BERE, Kynard de la

The de la Beres had extensive estates in Herefordshire, concentrated around Kinnersley and Stretford in the west of the county but with an outlying estate around Ledbury in the east.3 Two 14th-cent. de la Bere tombs survive at Stretford church: N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Herefs. 294. Their distinction matched their wealth. Our MP’s great-grandfather, Sir Richard de la Bere†, MP for the county in five Parliaments between 1353 and 1369, served the Black Prince as his chamberlain; and his grandfather, Sir Kynard†, a Herefordshire MP on four occasions, served both Richard II and Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d.1398), before his death fighting against the Glendower rebels at the battle of Pilleth in 1402. In comparison, our MP’s father was less distinguished. Indeed, the young Kynard appears, some years before his father’s death, to have superseded him in local affairs, following a family tradition of service to the great before premature death deprived him of what would no doubt have been a notable career.4 Sir Richard attested six Herefs. parlty. elections between 1417 and 1433, served as sheriff in 1421-2 and was a j.p. from 1424 to 1432. In this context, it would be helpful to know if he was a close kinsman of the cleric, John de la Bere, almoner of Henry VI in 1431-2 and 1438-48 and bishop of St. David’s from 1447. If he was, then it would help explain why he took part in the coronation expedition of 1430-2, departing with the King in April 1430 and remaining in France until the King’s return in January 1432.5 E403/691, m. 26; SC8/153/7626, 7629.

On his return from France, Kynard was drawn into his father’s violent dispute with their near-neighbour, Henry Oldcastle*. On 20 Sept. 1433, if an indictment is to be credited, he and Sir Richard led an attack upon their rival at Kinnersley, imprisoning him for a day and a night, and, more seriously, killing one of his men.6 KB27/691, rot. 6; 692, rot. 3d; 693, rex rot. 4d. The de la Beres complained to the chancellor that this indictment was laid by a corrupt jury: C1/11/171. Thereafter he may have returned to France, although the evidence is indirect. When a list of county notables was complied in 1434, in response to the parliamentary act requiring oaths against maintenance, he was not named, although his father and two other de la Beres, John and William, were. Absence abroad is a probable explanation, perhaps in the retinue of John, Lord Talbot, whose niece he married early in his career.7 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 376-8. However this may be, he was back in England by the summer of 1435 when he was arrested at Oldcastle’s suit by the sheriffs of London. His detention can only have been brief for, on the following 17 Sept. he was elected to Parliament with Walter Devereux I* at hustings conducted by Devereux’s father-in-law, John Merbury*.8 KB29/68, rot. 25; C219/14/5. Our MP may have had his own connexion with Merbury. In her will of 29 Jan. 1436 Merbury’s wife, Agnes, who was also Devereux’s grandmother, bequeathed a valuable brooch to Kynard’s sister, Sybil: Reg. Spofford (Canterbury and York Soc. xxiii), 226. Sybil was presumably her goddaughter. It is a measure of his family’s standing that he should have been returned in his father’s lifetime, but his election may also have owed something to a connexion with Richard, duke of York, who had only recently come of age. The de la Beres were tenants of the duke’s honour of Wigmore, and on 4 May 1436 Kynard sued out letters of protection as about to depart in the retinue of York, newly-appointed as King’s lieutenant in France.9 CIPM, xxii. 510; DKR, xlviii. 310. The duke’s affinity was probably also the context for our MP’s marriage to Joan, sister of another of the duke’s men, (Sir) Jonn Barre.

Kynard had again returned home by November 1438 when he was chosen as escheator of the county. On 8 Dec. 1439 he stood mainprise for Sir Robert Roos, a leading courtier, suggesting a continuing association with the royal household which had begun with his service on the coronation expedition.10 CFR, xvii. 117-18. Household service also provides the probable context for the marriage of his sister, Margaret, to a Household esquire from Warwickshire, John Holt of Aston near Birmingham. Arrangements for this match were concluded two days after he had stood mainprise for Roos. Interestingly, it was Kynard rather than his father who appears to have taken the lead in making the marriage, for it was he who undertook to pay for the array of the bride and the provisions consumed at the wedding feast. No evidence survives to show the size of the portion, or who paid it, although Holt’s willingness to settle nearly all his lands in jointure suggests it was generous.11 Birmingham Archs., Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall mss, 3889/Acc1926-008/348046. Kynard’s part in the making of the contract shows that he had financial resources of his own, no doubt a result of an undocumented settlement made on his own marriage. In the subsidy return of 1451 his widow was assessed on an annual income of £20, which can only have derived from such a settlement, and later evidence shows that she had a life interest in the de la Bere manor of Letton near Kinnersley.12 E179/117/64; CAD, iv. A8451. Further, our MP is known to have owned a tenement in Eastnor, in the far south of the county, for, in Mar. 1440, it was taken into royal hands as a distraint for his failure to account as escheator: E199/18/35.

