LACON, William I

This MP poses problems of identification. It has been assumed that the Shropshire MP in the Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.), 1450 and 1453 was the future judge, and that the judge was the younger brother and heir of Richard, son and heir of Sir Richard Lacon.11 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 543; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 522-3. Although there can be no doubt that the judge was Sir Richard’s son – he was remembered as such in his monumental inscription – it is equally certain that he was not his heir. The confusion has arisen from the misinterpretation of a deed of 8 Oct. 1446, by which Richard the son, during his brief period at the head of the family, settled property at Betton Alkmere, near Shrewsbury, on his stepmother, Agnes, for her life, with remainders in successive fee tail to his four brothers, William the elder, William the younger, another Richard and Thomas, in fee tail.12 CPR, 1441-7, p. 437; Salop Archs. deeds 6000/6722. The elder William is certainly to be identified with the future judge: earlier he had made a payment of £100 on the settlor’s behalf, an indication of wealth that singles him out as a rising young lawyer, and later the lawyer is described as ‘the elder’ when Chancery needed to distinguish him from his younger namesake. None the less, despite his place as first remainder-man in the settlement as if he was the settlor’s next heir, the main estates of the family passed, on Richard’s childless death in 1451, to the younger William. This is made explicit by two later deeds: in 1462 the future judge, acting as a feoffee-to-use, demised one of the principal Lacon estates, the manor of Harley in Shropshire, to the younger William’s son and heir, Richard, and Richard’s wife, Margery, daughter of Thomas Horde*, in tail; and, in 1481, the judge’s son and heir, another William, confirmed the property in Betton Alkmere settled in 1446 to this Richard, by then a knight.13 Raby castle, Staindrop mss, 1/29/24; Salop Archs. deeds 6000/6724. Clearly the latter represented the main Lacon line, and yet his father was the judge’s younger brother. There can be only one explanation: the judge was illegitimate. Even though no surviving contemporary source describes him as such, that omission is remedied in the detailed pedigree the Lacons submitted during the heraldic visitation of Shropshire in 1623. There he appears as Sir Richard’s bastard son.14 Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxix), 306.

This raises the question of which of the William Lacons represented Shropshire in which Parliament. The returns provide help enough to come to a firm conclusion: those for the Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.) and 1450 describe the MP simply as ‘William Lacon’; but the now-damaged return for that of 1453 called the MP ‘William Lacon of Willey’.15 C219/15/7, 16/1, 2. The return of 1453 is torn and Lacon’s name is lost. But, in what is certainly an echo of the official return, the comm. concerning the tax granted by the Parliament describes the Salop MP as ‘William Laken of Willey’: CFR, xix. 45, 50. The manor of Willey was the property of the main Lacon line, and there can thus be no doubt that the MP of 1453 was the Lacon heir, namely the younger William. Yet he is unlikely to have been the MP in the two earlier Parliaments: he had not then succeeded to the family estates, and a rising lawyer of good family (even if illegitimate) was a much more likely candidate for election to Parliament than the younger brother of even one of a county’s leading gentry. Moreover, the return witnessing the election to the 1450 Parliament supports the identification of the elder William as the MP in that assembly. Here a William Lacon appears as both attestor and MP, the attestor being additionally described as ‘esquire’. This suggests that the attestor was the legitimate William, for the elder William, even after he had attained a senior place in the legal profession, is routinely described as ‘gentleman’.16 In the pardon he sued out as late as 1468, when he was a judge, he is still described as ‘gentleman’: C67/46, m. 38. It is possible that the former was attesting his own return, but it is much more probable that he was attesting that of his illegitimate half-brother.17 Richard Lacon also appears among the attestors and stood mainprise for the MPs’ attendance: C219/16/1. This biography and the one that follows are, therefore, constructed upon the high probability that both the Williams sat in the Commons, the lawyer twice and the other once.

The future judge was educated at Gray’s Inn, probably beginning his education there in the mid 1420s. As early as 1429 he was nominated by his father, then escheator of Shropshire, to render account in the Exchequer, but, as with most lawyers, very little is known of him during the long period of his legal education.18 E159/206, adventus Mich. rot. 3. Nor is there anything to identify an early patron. It is, however, a fair speculation that William Burley I*, then the most prominent Shropshire lawyer, was a help to him. Such a conclusion is consistent with the family connexion between the Burleys and the Lacons – our MP’s father had been one of the executors of Burley’s father – and later evidence of a friendship between the two lawyers. Indeed, one of the earliest references to our MP shows him acting for Burley. In the summer of 1441 he was named in an arrangement designed to secure the payment of 1,000 marks from Richard, Lord Grey of Wilton, to Burley, probably as the marriage portion of Grey’s sister, Burley’s second wife.19 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 431; CPR, 1436-41, p. 553; CIPM, xxv. 589.

