SECHEVILLE, Richard

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 329-30.

The reconstruction of Secheville’s life presents some problems, for there appear to have been at least two men of the same name, whose careers overlapped. Thus, it was Richard Secheville ‘the younger’ who at Easter 1447 was sued before the justices of common pleas by Joan, the widow of his putative father John Secheville, for her dower lands in Tavistock, Lamerton and Hurdwick. This evidence, along with the 11-year break in Secheville’s parliamentary service, opens up the possibility that, while it was the son of John Secheville who sat in 1433, the MP of 1422 and before was an older man, perhaps of the same generation as John. Certainly, one of the Richards, most likely the younger man, survived at least until the end of Henry VI’s reign, and is found serving on a jury at Exeter in August 1459.3 E199/9/11, m. 7. This man, evidently the husband of Margery Carswill, as he was styled ‘of Mouthcombe’, was accused in early 1431 by the abbot of Buckfast of having pilfered a wreck at Battisborough in the previous summer, and their disagreement continued for some years, for in the autumn of 1454 the sheriff of Devon was ordered to arrest him to answer charges, probably in a related matter, but he had by then procured a royal pardon.4 CP40/680, rot. 132; KB27/781, rex rot. 1d.

The abbot of Buckfast was also the overlord of the property in Combe (in Holbeton), over which Secheville quarrelled with Henry Fortescue† for a number of years between 1431 and 1440. Part of the disputed property was a plot of land which separated the dwelling houses of the two men, making it easy for Fortescue to execute such violent assaults on his opponent’s family as those of which Secheville complained in 1434. At the time, Secheville had been a prisoner in the Marshalsea, and had thus been unable to protect his wife and mother-in-law. An initial attempt at arbitration by Robert Hill* and John Crocker in March 1431 failed, and in May 1438 the parties bound themselves in the substantial sum of £100 each to accept the award of a more high-powered panel of arbiters, consisting of the lawyers John Hody*, William Boef* and John Fortescue* (Henry’s brother, afterwards chief justice) on Fortescue’s part, and the hardly less eminent William Chaunterell, John Needham*, and William Keteridge* for Secheville. Their award proved lasting, and was secured by a fine in the king’s court in October 1440.5 KB27/694, rot. 34; KB146/6/13/1; CP40/687, rot. 474; 709, rots. 114d, 118d; C4/121; CP25(1)/46/85/175; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 329-30.

By this date Secheville was also in dispute with his Tavistock neighbour John Julkin* over a house in the town,6 CP40/718, rot. 116. while a decade later he clashed with the local mercer John Mason and the Ermington gentleman Walter Burell over goods which the two men had purportedly stolen from his house at Tavistock, perhaps in distraint for a debt of £10 which Burell was seeking to recover at that time.7 CP40/760, rots. 210, 291d. A far more prominent opponent was Thomas Bonville*, who in the autumn of 1450 complained of a trespass on his property committed by Richard and his kinsman John Secheville with a band of lesser men.8 KB27/758, rot. 15.

The date of Secheville’s death is uncertain, but he evidently survived into the 1450s, when he was still contesting his quarrel with the abbot of Buckfast.