HEYREMAN, Robert

Perhaps the father of Thomas Heyreman, twice mayor of Cambridge during the 1450s and a long-serving borough j.p.,3 J.M. Gray, Biogs. Mayors Cambridge, 18. Robert achieved prominence of a less desirable sort, after becoming caught up in a dispute between the town and university. About the end of Henry V’s reign, the borough authorities petitioned the Council, complaining that the local Austin friars and the university had disturbed their liberties. One of their complaints concerned Heyreman. According to the townsmen, certain members of the university had seized and imprisoned him while he was trying to serve a writ on behalf of the borough against a servant of the prior of Barnwell, and then banished him from the town when he brought an action for false imprisonment. In reply, the university authorities said that Heyreman was a notorious disturber of the peace who had acted as a pimp for prostitutes at Stourbridge Fair and broken into the house that the chancellor of the university kept there. They added that he had incurred the banishment – never in fact enforced – after failing to reform and starting to wander abroad at night. The matter came before arbitrators, but there is no evidence as to their conclusions.4 C.H. Cooper, Annals Cambridge, i. 160-1. In the eyes of the burgesses, the university’s accusations cannot have counted for much, given that they afterwards elected Heyreman to borough office and to Parliament.