Lacon’s readings have been conjecturally dated to 1439 and 1446, a conjecture consistent with the fact that it was in the late 1430s that his career began in earnest. By April 1437 he was acting as the King’s attorney in North Wales with a fee of £5 p.a., and in the early 1440s, he was retained as legal counsel by the Taylors’ Company of London.20 Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xxxii; Add. Roll 26597; Baker, ii. 985. More strikingly, late in 1441 John Feerby of St. Pauls Cray in distant Kent named him as a feoffee in a Sussex manor. Lacon is later known to have owned property in Stone, a few miles from St. Pauls Cray, and his nomination as a feoffee by Feerby implies that he had acquired it by this date. The acquisition is not surprising: he needed a base convenient for Westminster, and Stone, just to the north of Dartford, answered that need.21 E. Suss. RO, Dunn of Stonehouse mss, DUN1/18. The need was the greater as his success in the profession inevitably brought him clients beyond his own locality. In 1442, for example, he acted as a feoffee for Arthur Ormesby† of Southwark in Surrey, and in 1444 he was one of a group of feoffees, headed by James Fiennes*, a leading figure in Kent and the royal household, who quitclaimed their right in two London tenements.22 CP25(1)/232/72/46; Corp. London RO, hr 174/6. More significantly, by 1445 he was acting as steward of the extensive estates of the abbey of St. Albans; and on 28 Aug. in that year he was retained as counsel to the city of London at an annual fee of 13s. 4d., a vote of confidence in his abilities that he may have owed to his Gray’s Inn contemporary, Thomas Billing*, who had been appointed as common serjeant of London in the previous autumn.23 Corp. London RO, jnl. 4, f. 91v. This retainder explains the frequency with which he was employed by London citizens as a trustee in goods and feoffee in property: e.g. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 115, 202, 495; 1454-61, pp. 313, 336, 459-60; 1461-8, p. 387; Corp. London RO, hr 179/17; C1/33/249-50.

Thereafter the records supply several instances of Lacon as active in London and the south-east, a strong indication that, unlike his probable patron, Burley, who had made a successful legal career in the service of the great lords of the Welsh march, he saw his future as lying in the central courts. In September 1447 he was appointed to a commission of inquiry in Essex, probably at the nomination of the abbot of Stratford Langthorne abbey, upon whose complaint the commission was granted; and in the following May he and another senior Gray’s Inn lawyer, William Wangford, were named by the Crown to provide legal expertise for an inquiry into the illegal seizure of a Portuguese vessel anchored off the Isle of Wight.24 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 136, 188-9. He also developed connexions among the landowners of his adopted county of Kent: in July 1447 he had taken a bond in an obscure matter concerning Edward Brooke*, Lord Cobham; and early in 1449 he acted for his Kentish neighbour, John Squery of West Wickham, in the sale of four manors to John Trevelyan*, an important figure in the royal household.25 CP40/752, rot. 122; CCR, 1447-54, p. 114. The sale later led to dispute, and our MP found himself sued in Chancery by Squery for insisting that Squery’s wife had a jointure interest in one of the manors: C1/26/330. Similarly indicative of his concern to build his practice in the south-east are his appearances as an arbiter. In September 1445 he had been named to act for a London widow in her dispute with a draper, John Stokker; and in May 1449 he returned an award in the well-known dispute between Nicholas Molyneux and Thomas Coberley* over property in Surrey purchased with the profits of war by two brothers-in-arms, Molyneux and John Winter, for whom Coberley was executor.26 Jnl. 4, f. 92v; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 71-72; CP40/769, rot. 477; K.B. McFarlane, ‘A Business-Partnership in War and Admin.’, EHR, lxxviii. 290-308.

