reign.8 ‘Oath bk.’, D/B 5 R1, f. 76. In the early 1400s, the latter had been involved in the opposition to Henry IV that existed in parts of Essex and, during the summer of 1403, he circulated a writing certifying that Richard II was still alive. In the following spring, the authorities arrested him and his sons, John and Richard, along with other burgesses and the abbots of Colchester and St. Osyth, for treason, but the Beches’ disgrace was short-lived, since all three of them received a pardon in November 1404.9 J.H. Wylie, Hen. IV, i. 417-18, 420-1, 426-7; ii. 44; Sel. Cases King’s Bench (Selden Soc. lxxxviii), 151-5; VCH Essex, ix. 25; CPR, 1401-5, pp. 430, 432, 463; E163/6/28. Richard Beche went on to hold office in the borough and he was an alderman when he died in 1435. In his will of 8 May that year, he sought burial in the local parish church of the Holy Trinity, next to the tombs of his mother and first wife. He left his brother John his best silver chest and a ‘wodeknyf’ and appointed him one of his executors.10 Colchester ct. rolls, D/B 5 Cr49, m. 1; 50, m. 1; 51, m. 1; 52, m. 1; 61, m. 22d. Richard’s son and heir was another John Beche, probably the man active in the local cloth trade in Edward IV’s reign.11 E101/343/4-6.

In spite of the problems of identification, it is likely that the elder John, Richard’s brother, was the parliamentarian and that he held most, if not all, of the offices listed above. Doubtless, the MP was the John Beche who was one of the bailiffs in November 1428, when a lollard was burnt at Colchester’s Balkerne Gate,12 Red Ppr. Bk. Colchester ed. Benham, 52-53. and the John Beche found to hold lands in Essex worth £20 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436.13 J. Ross, ‘Essex County Society and the French War’, in The Fifteenth Cent. VII ed. Clark, 70. He was probably also the John Beche ‘gentleman’ whom, with other burgesses, the master and college of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, sued in the court of King’s bench in the early 1430s, for trespassing on the college’s land just south of Colchester and imprisoning one of its employees in the summer of 1429.14 KB27/687, rot. 62. John Beche ‘gentleman’ also features in a lawsuit heard in the court of common pleas in 1443. The plaintiff, the Norfolk esquire, Oliver Groos†, alleged that Beche and his wife Agnes were unjustly detaining £40 from him. According to Groos, the debt arose from a bond for 100 marks that he had taken at Needham Market in February 1429 from Agnes’s previous husband, John Chapman, who had named her his executrix. In response, the Beches pointed out that Chapman had also appointed another executor, John Edgore, whom Groos had neglected to name in his suit, but Groos claimed that Edgore had taken no part in the administration of the deceased’s estate.15 CP40/730, rot. 435d. It is also possible, if far from certain, that the MP was the John Beche who died in office while bailiff of Colchester, on 27 June 1457.16 Colchester ct. roll, D/B 5 Cr67, m. 23d. The MP may in fact have died some years earlier: John Beche ‘senior’ of Holy Trinity parish was dead by June 1449 when his son and executor, another John Beche, was involved in bringing a suit in the borough court: D/B 5 Cr63, m. 18d.