LACON, William II

When William Lacon first appears in the records he was a younger son. In Michaelmas term 1439, as ‘of Willey, gentleman’, he was sued for trespass by William, Lord Lovell. More significantly, on 14 Apr. 1445, with his father and brothers, he was implicated in the murder of a yeoman at Stockton-on-the-Forest near York, and he was appealed by the yeoman’s widow in the following February. Here the Lacons appear to have been acting as servants of the Talbots – there is no other ready explanation for their appearance in a county so distant from their native Shropshire – and it was this service that was to transform William’s prospects. According to the Berkeleys’ historian John Smyth, working from now lost documents, ‘one Lacon’ was killed by his own servant while acting for Margaret, wife of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, in the Talbots’ famous dispute with the Berkeleys; and there is every reason to suppose that the victim was William’s elder brother, Richard.4 KB27/714, rot. 31d; 746, rot. 87; J. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys ed. Maclean, ii. 71. Smyth dates the crime to 1452, but the appointment of our MP as sheriff of Shropshire in November 1451 implies that it is to be dated to the previous year, for William is unlikely to have been so nominated unless he had already inherited the family patrimony.5 Richard last appears in the records on 15 Oct. 1450, when both he and our MP attested the election to Parl. of their illegit. half-bro.: C219/16/1.

Lacon’s term as sheriff came at a difficult time. In February 1452 Richard, duke of York, rose against the government, drawing significant support from Shropshire, and in the following August royal justices of oyer and terminer came to the county to take indictments of those involved. It fell to our MP as sheriff to facilitate the justices’ inquiry by the requisite juries and executing process against the indicted. Such tasks often led sheriffs into difficulties, but Lacon seems to have managed adroitly. He satisfied the Crown by arresting two of the more prominent men indicted as supporters of York, Fulk Eyton and Roger Eyton*, but avoided local unpopularity by returning ‘not found’ to the many other writs of capias.6 KB9/103/2/48.

A term as sheriff early in a career generally marked a man out for a prominent path in local administration, and Lacon, had he lived, would have been no exception. On 1 Mar. 1453 he was elected to represent the county in Parliament in company with (Sir) John Burgh III*, who returned himself; and, on the following 16 July, shortly after the end of the second session of the Parliament, he was named to the county bench.7 C219/16/2. However, he had not been a young man when he inherited the family estates – his parents had been married by 1411 – and he did not live to be an old one. His career did not develop further beyond a couple of appointments to ad hoc commissions of local government and the occasional appearance as j.p.8 e.g. KB9/284/1; 288/82. He probably died between 31 Oct. 1459, when he headed the jury at the Shropshire inquisition taken on the death of Thomas Stanley II*, Lord Stanley, and 1 Sept. 1460, when not appointed to the county bench.9 C139/175/8. His death can be tentatively pinned down more accurately. As he was one of the county’s leading gentry and connected with the Lancastrian Talbots, he was an obvious nominee to the Lancastrian commission of array issued on 21 Dec. 1459; death is the best explanation for his exclusion. In any event, he was certainly dead by 6 Aug. 1462, when his illegitimate half-brother and namesake, Serjeant Lacon, settled one of the family’s principal estates, the manor of Harley in Shropshire, in tail upon our MP’s son and heir, Richard (d.1503), and Richard’s wife, Margery, daughter of Thomas Horde*. A later Chancery petition shows that this match was contracted in our MP’s lifetime. Horde, presumably as part of the contract, entered into a bond in 200 marks to Serjeant Lacon to the use of the marriages of our MP’s four daughters, ‘by the ordynnaunce and appoyntment’ of our MP.10 Raby Castle, Staindrop mss, 1/29/24; C1/59/216.

At least two matters troubled Lacon during his brief period as head of his family. On 29 June 1456 he was outlawed in the city of Coventry for a debt of £40 claimed against him by the city’s recorder, Henry Boteler II*, an humiliation for a man of his standing.11 CP40/783, rot. 566. Of greater importance was his attempt to make good his claim to the manor of Drayton Parslow in Buckinghamshire. This was the inheritance, or, at least, so he alleged it to be, of his paternal grandmother, Margaret Passelewe, but the title was contested by the powerful Staffords. According to a petition presented by Lacon to Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, in the 1450s, his father had proved his title before the assize justices, but ‘for dread of displeasure’ of the duke ‘delayed the execution of his recovery’. He humbly asked the duke for his good lordship in the matter, claiming as a recommendation for the exercise of that lordship the kinship between them. Both the Lacons and Staffords were descended from the Corbets of Caus, although our MP was going a little far in claiming to be of the duke’s blood, ‘not farre warin in degree’. Nothing is known of the immediate effect of this plea, and it is difficult to place it in the context of what else is known of the dispute over the manor. This shows that there were a number of rival claims, none of which belonged, directly at least, to the Staffords. However this may be, the dispute was resolved in favour of the Lacons shortly after our MP’s death. On 14 Oct. 1460 the principal of the rival claimants, John Spicer alias Purcell, quitclaimed the manor to feoffees including Serjeant Lacon. Since the duke of Buckingham had fallen at the battle of Northampton three months before, his death may have been the catalyst for the favourable resolution of the dispute in the Lacons’ favour. If so, our MP’s petition had not been effective.12 J.B. Blakeway, Sheriffs Salop, 62; Bodl. Dugdale mss, 39, f. 83v; CCR, 1454-61, p. 483.