None the less, although he seems to have had a base near London and a practice centred there from very early in his career, Lacon maintained a close interest in the affairs of his native county and in those of his brothers. His public career began with appointment to the quorum of the bench there in 1443; and in 1445-6 the Shrewsbury authorities twice paid for wine to entertain him on visits to the borough, on one occasion when he came from Welshpool with prisoners of Henry Grey, count of Tancarville. He also had a connexion (as did other Lacons) with the great Shropshire family of Talbot. On 23 June 1445 John Whichecote, an esquire in the Talbot service, granted all his goods to our MP and Sir John Talbot, son and heir-apparent of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury.27 Salop Archs. Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ acct. 3365/377, mm. 3, 5d; CCR, 1441-7, p. 309. Soon after, these two trustees acted together in a much more important matter, namely to surmount a crisis that threatened the future prosperity of the Lacons. On 17 Jan. 1446, three days after the death of our MP’s father, all the family’s lands were granted to our MP and Sir John by the new head of the family, our MP’s brother Richard. This was a defensive measure against an approaching storm, which quickly broke. Five weeks later, on 24 Feb., the Crown made what was from the Lacons’ point of view a very disturbing grant: two senior Household men, Sir Edmund Hungerford* and John Hampton II*, were given the keeping of the property of John Grendon, an idiot in royal custody. Since Grendon was the eldest son of Richard Lacon’s mother, the heiress from whom the family derived its wealth, this amounted to the confiscation of the bulk of the family estates. Our MP took a leading part in repelling the threat: he advanced Richard £100 to pay off the royal grantees, and then organized a successful challenge in Chancery to the basis upon which the grant had been made. On 29 Sept. 1449, after the delay customary in the resolution of such matters, a local jury vindicated the right of the Lacons.28 CPR, 1441-6, p. 452; KB27/749, rot. 88d; C44/29/10D; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 435-7. The grant to our MP, cited at the beginning of this biography, of the family property in Betton Alkmere (expectant on the death of Sir Richard Lacon’s widow) may have been a reward for his part in this matter.

Lacon’s involvement with the affairs of his native county culminated in his election to Parliament. There is a question about his qualifications for election in that, if his father’s widow was then living, he had no (or, at least, no known) landholdings in Shropshire. The probability is, therefore, that she was dead, and that he was tenant of Betton Alkmere when elected. If, alternatively or additionally, he had local property in the right of his first wife, this has left no impression on the records. The election took place on 16 Oct. 1449, less than a month after the traverse had been successfully concluded. The indenture is striking in that it names only four attestors to the return of Burley and Lacon, although there is nothing else to suggest any irregularity. Lacon’s attendance at Parliament might have been important from a purely personal point of view. Rising lawyers often saw such attendance as a means of career advancement, and there can be no doubt that, whether coincidentally or not, his election increased his standing. On 27 Mar. 1450, three days before the end of the second session of this Parliament, he was named among the feoffees for the settlement made on the marriage of the young Shropshire peer, John, Lord Strange of Knockin, to Jacquetta, daughter of Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers.29 C219/15/7; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 311-12. Further, on the following 1 Aug., soon after the conclusion of the assembly, he was appointed to the very important commission entrusted with the task of investigating the longstanding maladministration in Kent that had done so much to provoke the Cade rebellion. His appointment reflected not only his local interests but also his rising status in the profession, for, of the 11 lawyers named to it, he was one of only three who was not a royal justice. It was these three who travelled to begin the sessions at Rochester on 20 Aug.30 CPR, 1446-52, p. 388; R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Soc. xviii), 220-1. Other concerns, however, prevented Lacon from returning to continue the hearings a month later. Rather, he returned to his native county, sitting as a j.p. on 26 Sept. at Shrewsbury. His return may have been intended to secure him another election to Parliament. If so, he was successful: on 15 Oct. he was again elected in company with Burley. Two days later his rapidly growing importance was made much more explicit with appointment ‘for this turn’ as justice in North Wales to replace temporarily the life appointee, (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, who claimed to be too much busied on other matters.31 KB9/265/58; C219/16/1; CPR, 1446-52, p. 403.

