LEIGH, Roger

The identity of this MP is something of a mystery, since nothing has been found to connect a man called Roger Leigh or Legh with the Sussex borough of Arundel. Yet although the cursus above must of necessity be speculative, there is a strong possibility that the MP was the ‘gentleman’ or ‘esquire’ belonging to the family which owned the manors of Margaret Roding and Shelley in Essex as well as other manorial holdings in Surrey and Kent. Quite likely a younger brother of John de Leigh, who died in February 1422, Roger kept the revenues accruing from Margaret Roding after John’s death, until an inquisition revealed that the manor had been held in chief of the Crown. The Crown then sold the wardship and marriage of John’s son and heir, Thomas (b.1404), for £140, and in 1425 the Exchequer assigned the farm of Margaret Roding to others, although Roger Leigh, styled ‘of Shelley, gentleman’, stood surety for the lessees.1 CFR, xiv. 435; xv. 121; CIPM, xxi. 721; xxii. 8-10, 382, 680; E159/202, brevia Mich. rot. 5. The heir, his putative nephew Thomas, subsequently allowed him an annual rent of five marks from ‘Leghes Court’ in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, for term of Roger’s life, but predeceased him in June 1439. A few months later Roger stood surety for the guardians of Thomas’s infant son and heir.2 CIPM, xxv. 164-6; CFR, xvii. 110.

Meanwhile, in 1432 Leigh had taken on the trusteeship of a number of properties in the London parishes of St. Giles without Cripplegate and St. Botolph which were in the process of being sold to the Northumbrian lawyer John Lematon*. His association with other lawyers such as Edmund Mille* of Gray’s Inn in transactions regarding these same properties, may point to his own membership of the legal profession. Furthermore, a connexion with west Sussex (where Arundel lies) is also suggested, as it was from there that Mille hailed.3 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 177-8, 190-1; 1435-41, p. 136; Corpn. London RO, hr 161/18, 19. Significantly, too, Lematon (with whom he continued to be linked) also became a Member of the Parliament of 1442 (sitting for the Surrey borough of Reigate).4 Another of their fellow MPs was Ralph Legh*, a man from Cheshire who was currently building up his property interests in Surr. and rising swiftly in the favour of Hen. VI, and it is tempting to identify the MP for Arundel with Ralph’s putative kinsman, the Roger Legh who was a serjeant-at-law in co. Chester from Feb. 1437 and justice of the three hundreds of the eyre of Macclesfield from Aug. 1437 to aft. Jan. 1445. Ralph, the King’s attorney in Chester, named that Roger as his deputy on 24 Dec. 1439: DKR, xxxi. 218, 244-5; xxxvii (2), 451, 484, 673, 674. That he was not the same person as Roger Leigh of Essex is demonstrated by the involvement of the Cheshire man in transactions regarding the manor of Bosley in Apr. 1446, after the Essex man’s death: DKR, xxxvii (2), 63. Roger Leigh ‘of Margaret Roding’ was styled ‘esquire’ in 1439 when he accounted at the Exchequer for issues of the lands of a convicted felon, and in April 1440 when a mainpernor at the Exchequer for the alnagers of Hertfordshire, who included Thomas Thorpe*, an official in that government department.5 E364/73, rot. Gd; CFR, xvii. 155. He served as escheator in Hertfordshire and Essex in 1443-4, but died shortly after the end of his term and before 7 May 1445. A writ de diem clausit extremum was sent to his successor.6 CFR, xvii. 301. No post mortem has been found. In HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 532, Roger’s career is muddled up with that of a namesake who was Clarenceux King of Arms from early in 1436: DKR, xlviii. 309; CPR, 1429-36, p. 535. The herald was a different person from the Essex man, for he was still alive in 1451: CCR, 1447-54, p. 256. For more about Clarenceux, who died in about1460, see Gothic Art for Eng. ed. Marks and Williamson (V. and A. catalogue), 269; College of Arms mss, G. 7, f. 4; A. Wagner, Heralds of Eng. 159.