LACON, Sir Richard

More may be added to the earlier biography.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 541-3.

Lacon’s career was a remarkable one. Few gentry can have been so consistently involved in crime while sitting in as many as six Parliaments and holding all the major offices of county administration. None the less, his criminal propensities had an effect on his public career, most notably in his absence from the Shropshire bench for all but a single year. Part of the explanation for his violent activities lay in the disturbed condition of the Welsh march in the early years of the fifteenth century; and yet so persistent was his involvement in disorder, even to the last years of his life, that his temperament was probably the most significant factor.

The range of Lacon’s offences is also striking. They are best documented in the indictments laid when the court of King’s bench sat at Shrewsbury in 1414 and the petition presented in the Parliament of 1422, complaining of his assault on Whittington castle (both detailed in the earlier biography), but other records of King’s bench add considerably to the picture of his criminal activities. Perhaps the most notable of the allegations made against him comes from an approver’s appeal. In 1420 a tailor of Shrewsbury, named David Trefnant, appeared before William Forster II*, coroner of Shrewsbury, and Richard Overton, coroner of Shropshire, to accuse Lacon of the treason of making false coin. His story is full of circumstantial detail: it begins with Sir Richard, ‘in a seler to fore a chymney’ in his house in Shrewsbury, teaching a groom in his service, ‘to make and to caste the coyne of Grotes of fals metaill’. Yet it is probably mere invention, not least because the sums of money allegedly coined were of too small a value to interest a man of our MP’s wealth. The accuser was, however, familiar with the knight’s affairs, correctly naming men known from other sources to have been in Lacon’s service, and it may be that the appeal was an act of vengeance by a dismissed servant. None the less, Lacon was put to the trouble of answering. In Michaelmas term 1423, while sitting as an MP, he appeared personally in King’s bench to hear that the approver had abandoned the appeal, and in the following term he was dismissed sine die when the appeal was found insufficient to support the King’s suit.6 KB27/650, rex rot. 23d, 30d; 651, rex rot. 23. Other charges against him are not to be so readily discounted. For example, very late in his career, he was indicted as an accessory to a murder committed by a gang of his men, headed by his son, Thomas Lacon, at Stockton-on-the-Forest near York on 14 Apr. 1445. In the following February the widow laid an appeal before the sheriff, Sir James Strangeways*, and two of the coroners at the county court. Presumably the Lacons were brought to Yorkshire by their attachment to the Talbots, but no more is known of this obscure episode.7 KB27/746, rot. 87.

Other indictments were laid against Sir Richard in connexion with land disputes. The most important of these involved the manors of Drayton Parslow and Mursley in Buckinghamshire, to which he had a claim through his mother. The discovered evidence is not good enough to make a judgement on the merits of this claim, but he seems to have pursued it by force. On 20 Aug. 1436, before Andrew Sperlyng* and Thomas Rokes II* as j.p.s acting under the statute of riots, he and his son, Thomas, together with various of the family’s servants, were indicted for forcibly entering the manors on the previous 18 July and holding them ‘cum potencia et fortitudine’ until expelled by the inquisitors. Nothing more of significance is known of the matter until in the 1450s our MP’s son and eventual heir, William Lacon II, petitioned Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, for restoration, claiming that his father had recovered the property against the duke by assize of novel disseisin. This is difficult to square with the story told by the jurors in 1436: they attributed ownership of the manors to Sir William Tirwhit*, Cecily, his wife, and two lesser men, seemingly in Cecily’s right. Perhaps the duke was overlord; however this may be, the Lacons eventually secured possession.8 KB9/228/2/48-50; J.B. Blakeway, Sheriffs Salop, 62. The dispute also found expression in mutual actions of trespass between our MP and the Tirwhits: KB27/702, rot. 36d; CP40/705, rot. 116.