Chance references give further indications of Lacon’s expanding legal practice at this time. Late in 1450, for example, the town authorities in Rye in Sussex gave him and another leading apprentice, Thomas Young II*, a felt cap each for their friendship in the matter of the franchise of nearby Tenterden. Soon after, he made his first appearance in the Year Books: in Michaelmas term 1451 he argued in at least two cases in the Exchequer Chamber.32 E. Suss. RO, Rye mss, acct. bk. 60/1, f. 20v; N. Statham, Abridgement, Graunte no. 8, Barre no. 102. He also appeared as an arbiter in several high profile local disputes. In 1452 he joined the London alderman, Hugh Wyche*, in settling a dispute between Richard Bruyn* of Islingham in Kent and a London tailor, Hugh Cavendish. His local connexions no doubt served to recommend him, but it was his standing as a prominent apprentice-at-law that saw him named to conclude the more important dispute over the Northamptonshire estate of the Holts, long wrongfully retained by William Tresham*. Tresham had been murdered in 1450 by the common-law heir of the Holts, Simon Norwich, who, on 16 May 1452, entered into a bond of £200 to abide arbitration of our MP and five others in his dispute with Thomas Tresham* over the lands.33 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 355, 358-9; Add. Ch. 62431.

As a senior apprentice, Lacon was now an obvious candidate for promotion into the ranks of the serjeants. The call soon came: on 1 Feb. 1453 he was among those ordered on pain of £1,000 to take the degree on the following 2 July.34 CCR, 1447-54, p. 381; Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 163. His call made him a man of account, and this is immediately clear in the records. If the Crown was not ready to retain him among its own serjeants (he was the last of his call to be so retained), it found other work for him: by the autumn of 1454 he was the King’s justice in the Welsh lordships of the duchy of Lancaster, and by the summer of 1458, when he travelled to hold great sessions at Aberystwyth and Carmarthen, he was acting as deputy justice in South Wales.35 R.A. Griffiths, Principality of Wales, i. 155; DL29/584/9248; SC6/1162/8, m. 6, 1168/9, m. 1d.

Lacon also found employment in the service of some of the leading peers. In May 1453, as he waited to take the serjeant’s coif, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, granted him an annuity of £2 from the Shropshire lordship of Caus. Soon after he was acting in a matter of the highest importance for his old associate, Sir John Talbot, who inherited the earldom of Shrewsbury on the first earl’s death at Castillon in July 1453. The first earl had attempted to deprive Sir John of a large part of the Talbot patrimony to provide for his second wife, Margaret Beauchamp, and his family by her. If the findings of an inquisition taken at Wenlock on 18 Oct. 1453 are to be taken at face value, Lacon was one of a powerful group of feoffees who entered upon Margaret’s possession in the interests of the new earl.36 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 239; C139/154/29. One of the earliest cases he pleaded as serjeant saw him acting for another of the great men of the realm, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, who retained him as counsel to defend his servants in an action sued against them by Ralph, Lord Cromwell. The point at issue was the rival claims of the two peers to the valuable lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and so intense was the dispute that disturbances erupted in Westminster Hall itself as both parties ‘cum multis hominibus bene armatis’.37 Year Bk. Mich. 32 Hen. VI (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), pl. 14, p. 9; S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 892-3. There is no other evidence to connect our MP with the hot-headed duke, and their relationship may have been purely professional. Nevertheless, Lacon was on friendly terms with two of Exeter’s servants. The duke’s councillor, John Archer II*, an Inner Temple lawyer of violent temperament, employed him in his own suits in the common pleas and nominated him among his feoffees in two separate conveyances in 1454. It may be that Archer had recommended him to the duke as counsel. Some years later, in May 1460, the duke’s first cousin, Thomas, Lord Richemount Grey, who had actively supported the duke in the Ampthill dispute, named Lacon alongside the duke among his feoffees.38 Year Bk. Easter 35 Hen. VI, no. 4, pp. 58-59; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Archer mss, DR37/1/box 53/3141; CCR, 1447-54, p. 515; 1454-61, pp. 482-3.

