BURYTON, John

As a younger son, albeit of one of the leading families of Hereford, John Buryton had his own career to make. While his elder brother, Thomas, assumed their father’s prominent place in the city’s affairs, John took training in the law, if one may draw an inference from his nomination as under sheriff of the county, an office that was generally the preserve of minor local lawyers. He enjoyed a brief but active career. He first appears in the records on 23 Oct. 1450, when he was named last of the attestors to the city’s parliamentary election. Viewed from the context of 1452, when indictments portrayed John Weobley*, one of those returned, as the leader of the resistance to the rule of the leading citizens, this was a controversial return with a context beyond the merely local. Weobley’s faction were said to enjoy the patronage of (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, who, the indictments imply, exploited unrest in the city to rally support for his master, Richard, duke of York.1 C219/16/1; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 228-30. In view of our MP’s own later connexion with Devereux, his appearance at Weobley’s election can be seen as an early manifestation of that alliance.

However this may be, at the next election, held in the calmer circumstances of the spring of 1453, Buryton was himself elected with John Welford*, another of the citizens connected with Devereux. His elder brother, Thomas, was among the attestors.2 C219/16/2. If a factor in their return was an agreement to serve at a fixed fee rather than a daily rate, it was one on which, after the Parliament had proved to be lengthy, they subsequently reneged. As late as February 1457 the two MPs were suing out writs ordering John Chippenham, who had been the city’s mayor at the end of the Parliament, to pay them £16 10s. each, that is, the full daily rate of 2s. for the whole assembly, although thereafter Welford appears to have pursued the debt alone.3 Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 278-85.

Another of the few references to Buryton shows him in unhappy association with William Wykes*, another lawyer with interests in the city. According to a petition presented by Wykes to the chancellor between 1452 and 1454, Buryton, alone among his feoffees, had refused to reconvey to him.4 C1/231/22. Later, however, the two men were to have something to draw them together, for both identified themselves with the city’s Yorkist faction. Judging by his part in the terrible events in the spring of 1456, Buryton was one of the principals of this faction. On 15 Mar. 1456 a numerous Yorkist gang, under the leadership of two of the county’s leading gentry, Sir William Herbert* and Devereux’s son, Walter II*, responded, with disproportionate violence, to the murder in the city of one of Herbert’s kinsmen, Walter Vaughan: they intimidated the local j.p.s into taking an indictment of murder against six citizens and then promptly hanged the indicted. When this outrage occurred Buryton was in office as under sheriff to (Sir) Walter Skulle*, and he used the influence of his office in support of the Yorkists. According to one indictment taken before the royal commissioners who came to Hereford in the spring of 1457, our MP, acting on an illegal order from one of the j.p.s, Miles Skulle, the sheriff’s kinsman, arrested the mayor of the city, Richard Green, as implicated in Vaughan’s murder, and extorted 40s. from him for his release; according to another, he joined Devereux I and many Welsh outlaws in imprisoning the unfortunate Green and extorting the much larger sum of 50 marks from him.5 KB9/35/40, 65. After the indictments, Buryton came to the aid of the accused by standing surety for their appearance in the court of King’s bench. More importantly, on 13 May 1457, he was one of 15 Herefordshire men, headed by Devereux II, who entered into a bond in the massive sum of 5,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield† that Devereux and six other of their number – our MP not among them – would behave as true prisoners in the Marshalsea.6 KB27/784, rex rot. 6; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 222-3. This is the last reference to have been traced to Buryton, and it may be that he died on the side of York in the civil war of 1459-61.