BYRON, Sir John

More can be added to the earlier biography.4 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 461-3. A significant event in Byron’s early career was his bitter quarrel with his mother. Its cause and precise chronology are uncertain, but he seems to have believed that she intended to alienate her inheritance, in whole or part, from him. According to an indictment taken before the Nottinghamshire j.p.s on 27 Feb. 1415, six days earlier he had come to her residence and most valuable property, the manor at Over Colwick, near Nottingham, remaining there for two days until a group of his friends and relatives, headed by his brother-in-law, Thomas Booth, joined him in her forcible abduction. The purpose of her kidnapping is made clear in a petition Joan herself presented to the chancellor, in which she claimed that, together with her goods to the value of 400 marks and her muniments, she had been carried from Colwick into Lancashire and forced to enter into an obligation before the mayor of Wigan, promising that she would not alienate any of her lands. Unhelpfully, her chronology contradicts that of the indictment. She dates her abduction to the night of 16/17 Mar. so either this is an error or she was taken twice. Further, a later case in King’s bench shows that the bond was not entered into until 19 Apr. (and then to Byron’s father-in-law, John Booth, rather than Byron himself), although she does not imply in her petition that she was detained for as long as a month. To add to the confusion, on the following 24 May Byron was again indicted before the Nottinghamshire j.p.s, on this occasion for plundering the manor of Over Colwick on the night of 23 Feb. 1414 (a clear error for 1415) of goods and money.5 KB9/188/21; KB27/619, rex rot. 3; CP40/666, rot. 260.

None the less, these contradictions do not distort the main outline of the story: Joan’s son subjected her to a campaign of intimidation in an effort to prevent her alienating her lands. In this he failed. On 29 May, some five weeks after the bond, she conveyed her manor and advowson of Over Colwick to Sir Ralph Cromwell, son and heir-apparent of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Peter de la Pole† and John Brown, vicar of Basford. A few days later, on 3 June, at the nearby Cromwell manor of Lambley, she made a quitclaim to the same feoffees.6 Bodl. Rawlinson mss, B460, ff. 103v-104v; Add. Ch. 21173. Either she was intending to sell her manor to Cromwell, at the beginning of a career during which he proved himself a great purchaser, or she was seeking local support against the machinations of an ungrateful son.

The son, in the meantime, was preoccupied with countering the consequences of the indictments against him. On 29 Nov. these indictments, presumably at his request, were called into King’s bench; on 22 Jan. 1416 they were brought into court; and on the following day he appeared in person and pleaded a pardon.7 KB27/619, rex rot. 3; KB29/54, rots. 15d, 22. It was perhaps the ease with he was able to free himself of the common-law consequences of his actions that caused Joan to resort to Chancery. Her petition appears to have been presented at about Easter 1416, for she asked for a subpoena against her son returnable at three weeks of Easter. Significantly, Cromwell offered surety for the prosecution of her suit.8 C1/6/294. He was now sole seised of the manor, for he received quitclaims from his fellow feoffees on 12 and 16 Mar., and at some later date he conveyed to feoffees of his own, headed by William Gray, bishop of London, and including, in Sir Thomas Chaworth*, Sir John Cockayne*, Sir Richard Vernon*, Hugh Willoughby* and Peter de la Pole, several of the leading local gentry. There seems no reason to doubt that he intended to make the manor his own, and if this is what Byron was acting against when he mistreated his mother this places his actions in 1415 in a less unfavourable light. As it transpired, he was eventually able to recover the property. On 25 Nov. 1427, just over a year after Joan’s death, Cromwell’s feoffees conveyed the disputed manor to Byron’s nominees. Cromwell probably relented because Byron was able to prove that the manor was entailed, for in the following Hilary term the manor was recovered by Byron against Cromwell by a collusive writ of formedon.9 Rawlinson mss, B460, ff. 104v-108; CP40/668, rot. 437.

Yet although Byron showed himself keen to keep his mother’s Nottinghamshire manor he showed no similar enthusiasm in respect of the Lincolnshire lands that had come to him on her death. Part of this property was her own inheritance, and the other part the jointure and dower lands she had held from Byron’s father. In 1433 he sold to Sir Ralph Rochford of Stoke Rochford his part of the manor of South Stoke, his maternal inheritance, and to Roger Knight* his part of the manor and advowson of Walesby near Market Rasen, which had come to him from his father.10 CP40/691, cart. rot. 2; CP25(1)/145/158/6, 8. Although Byron retained his late father’s manor of Cadney, a few miles north of Walesby, he had already leased this in the previous year to Joan, widow of Sir Richard Hansard* of nearby South Kelsey, for a term of seven years.11 He later won damages of over £75 for wastes she had allegedly made there: CP40/722, rot. 393d.

This apparent lack of interest in his Lincolnshire lands makes it the more surprising that Byron should have been returned to represent the county in the Parliament of 1447. As noted in the earlier biography he had a particular motive for seeking a seat for he was under threat from charges of malfeasance laid against him as sheriff of Lancashire. His tenure of that office disqualified him from legally seeking election there, and he probably owed his Lincolnshire seat to the reluctance of better-qualified candidates to seek a place in a Parliament that promised to be divisive. Curiously, he appeared as an attestor to the Nottinghamshire election to the next Parliament, his only recorded appearance as an elector, and it may be that this betokens an unsuccessful attempt to secure a further election.12 He is named in the indenture as ‘Sir Thomas Beron’, suggesting that his name was an unfamiliar one in the office of the Notts. sheriff: C219/15/6.