Lacon’s clients as revealed in the Year Books were, aside from the duke of Exeter, a combination of important gentry from the march of Wales and a wider-ranging variety of religious institutions. In 1454 he represented the prior of Castle Acre in Norfolk; in 1455 he pleaded for Sir John Barre*; in 1457 he acted in King’s bench for Sir William Herbert*, (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, and many others appealed for murder in the wake of serious disturbances in Herefordshire; and in 1459 he pleaded for his old employer, the abbot of St. Albans. The Year Books also show, unsurprisingly, that he became more prominent as an advocate as he gained experience. In 1460 cases were reported in which he represented the abbess of Syon, George Neville, Lord Latimer, and the dean of Stoke by Clare (Suffolk).39 Year Bks. Mich. 33 Hen. VI, pl. 12, pp. 34-35; Easter 33 Hen. VI, pl. 7, pp. 16-17; Easter 35 Hen. VI, pl. 2, pp. 57-58; Trin. 37 Hen. VI, pl. 21, pp. 34-35; Trin. 38 Hen. VI, pl. 2, pp. 33-38; Mich. 39 Hen. VI, pl. 3, pp. 1-2, pl. 17, pp. 13-15. Other sources document further clients. On 18 Feb. 1457 the prior and convent of St. Mary’s in Southwark granted him a yearly rent of 26s. 8d. for the term of 24 years, no doubt for his legal services. Later, in Easter term 1460, he was paid 13s. 4d. by the executors of Sir John Fastolf, ‘at iiij tymes to go in the exchequer to meve the court’ in one of the knight’s matters, and soon afterwards he was retained ‘de consilio’ by the executors of the duke of Buckingham to represent them in Chancery.40 CAD, i. C28; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 303; C254/147/17.

Lacon’s personal affairs can only be occasionally glimpsed in the surviving records of these years. On 14 Mar. 1455 he joined with a merchant of Genoa, Francesco de Furnariis, in lending £127 3s. 4d. to a Southwark yeoman. The yeoman’s failure to discharge the debt led to his imprisonment in the Marshalsea from February 1456 until June 1460, when our MP acknowledged payment. In the autumn of 1456 he acted in company with another Genoese merchant, Geronimo de Illionibus, when the London draper, John Claymond, granted them all his goods.41 KB27/779, rot. 29d; CCR, 1454-61, p. 174. Such references as these, suggestive of a willingness on the part of our MP to speculate with the winnings of his profession, are, however, scarce. Save for the land he acquired at Stone early in his career and small properties at nearby Dartford (in his hands by 1462) and Crayford, he is not known to have made any other purchases of land.42 CCR, 1461-8, p. 360; PCC 20 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 153). He did, however, relatively late in his career, extend his property by marriage. His second wife was the youngest of the three daughters of a Berkshire esquire, whose main property had been the manor of Clewer in the parish of Bray. By 1464, when a final concord was levied giving him a life interest in her inheritance, he was holding in her right a moiety of that manor together with some 400 acres and £4 of annual rent in Hurst, Cookham, Bray and Binfield. Their marriage probably came about as a function of mutual connexions among the mercantile community: she was the widow of a London mercer and before that of a servant of the royal household.43 CP25(1)/13/87/5; C139/103/32. Her first husband, John Thorley, had bequeathed her property in Fulham and Windsor: PCC 30 Luffenam (PROB11/3, f. 242). She might later have brought Lacon further property. In Jan. 1469 she fell common-law heiress to one-sixth of the lands of her first cousin, William Warbleton*, but her expectations do not appear to have been realized. It took place between Easter term 1458, when Sibyl was a plaintiff as a woman sole, and 6 Oct. 1460, when Lacon was a suitor to the court of the manor of Bray.44 CP40/789, rot. 49; C. Kerry, Hist. Hundred Bray, 33. The acquisition of property in Berkshire by marriage at some point in the late 1450s helps to explain a further shift of our MP’s local interests away from his native county. Although in 1457 he was named with his younger brother, William, to the Shropshire commission for the assignment of archers and he remained on the bench there, he was becoming increasingly involved in Kentish affairs. Significantly, he was named to the bench in Kent in May 1458; on the following 18 Jan. he sat as a j.p. at Dartford; he was there again on 12 June 1459 when, acting on a writ of dedimus potestatem, he registered a deed of the prioress of Dartford for enrolment on the close roll; and in May 1460 he became a j.p. in Berkshire. Yet more strongly indicative of his local loyalties is the burial, seemingly at some date in the 1450s, of his first wife and one of his daughters at Stone.45 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 407, 660, 668; KB9/291/4; CCR, 1454-61, p. 394; Weever, 333.

