FALK, Nicholas

The Falks were one of the principal families of Hereford. Nicholas’s father served no fewer than seven terms as mayor and made a gentry marriage suggestive of higher social aspirations. Indeed, his marriage, socially satisfying at the time it was made, had important material implications when, in 1420, his wife unexpectedly fell sole heir to an estate which, when viewed from the standpoint of a Hereford citizen, was substantial.2 C138/47/48. This windfall promised to transform the Falks from citizens of Hereford to gentry of Worcestershire, residing at her manor of Bockleton near the Herefordshire border. Why it did not is unclear. On his mother’s death in 1435 our MP completed a process of alienation seemingly begun almost as soon as the inheritance had come into the family’s hands, and, although he appears to have retained Bockleton, he continued to live in Hereford. Perhaps the inheritance was too scattered to be practically taken on – outside Worcestershire, it included small parts of manors in Middlesex, Essex and Kent, together with many burgages in Shrewsbury – but it may also be that the family finances were not in robust health.

Falk’s first appearance in the records, occurring very soon after his father’s death, concerned an alienation closer to home: on 30 Dec. 1426 he joined his mother in selling a garden in ‘Oldescolestrete’ to another of the city’s leading men, George Breinton*. Not until November 1431, when he was one of the city jurors who returned assessments in respect of a royal subsidy, is he recorded as playing any part in city affairs.3 CAD, vi. C6538; Feudal Aids, ii. 422. Late in 1436 he twice served on inquisition post mortem juries sitting at Hereford, as he did again in 1444: CIPM, xxiv. 603, 626; xxvi. 167. His one term, albeit a double one, as mayor, contrasts unfavourably with his father’s much more active career. The circumstances of Falk’s single election to Parliament present several features of interest. On 17 Sept. 1435 he attested the county election for the only time in his career; three days later he was elected, again for the only time in his career, to represent the city at Westminster in company with his putative younger brother, Richard.4 C219/14/5. It seems reasonable to infer that he had a particular reason for wishing to sit in this assembly, and it is surely more than coincidental that, during the parliamentary session, he put in train the alienation of the bulk of his recently-deceased mother’s inheritance. On 8 Dec. 1435, 15 days before the end of the assembly, he granted all her Shropshire lands to his cousin, William Mytton*, and John Harper*; in the following Hilary term he was party to a final concord by which Mytton surrendered his interest in Katherine’s inheritance outside Shropshire and Worcestershire to Harper; on 4 Apr. 1437 he quitclaimed this property to Harper and the Shropshire lands to Mytton; and the process was completed in the following July when Harper quitclaimed the Shropshire lands to Mytton.5 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 120, 123, 130; CP25(1)/292/68/181. The most obvious interpretation of these conveyances is that Falk sold his mother’s Shropshire lands to Mytton and her other more distant property to Harper. In the case of the latter he was probably implementing an agreement made as early as 1422, when his parents had conveyed the lands in the south-east to Harper and his associates. Perhaps a mortgage turned into a later sale.6 CP25(1)/291/65/8.

Even so, although Falk was less wealthy than he could so easily have been (his mother’s inheritance was valued at £25 p.a.), he still numbered among Hereford’s richest citizens. In the subsidy returns of 1450-1 he was assessed at £5 p.a.7 E179/117/64. As such he was too important entirely to avoid the local troubles of the late 1440s and 1450s as his native city became first riven by internal faction and was then drawn into the conflict between strong Yorkist and Lancastrian factions among the county gentry. On 21 Oct. 1448 he and Richard Falk were among those assembled in the city’s church of St. Peter for the mayoral election, only for the election to be violently subverted (according to an indictment) by a group of lesser citizens, headed by John Weobley*.8 KB9/34/1/5. This provoked a factional struggle in Hereford, setting Weobley’s Yorkist grouping against the city’s ruling oligarchy. Our MP’s brother took an active part in opposing the Yorkist sympathisers, and, for his pains, suffered both violence and a false indictment for murder when, in March 1456, Hereford was raided by a Yorkist gang, headed by Sir William Herbert* and Walter Devereux II*. Nicholas no doubt shared his putative brother’s opinions. On the following 31 May, when Richard appeared in the court of King’s bench to answer the false indictment, Nicholas posted bail for him; and, more significantly, on 2 Apr. 1457, when a powerful royal commission came to Hereford to investigate the recent disturbances, Nicholas headed the city jury, which gave a vivid and, if a later conspiracy action is to be credited, untrue account of how the citizens had suffered at Yorkist hands.9 KB27/781, rex rot. 1; KB9/35/72d.

Falk’s last appears in the records in 1459 when he attested the city’s election to the Parliament in which the Yorkist lords were attainted. Since he had regularly witnessed the Hereford elections since the late 1430s, his omission from the attestors to the next election, who despite the very different political circumstances of the autumn of 1460 were much the same body as the 1459 electors, implies that he may have died in the interim. Certainly no further references to him have been traced.10 C219/16/5, 6.