POERS, John

Poers was a townsman of Warwick with, if we may judge by his terms as under sheriff, a training in the law. Nothing is known of his parentage, but it is possible that he was the son of Nicholas Poers, who attested the Warwickshire election of 1419.1 C219/12/3. He himself first appears in the records in 1435: on 16 Mar. he was named as a feoffee of property in West Smithfield, outside the city of London, implying that he was then attending an inn of court or of Chancery; and in May he was named to a royal commission charged with arresting a butcher of his native town.2 Corp. London RO, hr 163/40; CPR, 1429-36, p. 473. It may be that already, at this early stage of his career, he was serving a term as under sheriff, although the evidence is only suggestive. The sheriff in 1434-5 was Thomas Erdington*, under whom he is known later to have held the office. Erdington and he headed the arrest commission of May 1435, perhaps as sheriff and under sheriff; in Trinity term 1435 the two were joint-plaintiffs in a plea of debt; and in Easter term 1437, Erdington, as ‘late sheriff’, claimed £20 each against our MP and his putative father, possibly for defaults as his shrieval officers.3 CPR, 1429-36, p. 473; CP40/698, rot. 184d; 705, rot. 177d.

Poers’s legal qualifications, however modest, may have assisted him in acquiring the hand of a minor heiress. In 1438 he and his wife, Margery Faseman, complained to the chancellor against the attempts of Thomas Tate of Coventry, executor of the bride’s mother and husband of the other coheiress, to disinherit her of property in Derby. They supported their action by suing him at common law for chattels worth £40, but soon after their differences with Tate were resolved. In another petition to the chancellor the two couples sued the heir of the last of William Faseman’s feoffees for three messuages in Derby.4 C1/9/111; 1514/1; CP40/710, rot. 403. If Poers did eventually secure his wife’s inheritance, he played no part in the affairs of her native town.

In the mid 1440s Poers served two consecutive terms as under sheriff, first for Sir Robert Harcourt* and then for Erdington. Both these terms may have been more than usually onerous. Harcourt was absent for a substantial part of his shrievalty on the expedition to collect Margaret of Anjou from France, and on 21 Mar. 1445, as Poers attempted to make an arrest on the sheriff’s behalf, he was violently assaulted at Wolston. Thereafter, according to the sheriff’s testimony, Poers dared not go about his duties ‘absque magno posse’.5 KB27/736, rex rot. 7; KB29/77, rot. 28. Erdington was similarly absent, for during the first part of his term he was an MP at Westminster. This consideration may have caused him to demand particular undertakings from his officers. On 10 Dec. 1445, while Parliament was in session, Poers entered a bond in as much as £300, probably to indemnify the sheriff against any penalties intendant on defaults by him as under sheriff.6 CP40/759, rot. 129d; 761, rot. 194d.

As a local lawyer, it is not surprising that Poers should himself have been elected to Parliament. The most interesting events of his career followed his first election to the Parliament of November 1449. He was among the townsmen who led a campaign of intimidation against the town’s leading resident, John Brome II*, a senior Exchequer official. According to a complaint made by Brome to the King, on 11 July 1450, ‘in tyme of grete rebellion and riote … withynne this lande’ (that is, at the time of Cade’s rebellion), Poers and the two bailiffs of Warwick led a raid on ‘Bromes Place’ in the town, taking goods worth 100 marks, and early the following morning they went to his manor of Baddesley Clinton, some six miles away, putting his wife and children ‘in right grete fere and drede’. On 13 Aug. there was a further attack on the Warwick property: the rioters, ‘in the most cruell and vengeable wise’, damaged timber and stone so that it might not be used in rebuilding. In his petition Brome attributed to his enemies the worst disorders ‘that euer was seene in that towne in eny man’s dayes that nowe lyueth, and lyke to distroy the same towne, without gode and due remedy’. For good measure, he also claimed that they laboured to put him, ‘out of the conceite of all the Comyns of all the said towne and Shire’, slandering him in every market town. It is not known why Poers should have put himself among the leaders of Brome’s local opponents, but it is clear that his re-election to Parliament on 19 Oct., two months after the second attack, in an indenture witnessed by the two bailiffs, was an expression of that leadership.7 C219/15/7; 16/1; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR3/628.

These attacks on Brome happened in the immediate aftermath of the succession to the earldom of Warwick of Richard Neville, and there is some evidence that Brome’s opponents were acting, in part, as adherents of the earl. There is, however, nothing to connect Poers with the new earl, save for his friendship with Nicholas Rody*, who was the earl’s steward in Warwick.8 In his will of July 1458 Rody bequeathed him, among other bequests, black cloth to make a gown for Rody’s month’s day: E40/4653. That friendship could easily have arisen without a mutual association with Neville, and the obscurity of the second part of our MP’s career is evidence against such an association on his part.

He is not recorded as playing any part in the civil war of 1459-61 and very little else is known of him. In 1464 Sir Thomas Ferrers sued him and four tradesmen of Warwick for £100 each, presumably (since the plaintiff is described as former sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire), in connexion with a bond they had entered to him as sheriff in 1460-1. Later, in 1467, Poers attested one of the few surviving parliamentary election indentures from his home borough, and in 1472 he was one of the four townsmen whose names were appended to the joint county and borough indenture.9 CP40/813, rot. 202d; C219/17/1, 2. He was still alive in the following year, when, with a namesake described as ‘junior’, he was joint defendant in an action of debt sued by Sir Edward Ralegh, another former sheriff, and was one of several men commissioned to make an arrest by the serving sheriff, John Hugford†.10 CP40/846, rot. 191; KB9/334/141-2.