It is not known whether Serjeant Lacon had strong political sympathies during the civil war of 1459-61. The pattern of his appointment to commissions gives no certain guide. His removal from the Shropshire bench in the autumn of 1460, when the Yorkists were in control of government in the aftermath of their victory at the battle of Northampton, might be taken as an indication of a Lancastrian affiliation, as might also his close connexion with the earl of Shrewsbury (and more distant links with the dukes of Buckingham and Exeter). Yet his removal from the bench probably betokens no more than the shift of his personal interests southwards as a result of his second marriage. Such an interpretation is consistent with evidence of an inclination towards York. On 13 Sept., a few days after his removal from the bench, Thomas Lacon, probably one of his brothers, was granted for life the keepership of the royal swans in the river Thames. This appointment is to be seen in the context of the direct evidence of our MP’s identification with York provided by a deed dated on the following 14 Oct. On that day John Spicer alias Purcell, tenant of the Buckinghamshire manors of Drayton Parslow and Mursley, which the Lacons had long claimed as the inheritance of Sir Richard Lacon’s mother, Margaret Passelewe, quitclaimed the manors to our MP, who had perhaps brought him out in the interests of his nephew, Richard Lacon. The political significance of the conveyance lies in the identity of the serjeant’s co-feoffees, namely Richard, duke of York, the duke’s two sons, the earls of March and Rutland, and another important Yorkist, (Sir) John Wenlock*. This apparent choice on our MP’s part may reflect no more than the times – if so, he clearly had every faith in the continuance of the Yorkist regime – but it is likely to have meant more than that. Interestingly, the quitclaim was made while the duke’s claim to the throne was being actively discussed in Parliament (as our MP, no doubt then busy pleading in the court of common pleas, must have been acutely aware), and just two days before the claim was formally presented.46 CPR, 1452-61, p. 626; CCR, 1454-61, p. 483.

Unsurprisingly, Lacon adapted seamlessly to the change of King, albeit without any grant of royal patronage to suggest that his support for that change had been active. The pardon he sued out in May 1462, in which he is described simply as ‘late of Stone, gentleman’, was no more than a routine precaution, and he was prominently involved in legal affairs from the outset of the reign. He was reappointed to the county benches in Kent and Berkshire; and on 14 Dec. 1461 during the new King’s first Parliament, he joined two other of the call of 1453, his friend Billing and Thomas Lyttleton, and the King’s attorney, in making a report to the Lords on a petition of the tenants of the manor of East Meon in Hampshire against their lord, the bishop of Winchester.47 C67/45, m. 26; PROME, xiii. 40-41. He also formed a connexion, albeit an indirect one, with one of the leading Yorkist lords, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester: on 29 Aug. 1463 his eldest son, William, sued out a protection for four months as serving in the earl’s retinue for the keeping of the seas.48 C76/147, m. 8.

At about the same time as his son was serving at sea, Lacon gained a delayed promotion in the legal profession. He was advanced to the rank of King’s serjeant between early 1463, when he was not among those personally summoned to the Lords, and 23 Nov. 1464, when, as a King’s serjeant, he headed a commission to inquire into the Hungerford lands in Buckinghamshire. The likelihood is that he was promoted at or before the new call of eight serjeants in the previous November. He was then the only survivor of the call of 1453 who had not already been raised to that rank. The most senior of the new call, Thomas Young, immediately received his patent as King’s serjeant; and the probability is that our MP had received his own patent shortly before.49 Law Offs. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. x), 11. There is, however, the possibility that he never became a King’s serjeant. His patent of appointment does not survive, nor does his patent as a justice name him as King’s serjeant: C66/512, m. 8. The evidence to the contrary is the Bucks. comm.: C66/509, m. 26d. He did not have to wait long for a further promotion. Although he was the last of his call to become a King’s serjeant, he was not the last to be raised to the bench. On 4 June 1465 he was named as a justice of King’s bench with an annual fee of 110 marks and an allowance of over 13 marks for robes. To this he soon added a further £20 p.a. as justice of assize of the home circuit.50 CPR, 1461-7, p. 442; CCR, 1468-76, no. 587. More modestly, he also received what was perhaps an acknowledgment of his new rank from the borough authorities of Shrewsbury: soon after his promotion to the bench they paid 4s. for wine given to him in suo adventu from parts of Wales, where no doubt he had been on royal business.51 Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/396, m. 1. This is one of only two references that connect him with his native county in the latter part of his career. The other dates from Aug. 1470, when he was named as an arbiter in the dispute between William Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and the town of Oswestry, on the one hand, and the borough of Shrewsbury on the other: ibid. assembly bk. 3365/67, f. 111v.

