BOYVILLE, Hugh

Boyville was a younger son of a leading Leicestershire family. The earliest reference to him sets the tone for a career that was marred by an involvement in at least three murders. The first of these came at the earliest recorded moment of that career. On 20 Aug. 1412 he was indicted, along with his brothers John and Thomas, before a Leicestershire coroner for the death of their neighbour John Caldecote at Holyoaks (in Stockerston) on the previous day. There is no evidence to give this indictment a context, and in any event it occasioned Hugh little difficulty.6 Process ended in Hil. term 1415 when Thomas, indicted as principal, successfully pleaded a pardon: KB27/615, rex rot. 3.

Over the next few years the youthful Hugh makes only fitful appearances in the records. In September 1419 he began his public career by attesting the Leicestershire county election.7 C219/12/3. More interestingly, in Trinity term 1425 Elizabeth, widow of Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, granted him a fee simple interest in her third parts of two of the Fitzalan manors in Essex. His association with this powerful widow no doubt originated in the extensive Mowbray landholdings in Leicestershire, but if this grant was intended as a reward for service that service was ended by Elizabeth’s death on the following 8 July. It was probably because of her death that the grant did not take effect.8 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 6; CIPM, xxii. 434.

None the less, Hugh was not destined to be landless. At an unknown date he was granted an interest in his family’s manor of Ayston in the hamlet of Ridlington, where he established his residence.9 In the tax returns of 1428 this manor was returned as in the hands of his er. bro. John, who presented to the church there on 25 Oct. 1428: Feudal Aids, iv. 212; VCH Rutland, ii. 59; Reg. Fleming, i (Canterbury and York Soc. lxxiii), 633. Thereafter, however, Hugh is so frequently styled as ‘of Ridlington’ as to leave no doubt that it had come into his possession. In July 1446, for example, he sued out a pardon as ‘of Ridlington alias of Bringhurst’ (the property of his wife): C67/39, m. 47. His marriage supplemented this modest holding. His wife, Alice, whose first husband died in 1428, had a dower interest in lands in Bringhurst in Leicestershire and Brampton Ash in Northamptonshire. She was also the heiress-presumptive of her brother, and although it is not known when he died at some point in her marriage to Hugh she inherited the manor of Little Oxendon with lands at Burton Latimer in the latter county.10 J. Nichols, Leics. ii (2), 519; Feudal Aids, iv. 31; Genealogist, n.s. xxii. 29. These holdings explain why Hugh was assessed on the respectable annual income of £20 in the Leicestershire tax returns of 1436.11 E179/192/59.

Boyville attested his second parliamentary election at Leicester in September 1427, when his elder brother John was one of those returned. More noteworthy is his appearance, in technical breach of the statute of 1413, at the elections to the next Parliament. On 18 Aug. 1429, in company with his brothers John and Thomas, he attended the Leicestershire election, and two weeks later, for the first and only time in his career, he attested the Rutland one, when John was again returned. His appearance at both elections raises the possibility that John had sought election for Leicestershire, and having failed to do so stood instead in Rutland. It may be relevant here that the only other occasion on which Hugh is recorded as an attestor was at John’s election for Leicestershire in September 1435.12 C219/13/5; 14/1, 5. These attestations imply the two brothers were on close personal terms and this is confirmed by other evidence. In November 1439, for example, while he was himself sitting as an MP, he acted in an important resettlement of the estates of his brother’s wife, and in the following July he joined John as the beneficiary of a royal grant of the wardship of their deranged uncle, Thomas Walsh.13 CCR, 1435-41, p. 343; CPR, 1436-41, p. 424.

From the mid 1430s Boyville played an important part in the administration of Rutland, a county with so few wealthy gentry that there were opportunities for a well-endowed younger son to make his mark in local politics. Named as sheriff of that county in 1436, he was appointed to the county bench immediately after the end of his shrievalty, and it was Rutland he represented in the Parliaments of 1439 and 1447. On the second occasion the election was conducted by his brother John as sheriff, but it must be doubtful whether he needed his brother’s help to secure election. His high standing in his adopted county is reflected in his own second appointment to its shrievalty in November 1448.14 CFR, xvi. 303; xvii. 144; xviii. 103; CPR, 1436-41, p. 589; C219/15/4. This second term was to be a controversial one. In a petition presented to the Commons in the Parliament of November 1449, Alice Bermycher stated that a group of 30 armed men, acting on the command of Boyville and Sir Laurence Berkeley*, had come to the house of Sir Henry Pleasington* at Whissendine at 11 p.m. on the previous 19 Oct. and murdered her husband, Thomas. To conceal the crime, on 30 Oct. Boyville, as sheriff, had empanelled before the Rutland j.p.s at Uppingham a jury composed entirely of the tenants and servants of the Berkeleys. If, however, Boyville prevented an indictment before the j.p.s he did not have the same success with a coroner’s jury: at Ketton on 23 Oct., before coroner Thomas Stokes, the Berkeleys were indicted as accessories to Bermycher’s murder.15 SC8/96/4800; KB27/766, rex rot. 5d.

The dynamics of this episode are uncertain, but it is probable that it was connected to a developing feud between the combative Everard Digby* (with whom Boyville had represented Rutland in 1447) and the hapless John Chesilden*. In a petition presented in Parliament in the spring of 1450, probably at the same time as Alice presented hers, Digby alleged that Chiselden had unsuccessfully attempted to abduct Alice to prevent her suing an appeal against her husband’s murderers.16 SC8/105/5244. This implies that Boyville and the Berkeleys were involved in their dispute as supporters of Chesilden, and this surmise is supported by mutual actions of trespass between Digby and the Boyville brothers in 1451.17 KB27/762, rot. 9d; CP40/763, rot. 483d.

