GERVEYS, Peter

Gerveys came from a minor gentry family resident at Bonallack in western Cornwall. He is first heard of in 1420, when he went to France as a man-at-arms in the retinue of Hugh Courtenay, earl of Devon.5 E101/49/34. The family’s estates included holdings in the parishes of St. Budock, Treneglos, St. Sithians, Penryn and elsewhere in the far south-west, as well as 26 messuages and 80 acres of land in Helston, and their valuation in 1451 at just £4 p.a. was probably an underestimate.6 C1/516/34; Cornw. Feet of Fines, ii (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. 1950), 832; Cornish Lands of the Arundells (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. n.s. xli), 122; E179/87/92; English deeds, 102.

Certainly, his property made Gerveys a man of some consequence in the borough of Helston, and clearly qualified him to represent his neighbours in Parliament. While nothing is known of his activities in the Commons, it is clear that Gerveys used his journey to London to attend to his private affairs in the Westminster law courts.7 KB27/686, rots. 24, 24d. This private business saw him find sureties in the King’s bench for one John Trewothnowe who was suing William Gurlyn for maiming him by severing the veins in his right thumb with a sword. In the event, Gurlyn was acquitted on a technicality, and later went on to marry his daughter to Gerveys.8 KB27/686, rot. 63d.

Gerveys’s standing was such that he might have reasonably expected to hold office under the Crown, and his attendance at the Cornish shire elections of 1437, the year when his cousin James Flamank* was elected to represent Bodmin, suggests that he took an interest in national, as well as local affairs. His failure to secure royal appointment may have owed something to his repeated brushes with the law. Thus, in 1439 he came to blows with another man in the churchyard of St. Thomas the Martyr;9 Reg. Lacy, ii (Canterbury and York Soc. lxi), 164. around the same time, he was said to have misappropriated £40 worth of pewter vessels, silver plate and other goods formerly belonging to Richard Allet*,10 KB146/6/19/1. and in July 1448 a special commission of oyer and terminer was appointed to investigate claims that Gerveys in association with the Killigrews of Arwennek had abducted John Beauchamp the elder, imprisoned him in his house at Bonallack and only released him on payment of a ransom of 100 marks secured by obligations for £140.11 CPR, 1446-52, p. 190. Other acts of violence in which Gerveys was implicated included an attack on the servants of Ralph Reskymer in late May 1452, a probably related assault on William Reskymer the following spring, and the purported ravishing of Isabel, wife of Gregory John, in about 1455.12 E159/230, recorda Easter rot. 32; CP40/769, rot. 106d; KB27/778, rot. 8.

By this date Gerveys regularly resided in a house in St. Mary’s Street in Helston, and it is a mark of the respect he enjoyed in the town that in the autumn of 1456 he was chosen as mayor.13 English deeds, 102. He had assumed a perhaps informal role of leadership the previous November when he had headed a group of armed burgesses who had attacked Thomas Treuthgans, a servant of the influential John Arundell of Lanherne, and he may have brokered a subsequent agreement with Arundell, who, during Gerveys’s mayoralty, was granted an annual pension of 26s. 8d. in return for his counsel to the borough.14 CP40/781, rots. 302, 308; Helston bor. recs., B/Hel/245. If the attack on Treuthgans appeared to confirm Gerveys’s reputation for unruliness, his advancing years now saw him settled on a path towards respectability. In the autumn of 1461 the newly-crowned Edward IV at last admitted him to office as the duchy of Cornwall’s portreeve at Helston.15 SC6/821/11, m. 15. His claim to local leadership was now certainly hard to ignore, for he had further increased his landholdings by taking the demesne lands of Carminowe and Burnow (in Cury) to farm from John Arundell,16 Cornish Lands of the Arundells, 16. and is periodically found attesting his neighbours’ property deeds.17 Cornw. RO, Trehane estate recs., PL/10/2-3.

Little else is recorded of Gerveys’s life after Edward IV’s accession. In 1463 he was being sued for a debt of four marks by Richard Reynold (formerly attorney to Arundell and Treuthgans in their litigation against him),18 CP40/810, rot. 234. in July 1468 he was among the men who purchased part of a cargo of wine taken by pirates from a Spanish ship, and two years later he received a royal pardon of outlawry for his failure to respond to a suit for debt brought in the royal courts by one Henry Gyllyot.19 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 104, 149. The date of his death is not known, but it probably occurred well before 1499, when his elder son William held the family property at Treskewes.20 Cornish Lands of the Arundells, 122. After Peter Gerveys’s death some of the family muniments came into the hands of Thomas Trefusis, a descendant of his aunt Margaret, and as a consequence William Gerveys was for many years involved in a legal battle to secure his title to his father’s property.21 C1/516/34; Vivian, 175. Neither of Gerveys’s two sons followed their father into the Commons, but the family’s parliamentary traditions were continued in the mid sixteenth century by William’s daughter Thomasina, who married Ralph Couche†, a Marian Member for Penryn, and bore him a son of the same name who in subsequent years represented two Cornish boroughs.22 The Commons 1509-58, i. 714-15.