As a judge, Lacon could hardly avoid taking his part in the controversial political trials that disfigured judicial administration in the late 1460s. On 18 July 1468 he was one of two royal justices before whom the wealthy London alderman, (Sir) Thomas Cook II*, convicted of misprision of treason, registered sureties for the payment of the massive fine of 8,000 marks imposed upon him at the King’s pleasure. He had a distant connexion with the alleged plotters through his wife: Hugh Pakenham, executor of her second husband, Thomas Ryke, was implicated with Cook. There is no reason to suppose that this had any impact on his feelings on the matter, but he and his colleague, (Sir) William Yelverton*, may have disapproved of both the size of the huge fine levied against Cook and the manner of its imposition. This, at least, is a possible interpretation of the laconic record, that the fine ‘non recordatur nec assensum per iusticiarios’.52 CP40/802, rot. 49; John Vale’s Bk. ed. Kekewich et al. 90. Soon after, Lacon acted in another matter that was equally judicially questionable. On 16 Jan. 1469 he sat as one of the commission, which, in the presence of the King himself at Salisbury, took the arraignment of (Sir) Thomas Hungerford* and Henry Courtenay, the dispossessed heir to the earldom of Devon, for high treason.53 PROME, xv. 166-7; KB9/320/16d; E404/74/1/154. He received financial reward from the Crown for his participation in both these trials. Five days after the trial of Cook, he and Yelverton received an assignment at the Exchequer for £10, and he later had another £10 for his attendance at Salisbury. To these he added, in June 1469, the payment of another £20 ‘by waye of Rewarde’ for holding sessions of oyer and terminer with Billing and others in East Anglia.54 E403/840, m. 13; 842, m. 1; E404/74/2/32. Such payments invite the conclusion that, as national politics became increasingly strife-ridden, the Crown felt the need to reward its judges for activities that would have been regarded as routine in less disturbed times.

In this period Lacon also acted in a very important, and politically-charged, transfer of property. On 21 June 1468 John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, who had recently come of age, granted the extensive lordship of Gower in south Wales to four prominent lawyers, headed by our MP and Thomas Lyttleton; these feoffees then suffered a recovery to the royal favourite, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, whose estate was confirmed by the Crown. According to a petition presented in the Parliament of 1485, this transfer was brought about ‘by unlawfull means’. Herbert, with the King’s connivance, engineered the imprisonment of Thomas Charles, a former servant of Henry VI, in the Tower of London, releasing him only when he agreed to surrender two manors in East Anglia to Mowbray as very inadequate compensation for Gower. Lacon and Lyttleton need not have been aware of this, but it does look as though the King was employing his justices to give the seal of respectability to an unlawful conveyance.55 CCR, 1468-76, no. 67; CPR, 1467-77, p. 163; CP25(1)/83/57/6; Glamorgan County Hist. iii. 259; PROME, xv. 141-6. However, if this and the evidence of the payments cited above might be taken to suggest a politicization of the judicial bench in the late 1460s, the Readeption made no discernible difference to the career of Lacon or his judicial colleagues. They all kept their places, and our MP was added to the commissions of the peace in Hertfordshire and Middlesex. Edward IV’s return, however, proved a different matter: the restored monarch gave new patents to Lacon and only four of the justices who had been serving when he went into exile; five others were retired. The motive for these effective dismissals seems to have been largely economic, although, in the cases of Sir Robert Danby, c.j.c.p., and (Sir) Walter Moyle*, royal displeasure was probably the cause.56 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 258, 264; Ives, 233. Whatever the cause, however, the effect was greatly to increase the burden on Lacon and the other remaining justices. When Edward IV had gone into exile, there had been four puisne justices in King’s bench; when the court sat again after his restoration, that is in Trinity term 1471, Lacon had only a single colleague to serve under Chief Justice Billing. This remained the case almost to the end of his life.

