YURLE, Simon

More may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 940.

While earlier fifteenth-century Yurles at Launceston had been masons,3 Cornw. RO, Launceston bor. recs., B/Laus/132, m. 1d. by the 1430s the family was well established among those owning property in the town. Not only were Simon and his putative kinsman John cultivating their landed holdings there, but more importantly another relative, Richard Yurle, had become a canon of Launceston priory. There he cut a somewhat controversial figure and may well have harboured ambitions to become prior, for in 1431 he was accused of plotting with the prior’s physician to poison Prior John Honyland, a charge of which he was later acquitted, although only after a lengthy trial in the course of which Simon Yurle had to stand bail for him. Yet, the rumours about Canon Yurle did not die, and in the mid 1440s two other canons of the priory had to make a formal apology to the bishop of Exeter for having put about that he was the only man fit to be elected prior.4 KB27/680, rex rot. 1; 681, rex rot. 6; 686, rex rot. 4d; KB9/225/39-40.

As his repeated returns to the Commons suggest, Simon Yurle was probably a more important man of law than the otherwise sparse recorded details of his life suggest. Thus, in May 1430 he appeared in the Exchequer at Westminster alongside William Hall, a serjeant-at-law, Nicholas Aysshton*, a future j.c.p., and a servant of the prior of Launceston to place the nine-year-old son of John Arundell* of Bideford (the heir to the extensive estates of his grandfather, Sir John Arundell I*) in the King’s custody.5 E159/206, recorda Easter rot. 3d.

Around the time of his kinsman Richard Yurle’s first troubles Simon was embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with John Trelawny of Plympton, probably an illegitimate son of Sir John Trelawny†, over pasture rights at Launceston.6 KB27/680, rots. 43, att. 1. This was just one of several indications that Yurle did not enjoy universal popularity among his neighbours. In the summer of 1432 he complained to the court of common pleas that three years earlier a group of local peasants had assaulted and wounded one of his servants at Launceston. Peasants though Yurle’s opponents might have been, they were remarkably well connected among the leading burgesses of Launceston, and among those who stood bail for them were Thomas Lanoy II* and Robert Skelton*.7 CP40/686, rot. 409d.

Simon’s frequent appearances as an attorney at the Exchequer may be accounted for by the expertise he had gained by his service as a clerk there, and of which his neighbours were eager to avail themselves.8 R.L. Storey, ‘Gentleman Bureaucrats’, in Profession, Vocation and Culture ed. Clough, 97, 99; E5/495. Thus, for instance, in 1420-1 he and John Palmer* had been paid 6s. 8d. for searching the records of the Exchequer in order to procure a writ of supersedeas regarding proceedings over the lands formerly belonging to Sir Otto Trevarthian; at Easter 1424 Thomas Carminowe*, then sheriff of Cornwall, employed him as his attorney; and in 1427-8 and 1430-1 respectively he performed similar service for the sheriffs of Cornwall and Devon, Sir William Bodrugan* and John Bozon, and the escheator, John Tretherf*.9 SC6/823/35; E159/200, adventus Easter rot. 3; E207/13/9; E368/203, adventus Easter rot. 3.