Another dispute indirectly reveals some of the illicit tactics Lacon employed in his litigation. On 8 June 1428 a London cordwainer, Hugh Roberdes, was indicted before the Shropshire j.p.s, headed by the earl of Stafford (Lacon’s supposed rival for Drayton Parslow), for lying in wait to kill our MP at Nesscliffe and assaulting one of his servants. This had all the hallmarks of a false indictment, as Roberdes is implausibly said to have been at the head of 100 unnamed armed men, and, when it reached King’s bench, it was thrown out through insufficiency. That it was false becomes all the more probable when it is considered in the context of an action brought by Roberdes himself: he later claimed that, on 4 Nov. 1428, Lacon and others, clearly our MP’s servants, had threatened him at Westminster so that he dared not go about his business, namely to instruct legis peritos to prosecute a writ of trespass against our MP. The implication is clear: the unfortunate Roberdes was an agent for another of Sir Richard’s opponents, and that Lacon resorted to threats and false indictment to deter him.9 KB27/672, rex rot. 5d; 682, rot. 21; 685, rot. 57.

Lacon seems to have suffered comparatively little for his many offences. He was, for example, able to plead a royal pardon against the indictments of 1414, and the appeal of the Yorkshire widow did not come until after his death. Yet he did not escape entirely unscathed. He was, for example, troubled on at least three occasions by a surety of the peace in £200 he had given in the wake of the King’s bench visitation to Shropshire. This seems to have been employed by the Crown as a means of keeping his violent propensities in check. In June 1423, together with his four sureties, each of whom had offered security in £100, he was summoned to answer why these considerable sums should not be forfeit to the Crown because of assaults contingent on the attack on Whittington castle. Forfeiture was successfully resisted, but Lacon was put to the trouble of making several personal appearances in King’s bench to secure adjournments. Further, the matter was revived nine years later. On 24 Jan. 1432 he was called to explain why he should not be condemned on the bond for an assault on a yeoman, William Heuster, at Monk’s Foregate in the previous June. Again he had to appear personally before the judges to plead not guilty, and he was soon required to answer on a separate charge. On 6 Nov. 1433, during the second and last session of a Parliament of which he was a Member, he was summoned to reply for an alleged assault upon one of his former servants, a gentleman of Shrewsbury named John Gamon, in the church of St. Paul’s.10 KB27/650, rex rot. 19d; 684, rex rot. 9d; 691, rex rot. 8. Gamon had acted for him in the threats against Roberdes: KB27/685, rot. 57. There is no evidence that he or his sureties were ever forced to pay, but the threat may have served as a curb on his behaviour. The assault on Whittington had earlier raised a financial threat of a different sort. At an assize of novel disseisin at Bridgnorth on 12 Jan. 1423, damages of 800 marks were awarded against him and the others involved in the seizure, but again it seems that no payment was made to the beneficiaries of the award, Richard Hankford* and Elizabeth his wife.11 C66/407, m. 29d; CP40/648, rot. 320.

Throughout his career Lacon was closely associated with the borough of Shrewsbury. He maintained a residence there – the house in Dogpole in which he is alleged to have made false coin – and in 1408 he was admitted to the guild merchant. On at least one occasion he advanced money on mortgage to one of the burgesses, Thomas Biriton. This, at least, is the implication of a curious indenture of 1410: Biriton conveyed to him in fee a tenement and four shops near the church of St. Alkmund on condition that the grant be void if, within two years, he paid Lacon for a sword that the latter had lent him.12 Salop Archs., Childe mss, 3320/29B/1, 2. Lacon also received marks of regard from the borough authorities: in 1419-20 they gave him a gallon ‘de Romenay’ when he came to visit the abbey; and in 1441 he was one of the ‘probos homines patrie’ to whom they gave wine worth 3s. 5d. at the hearing of an assize of novel disseisin in which he was himself party.13 Salop Archs., Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/359; 377, m. 1; deeds 2498. Further, he is known to have attended the borough court, and he registered bonds before the town’s bailiffs on several occasions.14 Shrewsbury recs., assembly bk. 3365/67, ff. 48, 49v, 50, 52v, 55.