In 1440 Kynard and his erstwhile opponent, Henry Oldcastle, were the subject of a petition to the chancellor. They had clearly resolved their former differences for, if the complaint is to be believed, they joined together at the head of a large body of armed men, broke into a house in Gloucester and took goods worth 100 marks belonging to Thomas Woodward, one of the Gloucestershire tax collectors. There may have been something more than special pleading in Woodward’s claim that he could gain no redress because the offenders were ‘squyers’ of ‘so grete myght of kyn alliance and lyuelode in her cuntre’. Indeed, he claimed he dare not personally deliver to them the writs of subpoena he requested, so he asked that the sheriff of Herefordshire be required to do so, on pain of £100. On 25 Nov. our MP was summoned to answer in the following Hilary term, and, having done so, he was dismissed sine die.13 C1/12/1; C244/30/139. Unfortunately the context of this episode is unclear, nor is there anything to illuminate a stranger event which took place in the following summer. According to an indictment taken before the county j.p.s., on 8 July 1441 a Welsh gentleman, David ap Gruffyth Lloyd, came to Dorstone, a few miles to the south of Kinnersley, with 200 armed men with the intention of charging de la Bere ‘with divers matters maliciously invented’.14 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 261-2.

By the early 1440s, notwithstanding the fact that he had yet to come into his inheritance, Kynard had established himself as a man of influence, important enough to be considered for appointment to the shrievalty. In November 1441 he was named on the pricked list, but for an unknown reason the serving sheriff, William Lucy, was, contrary to statute, continued in the office for a second year. On 30 Dec. he attested his first parliamentary election, named second to the only knight present, and in February 1443 he was added to the Herefordshire bench.15 C47/34/2/2; C219/15/2. More interestingly, in 1442 Humphrey, earl of Stafford, had granted him an annuity of ten marks, and soon thereafter employed him as one of his itinerant justices in his Welsh marcher lordships.16 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 232. Other members of the fam. were also connected with the Staffords. John de la Bere, probably our MP’s brother, had acted as a surety for the earl’s mother, Anne, countess of Stafford, in 1433, and Edmund de la Bere was keeper of Hay Castle in the 1440s: ibid. 223; CFR, xvi. 141. In view of his established connexion with the royal household and the duke of York, our MP could hardly have been better-connected, and it may be that he was one of those chosen to take up knighthood at the coronation of Queen Margaret on 30 May 1445.17 No reference describes him as a knight in his lifetime, but, as a litigant in 1449 and 1464, his widow described herself as ‘once wife of Sir Kynard de la Bere’: KB27/752, rot. 31d; CP40/753, rot. 70; 811, rot. 77.

Death, however, was to cut this promising career short. He did not live to come into his patrimony, for he died on 18 Oct. 1445. His father survived him by less than two years, dying on 8 Sept. 1447, and the family patrimony descended to our MP’s son, Richard, as a minor.18 CFR, xviii. 1; SC6/1116/16. In anticipation of this minority Sir Richard made a lavish settlement in favour of his four unmarried daughters and the three unmarried daughters of our MP. He instructed his feoffees to raise 100 marks for the marriages of each of these women and girls, placing this very considerable charge on his estate in the knowledge that it could be discharged, in part at least, during the minority of his heir-apparent. Not surprisingly, so lavish an arrangement was not easily carried through. In the early 1450s Kynard’s four half sisters complained that one of the feoffees, John Chabnore, had retained the profits of property set aside to provide 400 marks for their marriages. The feoffee was probably acting in the heir’s interest. Later, in the late 1460s (or early 1480s), it was the turn of our MP’s daughters to complain that their brother had entered on the possession of the feoffees and so prevented the levy of their portions.19 C1/19/132, 32/133. William Catesby†, stepson of their mother, was one of the sureties for the prosecution of the second petition. None the less, although Sir Richard’s generosity led to litigation, it did have the advantage, as he had intended it should, that most of the revenue of his lands was kept out of royal hands. Further, an account presented at the Exchequer by Kynard’s widow shows that the profits of the un-enfeoffed lands were consumed by the cost of maintaining her son and three daughters. She was allowed as much as 14s. a week for their exhibition.20 SC6/1116/16.

From the summer of 1453, when Kynard’s widow took as her second husband (Sir) William Catesby*, a rising figure at court, these children were probably brought up at Catesby’s home at Ashby St. Ledgers in Northamptonshire.21 SC1/51/147; E40/4369. The son, Richard, went on to enjoy the long and successful career that premature death denied his father. Four times sheriff of Herefordshire between 1478 and 1511, he was raised to the status of knight banneret in 1487 for his valour in Henry VII’s cause at the battle of Stoke. Soon after, on the death of his mother’s niece, Isabel, daughter of Sir John Barre and widow of Humphrey Stafford IV*, earl of Devon, he fell coheir to the Barre estates.22 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 472, 682-4; C1/132/31; CFR, xxii. nos. 435-7; CPR, 1485-94, p. 376; E150/416/1. For his career and brass in Hereford cathedral: W.E. Hampton, Mems. Wars of the Roses, 81.