An interest in parliamentary affairs outside his native Lancashire was part of a wider attempt by Byron to extend his connexions. This is clearly reflected in the marriages of some of his children. In 1440 or 1441 his daughter, Margaret, the widow of two Lancashire men, John Barton of Middleton, and Sir William Atherton of Atherton in Leigh, was married to the wealthy knight Sir Robert Harcourt*, whose interests lay in Oxfordshire and Staffordshire. Soon afterwards Byron found for Margaret’s younger sister, Ellen, another husband from the first rank of gentry in Walter*, son and heir-apparent of Sir Thomas Blount† (d.1456) of Barton Blount in Derbyshire, a match that was probably brokered by the bride’s great-uncle, the lawyer Henry Booth*, who lived at Arleston, only a few miles from the Blount manor at Elvaston.13 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 67-68; Add. 6698, f.195v. Interestingly, both these new sons-in-law were MPs in the Parliament of 1447, perhaps offering support to Byron in his troubles over the Lancashire shrievalty.

Later, Byron also looked outside Lancashire for a spouse for his grand-daughter, Margery, but here his motive was rather different. The death of his eldest son, Richard, had left this girl as common-law heir to the Byron lands, but Sir John was anxious that the family inheritance should remain to his three surviving sons. His task was thus to find a groom, preferably of fairly modest rank, ready to accept the bride’s disinheritance. To this end, on 21 Dec. 1448 he entered into an indenture for her marriage to Thomas, son and heir-apparent of Richard Walsh of Wanlip in Leicestershire. The groom’s father was clearly keen to make a marriage that marked a social advance for his family, for he accepted the bride on terms highly unfavourable to himself. In return for a modest portion of 100 marks payable to the groom, he agreed to settle a jointure worth 30 marks p.a. on the couple and, moreover, to enter into a bond in a ruinous 1,000 marks that he would not vex the bride’s three paternal uncles or their male issue in any of the Byron lands.14 CCR, 1447-54, p. 108. She later married Robert Staunton*.

Byron’s dispute with his mother, together with other quarrels cited in the earlier biography, suggest that he was a man of combative temperament. He even managed to fall out, albeit temporarily, with his former guardian, Sir John Assheton†, the father of his son-in-law, Thomas Assheton. Their dispute was over a boundary between his property at Droylsden and Sir John’s at Ashton-under-Lyne. At the Lancashire assizes on 17 Aug. 1423 Byron won a modest 40s. in damages against Assheton for a disseisin and the whole matter appears a rather minor one, particularly since cordial relations were soon restored between the two families. Yet the dispute was considered significant enough to come before Henry VI’s minority council, which, through the mediation of Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, and Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, referred it to the local arbitration of Sir John Stanley† of Lathom. His award, made on 6 Apr. 1425, is largely concerned with a series of small compensatory payments for those injured in clashes between the two parties.15 Rawlinson mss, B460, ff. 90-96.

A more unfavourable light is thrown on Byron’s character by his corrupt conduct as sheriff of Lancashire. As mentioned in the earlier biography this prompted the council of the duchy of Lancaster to issue a commission of inquiry in July 1446, and soon after Alexander Radcliffe* complained that Byron, to aid his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Booth, had secured false indictments at a sheriff’s tourn against him and 180 of his supporters. This matter was pending before the duchy council when the Parliament of 1447 was summoned and helps explain Byron’s candidacy.16 DL7/1/72, 72A; DL37/15/55. Nor is this the only evidence of his misconduct as sheriff. In a petition in Chancery, to be dated to the early 1440s, a local esquire, Robert Pilkington of Pilkington, accused him of the systematic and illegal exploitation of the office to the detriment of Pilkington’s tenants and those of the duchy in the parish of Rochdale. He claimed that Byron brought vexatious suits against the tenants in the county court of Lancaster, forcing them to travel some 40 miles from Rochdale to answer or suffer a burdensome amercement; imprisoned them on imagined indictments of felony and fined them for release; harassed him and his brother, Sir John Pilkington, by routinely empanelling them on county court juries; and, as steward of the duchy court of Rochdale, levied a new and unjustified annual impost on the more than 300 householders resident within the court’s jurisdiction. The wrong may not have all been on one side here: Byron made his own complaint against the Pilkingtons for forcibly resisting the attempts of his servants to levy from them moneys owed to the Crown. None the less, so extensive a series of charges laid against him cannot all be placed entirely at the door of special pleading, and it says little for Henry VI’s government that Byron retained the shrievalty until his death.17 C1/2/25; 43/41-42.

In the Lancashire assessments to the subsidy of 1450, Byron’s income was put at £80 p.a. Even allowing for his land sales, this was a marked underestimate of the annual value of an estate that comprised lands in six counties.18 PL3/3/28. His landholdings in Derbys., Lancs., Lincs., Northants., Notts. and Yorks. are detailed in three fines levied in 1441, all conveyances to feoffees drawn largely from his wife’s Booth family: Lancs. Final Concords (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. l), 106; CP25(1)/293/70/253; CP26(1)/27, Trin. He last appears in the records in Trinity term 1451, when he had an action of trespass pending against a tailor of Southwell. He was buried in the collegiate church of St. Mary in Manchester, where mutilated brasses survive to him and his wife.19 KB27/761, rot. 1; Mon. Brasses ed. Mill Stephenson, 270.

The family had a long later history and were elevated to the peerage in 1643 in the person of Sir John Byron† (d.1652), a loyal servant of Charles I. The sixth baron was the romantic poet, George Gordon Byron.20 The Commons 1604-29, ii. 377-9; CP, ii. 454-9.