SERLE, John

The identification of Plympton Erle’s most eminent parliamentarian of the fifteenth century is complicated by his alternate use of two surnames, but an Exchequer bill of 1428 leaves no doubt that John Silverlock ‘aultrement dit’ John Serle was in fact a single person.4 E5/483. Similarly, in Feb. 1426 Bishop Lacy of Exeter granted an oratory licence to John ‘Sylverlok alias Serell’ of Plympton: Reg. Lacy (Canterbury and York Soc. lx), i. 151. The earlier biography of Serle, in The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 337, failed to notice his alias. To add to the confusion, there were also other John Silverlocks active in the town and its neighbourhood in the same period, but their social status makes it improbable that they, rather than their more prominent namesake, were returned to the Commons. They included a Plymouth yeoman and a Plympton baker or ostler.5 KB27/649, rot. 43d; CP40/652, rot. 161d; 677, rot. 428. An earlier John Silverlock of Plympton Erle had died by late 1422, having appointed his wife Eleanor as one of his executors. It was presumably he who had witnessed local deeds in the reign of Henry IV and who in 1405 had been commissioned to see restitution for acts of piracy made to alien merchants. There was evidently a tie of kinship between this man and the MP, for the latter sued Eleanor and her new husband, John Sampson of Plymouth, together with John Silverlock of Plymouth, for debt.6 CP40/629, rot. 291; 647, rot. 170; 652, rot. 161d; CPR, 1405-8, pp. 147, 152; Cornw. RO, Edgcombe mss, ME671-2; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, Woollcombe mss, 710/4, 43, 45-48. Another putative kinsman, Serlo Silverlock, who had stood surety for one of the Plympton Members at the parliamentary elections of 1414 (Nov.) – when John himself was first returned – had died by 1425, leaving a widow, Margery, who, also dead by that date, had named John as her executor.7 CP40/658, rot. 434; 660, rot. 284.

An attorney, Serle alias Silverlock often acted in the courts at Westminster for his neighbours,8 KB27/693, rot. 76; 694, rot. 26; 742, rot. 15; CP40/746, rot. 287d. and may have been employed in a professional capacity by the borough authorities of Plympton Erle, for from the summer of 1425 he was suing Richard Sperkwell, the town clerk, for a debt.9 CP40/658, rot. 434; 720, rot. 33; 737, rot. 143d. His legal practice probably accounted for his acquaintance with Thomas Dowrich I*, for whom he stood surety at his election to Parliament for Plympton in 1427.10 C219/13/5. It may have been his professional training, too, which recommended him to Richard, duke of York, who by 1450 was employing him to collect his rents and to impound the livestock of defaulting tenants.11 CP40/758, rot. 294. On occasion, his relationships with clients could turn sour, as when in early 1453 he was forced to sue John Hill of Hareston for his promised fees.12 CP40/768, rot. 418.

In the course of his career Serle made some powerful enemies in the locality, not least the wealthy Sir Robert Chalons† of Challonsleigh who claimed to have been ambushed and assaulted by the lawyer with an armed following of townsmen in September 1427. Litigation over the incident continued for several years, and possibly accounts for Serle’s absence from the Commons in the Parliaments assembled a month later in October 1427 and in 1429.13 CP40/677, rot. 428. Similarly, it is possible that it was he, rather than another John Silverlock, who was said to have headed a gang of riotous townsmen in a clash with the canons of Plympton priory in the late 1430s. They allegedly dug up the body of one of the prior’s servants and paraded it around the churchyard, singing a lewd ‘three men song’, before tipping it into a rubbish pit and performing mock rites. The prior’s petition of complaint, addressed to the Commons (perhaps in the Parliament of 1439), received the royal assent, but the outcome of the matter has not been discovered.14 SC8/135/6740. Less dramatically, by 1429 Serle alias Silverlock and his wife Christine were in dispute with the local tailor Peter Rose over an otherwise obscure issue, while a year later he was engaged in a squabble over property at Challonsleigh.15 KB27/675, rot. 65d; 679, rot. 40d; 686, rots. 34d, 52, 61.

Serle was fully capable of abusing his superior knowledge of the law to his own advantage. When John (or Richard) Brackley, a yeoman of Plympton Erle, was challenged before the justices of common pleas to satisfy him under an obligation for five marks, Brackley claimed that the obligation had been made under certain conditions, agreed verbally, and maintained that as he was only ‘minime literatus’, the document had been read to him and expounded in English as containing the agreed conditions, whereupon he had sealed and delivered it to Serle in good faith. Serle, sensing his advantage over the uneducated man, denied that there had ever been any conditions attached and demanded full payment.16 CP40/730, rot. 407; 760, rot. 183. Brackley was probably a descendant of John Brackley†, the Plympton MP of 1384, some of whose lands became the subject of a bitter quarrel between Serle and members of the Fortescue family allied with John Silverlock the baker, which was to continue throughout the 1440s. In the summer of 1444 the Fortescues accused Serle of a violent assault on their servants.17 CP40/734, rots. 85d, 263d; 745, rots. 37d, 277; 760, rot. 210; KB27/693, rot. 76; 694, rot. 26; 702, rot. 50d; 722, rot. 16; C1/15/181. Yet relations between them were not uniformly bad, for it was in association with a member of the family, John Fortescue of Woodlegh, and Richard Champernowne of Mamhead that in about 1450 he was accused by William Denys* of having broken his closes and stolen a valuable horse.18 CP40/758, rot. 42d; 760, rot. 207; 766, rot. 56.

In his final years Serle employed a fellow lawyer, John Cokeworthy* (his former colleague as customs collector), as his receiver, but was forced to sue him for an account of his activities.19 CP40/771, rot. 398. He died at an uncertain date before June 1454, and was survived by his second wife, Alice.20 C1/24/110; Add. Roll 64682.