One of these bonds provides a clue to the reason for the murder of Lacon’s father in 1397. On 16 Sept. 1406 Robert Huse of Lacon, Aline, his wife, and their daughter and heiress, Margaret Kendale, acknowledged a debt of £40 to our MP. Aline was the heiress of the senior line of the Lacons, and it is a reasonable surmise that Margaret was the husband of Robert Kendale, who, with Sir John Hawkstone, had been responsible for the killing. On this assumption, the death of our MP’s father was part of a dispute between heir male and heir general.15 Ibid. f. 50; Blakeway, 62.

Sir Richard died on 14 Jan. 1446.16 CIMisc. viii. 192. His death made real a threat to the family’s prosperity that had lain dormant since the death of his first wife, Elizabeth Peshale, whose lands were the basis of our MP’s wealth. Since her death in 1435 he had held her estates, valued at over £100 p.a., and his right appears to have gone unchallenged. When he died, however, a rival claim was quickly asserted. Elizabeth’s heir at common law was not Richard Lacon, her eldest son by our MP, but rather John Grendon, her son by her first husband. Fortunately for the Lacons, John, an idiot from birth, was incapable of asserting his claim; but, unfortunately for them, Sir Richard’s death was the prelude to an assertion of John’s rights by others. Our MP’s heir, Richard, seems to have been aware of the danger: three days after his father’s death, he granted his inheritance to Sir John Talbot, son and heir apparent of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and his own illegitimate half-brother, William Lacon I, a rising lawyer, no doubt in the hope that they would have influence enough to maintain his right. The danger he faced was soon made manifest. Five weeks later, on 24 Feb., the Crown, claiming that Grendon was an idiot in its custody, granted the keeping of his estates, together with its issues since the death of his mother, to two senior Household men, Sir Edmund Hungerford* and John Hampton II*. This grant was the more threatening because Grendon’s right was hard to gainsay: he was not only his mother’s common-law heir, he was also her heir-in-tail. By a deed dated 18 June 1400, the legal remainder of her inheritance, expectant on the death of her grandmother, had been entailed upon her and her first husband, Henry Grendon, and their issue.17 CPR, 1441-6, p. 452; Salop Archs., Forester mss, 1224/3/149.

What happened next is open to more than one explanation. On 28 May 1446 a royal commission was issued for an inquiry into the concealment of royal wards in Shropshire ‘by reason of idiocy’, and there can be no doubt that this was intended to test the rival claims to Elizabeth’s inheritance. On the following 13 June, these commissioners, headed by Nicholas Eyton*, took a presentment that was, at first sight, extremely hostile to the Lacons. A jury returned that the manor of Willey and other property that had come to them through Elizabeth were entailed upon her issue by her first husband, correctly naming the three grantees of the settlement of 1400. There are, however, grounds for believing that this finding was not intended to bolster the right of the royal grantees, but rather to give the Lacons the opportunity to challenge this settlement. Strongly indicative of this interpretation is the nomination of the earl of Shrewsbury and Sir John Talbot, patrons of the Lacons, at the head of the commission. Neither of them troubled to sit, but it is fair to assume they could, had they chosen, ensured a different outcome. Further, soon after the commission had endorsed the entail upon which their title was based, the royal grantees accepted from William Lacon I a payment of £100, no more than one year’s revenue from the disputed lands, to abandon their claim.18 CIMisc. vii. 192; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 435-7. In these circumstances, it is attractive to conclude that the commission jurors cited the entail of 1400, which had become known beyond the confines of the Lacon family, so that the family could traverse their findings. This, in any event, is what happened: in February 1448 Sir John Talbot and William Lacon I, as feoffees in the disputed lands, came by attorney into Chancery, denied the entail and further subverted the rival claim by asserting that Elizabeth had, in her lifetime, passed away her right to her eldest son by Sir Richard Lacon. On 26 Sept. 1449 a local jury found for them in every particular. Thus was the inheritance of the Lacons preserved.19 KB27/749, rot. 88d.