Soon afterwards Boyville was involved in another murder. On this occasion the victim was a man of much greater substance than Alice’s unfortunate husband and his death a matter of more than local significance. On 23 Sept. 1450 William Tresham*, the influential lawyer and royal servant, was killed at Moulton in Northamptonshire as he made his way, or at least so it was alleged, to meet Richard, duke of York.18 PROME, xii. 175-9. His death was not however a manifestation of the deepening divisions in national politics but rather the culmination of a long-festering resentment on the part of Boyville’s stepson, Simon Norwich, who had been a mere baby when Hugh married his mother. Norwich’s legitimate expectations of inheriting the valuable Holt lands had been frustrated by Tresham. According to indictments taken on 26 Oct. 1452, before a powerful commission of oyer and terminer, our MP had joined Norwich in a series of forcible entries upon the possession of the feoffees in the Holt lands, the chief of whom was Tresham, in the weeks preceding the murder. Tacked on to the end of this catalogue of entries is an indictment for the murder with, significantly, two clauses struck out: first, that the murder had been brought about ‘per excitacionem, procurationem et mocionem’ of Norwich and Boyville, and second that these two esquires had feloniously received the murderers.19 KB9/94/1/10, 22.

The cancellation of these indictments shows that, by the time they were laid, the heat had gone out of the dispute, and there may have been a general view that Tresham had brought his sad end upon himself. None the less, there is no reason to doubt Boyville’s involvement. He had a particular motive beyond his family relationship with Norwich, for at an unknown date before 18 Oct. 1440 Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, of whom the Norwiches were tenants, had granted him the heir’s marriage.20 This grant is known only from later litigation when, in 1458, our MP sued Norwich for marrying without his licence: CP40/791, rot. 671. Without the Holt inheritance that marriage was devalued, and this may have given Boyville a financial motive in securing for Norwich what was widely considerd his rightful inheritance. More interestingly, an additional context for the murder is provided by the Grey connexion. Both our MP and Norwich numbered among the affinity of Reynold’s forceful and ambitious son and successor, Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin. Only a few months after the murder, Boyville and Grey were named as joint feoffees by Sir John Knyvet in the disputed manor of Hilborough in Norfolk.21 Norf. RO, Hilborough mss, HIL/1/10,869X8. For evidence connecting Norwich with Grey: C140/27/16; KB27/769, rot. 51d. This evidence of association, slender enough in itself, is endowed with significance by the statement of a well-informed contemporary chronicler that Tresham was killed by Grey’s men.22 Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), [769].

In contrast to his alleged involvement in murder, only colourless details survive of the rest of Boyville’s violent and disruptive career. On 20 June 1452 he sued out a general pardon, perhaps as protection for indictment for his part in Tresham’s death. It is difficult to read any political motive into his restoration to the Rutland bench in November 1456, from which he had been removed when named as sheriff eight years before. A reputation for violence may explain the delay in restoration, but this can be no more than speculation. His political sympathies during the civil war of 1459-61 are similarly unknown. Although he was again removed from the bench in January 1459, his appointment to the Lancastrian commission of array in the following December suggests that he was not then distrusted by Henry VI’s government.23 C67/40, m. 31; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 557, 675. He had an indirect connexion with the leading Lancastrian lords in that his younger son, William, was a servant of Thomas, Lord Roos, but this was balanced by his own association with Lord Grey, who famously abandoned Lancaster for York at the battle of Northampton in July 1460.24 C1/27/5; A. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 37-39. The probability is that he remained neutral, for he neither suffered nor prospered in the wake of the change of regime. He was not restored to the bench on Edward IV’s accession but he did play a modest role in local affairs as a subsidy commissioner in 1463 and as verderer in the forest of Rutland (an office his elder brother John had held earlier).25 CFR, xx. 101; CCR, 1461-7, pp. 44, 218.

What is known of Boyville’s private affairs in the last decade of his life is of a piece with what had gone before in that it relates to a dispute. In about 1462 his neighbour, Elizabeth, widow of John, Lord Scrope of Masham, complained to the chancellor that William Boyville had, at his father’s commandment, come to Market Harborough with 34 rioters, demolished her court-house there, destroyed her mills, assaulted her servants and extorted £10 from her tenants. As a result she was no longer able to maintain her lordship there, and it is likely that at the heart of the dispute was a clash between tenant and feudal overlord for Hugh was her tenant in respect of his wife’s lands at neighbouring Little Oxendon.26 C1/27/5; C140/21/41. The Chancery petition can be dated by reference to supplementary common law actions brought by Lady Scrope: CP40/806, rot. 150.

In 1467 Boyville made a settlement to the disinheritance of his wife’s issue by her first husband, granting her manor of Little Oxendon to his son and heir, Richard (d.1510), in tail, with remainder to his younger son, William. This is the last reference to him and he probably died soon afterwards. His successor, Richard, made a career at the Yorkist court. In 1468 he was one of those who accompanied Edward IV’s sister Margaret to Burgundy for her marriage to Charles the Bold, and in September 1480 the King granted him and Griselda his wife, ‘for his good service to the King’s sister, the duchess of Burgundy’, an annuity of £20 during the minority of the duchess of Clarence’s son and heir. Richard’s son, George, served as clerk of the peace in Northamptonshire.27 J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 8, 224; C.A.J. Armstrong, Eng., France and Burgundy, 156; CPR, 1476-85, p. 217; C142/35/46; Add. 34806, C 30.