Very little evidence survives to illuminate what must have been these busy last years of Lacon’s career. He was one of the triers of English petitions in the Parliament of 1472, as he had been in that of 1467. In his will of 26 Sept. 1475 he described himself as a knight; and the occasion of his knighthood was probably the ceremonial knighting of the King’s eldest son, the prince of Wales, on the previous 18 Apr.57 His name does not appear in the list of those then knighted provided by Shaw, Knights of Eng. i. 136. Significantly, however, both he and Billing, c.j.KB, also not listed, both first appear as knights in 1475. He did not enjoy the rank for long for he died on the following 6 Oct., three days before the beginning of Michaelmas term. The will is a colourless document that gives no indication that the testator was a man of wealth. Indeed, given his high rank in the legal profession, its most striking aspect is the extreme paucity of its bequests. His eldest son, William, was to have his ‘place’ in Stone (on condition that he pay the judge’s widow eight marks p.a. for her life), together with a small number of livestock, a cart and plough, and the grain in the barns. His daughter, Elizabeth Mortimer, was bequeathed a wood called ‘Godwod’ in Crayford, which she was to have in fee after the widow’s death, subject to her brother William’s agreement. The religious bequests were very modest: the four orders of friars in London were to have £1 each; the church of Bray £2 for the purchase of a mass book and £1 for the repair of the Foxley chapel founded by his wife’s ancestors; and a quarter of wheat was to go to each of the friaries of Reading and Guildford. The church of Stone did a little better, receiving a silver chalice and a corporal with its case, but the will mentions no other churches or religious houses. There is nothing to remember Lacon’s Shropshire origins. The remainder of the will concerned minor grants of gowns and crops to servants. Lacon’s son, George, was to have two books of law, and his long-time friend and colleague, Billing, was bequeathed a book of statutes. One can only assume that the surviving will was a collection of last thoughts and that he had already made disposition of the bulk of his wealth. A Chancery petition presented after his death supports this hypothesis. His nieces, the daughters of his brother, William, claimed that he owed them £80 and that he had instructed his widow, as his executrix, to discharge the debt either from his goods or from the sale of land at Dartford with an annual value of eight marks.58 PCC 20 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 153); C1/59/216-17. The petition identifies Thomas Vincent†, clerk of the peace in Berks., as Lacon’s feoffee in these Dartford lands. Our MP was his patron. Vincent acted under him as associate assize justice on the home circuit and used his status as our MP’s ‘servant’ to sue by bill in King’s bench: KB27/828, rot. 82d; 841, rot. 30; 843, rot. 78. After Lacon’s death, he became a filacer in KB. Further, if we may judge from his surviving brass in the church of Bray, he made provision, outside his will, for a suitable memorial. A product of the then recently-established London ‘F’ workshop, the brass portrays him in judicial robes, and was originally decorated with enamel. The female figure, clothed in widow’s weeds, was stolen in about 1841.59 H.T. Morley, Mon. Brasses Berks. 48-49; R. Gough, Sep. Mons. ii (3), 247.

Lacon’s widow survived him long enough to take a fourth husband. By 1480 she had married a Leicestershire knight, Sir Thomas Berkeley†. One can only speculate about how such a match came about, but it may be significant that, as a young man, Berkeley had spent time at Lincoln’s Inn.60 CP40/873, rot. 81d; CP25(1)/13/87/26; L. Inn Black Bks. i. 23. Sibyl’s survival did little to harm the prospects of our MP’s son and heir, William, for he was not her heir. What condemned him to a life of obscurity was his father’s curious and remarkable failure to translate the profits of a long legal career into a worthwhile landed estate. His nomination as escheator in Shropshire, an office he was holding at his father’s death, implies that his father had given him his property at Betton Alkmere, but there was little else to come to him.61 CFR, xxi. 236. There can be no doubt that our MP’s son was the escheator. On 1 May 1476 he was pardoned as ‘late of [Betton] Alkmere alias late of Stone, late escheator of Salop’: CPR, 1467-77, p. 584. Perhaps it was his lack of prospects that encouraged him to indent for service, with a very modest retinue of three archers, in Edward IV’s great expedition to France in the summer of 1475.62 E405/60, rot. 1d; 61, rot. 2. This sad lack also seems to have led him into debt: he was, at any rate, obliged to mortgage ten acres of arable land in Stone to a London mercer for a paltry £5. Debt may also explain why, in 1481, he returned the property at Betton Alkmere to the senior branch of the Lacons. Four years later, his son and heir, John, confirmed a further alienation, quitclaiming the family’s lands in Stone and neighbouring Swanscombe. This seems to have marked the end of a line that our MP invested so little in founding. He appears to have been more concerned with the fortunes of the main line of his family than in the foundation of his own junior branch.63 C1/55/12-14; Salop Archs., deeds 6000/6724; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 72.