PERWYCH, Sir Roger (d.1388), of Lubenham, Leics. and Milton Malzor, Northants.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1386-1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark, C. Rawcliffe., 1993
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Oct. 1382
Sept. 1388

Family and Education

m. bef. Apr. 1369, Amy or Anne (c.1357-bef. 1404), da. and h. of Sir Thomas Malesours of Lubenham and Milton Malzor, 2s. Kntd. bef. Apr. 1386.

Offices Held

Sheriff, Warws. and Leics. 26 Nov. 1377-25 Nov. 1378.

Commr. of inquiry, Warws. July 1378 (disturbances at Coventry), Leics. Jan. 1379 (murder), Northants. Feb. 1379, Mar. 1380 (felonies), Leics. Nov. 1383 (murder); oyer and terminer, Northants. July 1384, Leics. Mar. 1386, July 1388; array Apr. 1385.

Tax assessor, Leics., Warws. Aug. 1379.

J.p. Leics. 5 Apr.-Dec. 1381, 20 Dec. 1382-d.

Biography

Perwych’s origins are obscure. He owed his tenure of the manors of Lubenham (on the border of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire) and Milton Malzor to his marriage to Amy, the young daughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Malesours. Following Sir Thomas’s death in 1361, Milton Malzor passed to his brother Hugh for his lifetime, but custody of Lubenham and the wardship of the heiress were disputed between Edward, prince of Wales and Sir John Boyville. Amy’s marriage was subsequently found to pertain to the King, and in April 1367 Perwych was appointed, together with a royal serjeant-at-arms, to bring her before the Council. At what stage in the proceedings he abducted and married his charge is unclear, but before long Boyville was suing him for the ravishment of his ward, an action he countered by accusing Sir John of wasting his wife’s inheritance. The matter was finally settled at Westminster in April 1369 by the archdeacons of London and Northampton, Sir William Finchedon, j.c.p., and Henry Snaith, the King’s wardrober, who insisted on the cessation of lawsuits in an accord reached between the two men, each making recompense to the other. Perwych added temporarily to his holdings at Lubenham by acquiring a lease of the St. Cler property in the locality, and it was there that he and his wife were living in 1381 when the poll tax was collected. Amy came into her inheritance in Northamptonshire some time before Michaelmas 1386, for the Crown then successfully sued Perwych for the next presentation to the churches of Milton and Collingtree.1

The Malesours estates not only gave Perwych sufficient standing in the community to be elected to Parliament by two shires, they also enabled him as a man of substance to offer his services as a mainpernor in the central courts. Thus, in 1371, he stood surety under pain of £100 that Master Robert Sustede, rector of Willingham (Suffolk), who was about to depart for Rome on business of a royal physician, would do nothing there tending to the prejudice of the King; and early in 1379 he provided securities at the Exchequer for a lessee of land in Northamptonshire. Another landowner, Thomas Preston, asked him to act as a trustee of the manor of Gretton. On 27 Apr. 1379, while attending his first Parliament, Perwych paid a fine of £2 for failing to take up knighthood as required by royal proclamation; accordingly it was still as an esquire that on 29 Oct. 1382, five days after the dissolution of his second Parliament, he was retained by John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, for service in peace and war. The duke promised Perwych that he would not compel him to join any military expedition either at home or overseas against his wishes, and it is clear from his regular appointment to royal commissions that he chose not to follow his lord to Castile in 1386. Meanwhile, in association with another Lancastrian retainer, Sir Thomas Walsh*, he had acted as arbiter in the disputes between Croyland abbey and its tenants at Wellingborough, which were finally resolved in 1385. Despite his earlier reluctance to become a knight, he did so before the following spring.2

In the Easter term of 1388 Perwych was attached by the court of common pleas to answer one Robert Gladman for an armed assault at Islington (Middlesex) a year earlier, he having asserted that the victim was a fugitive villein from his wife’s manor of Lubenham. The case had not reached judgement before the defendant’s death, which occurred while he was at Cambridge for the Parliament assembled that September. His will, made on 3 Oct. and proved on the 16th—the day before the dissolution—was witnessed by his fellow shire knight, Sir William Flamville, as well as by Roger Herlaston, a Cambridgeshire esquire. He asked that his body be taken home for burial in St. Mary’s chapel in Lubenham church.3 Perwych’s widow married Robert Veer* of Thrapston not long afterwards. His elder son, William, who eventually inherited all of the Malesours estates, later joined with the younger in various criminal activities, they and their armed gang at times threatening the local countryside and even terrorizing the townships of Market Harborough and Great Bowdon; their most notorious exploit was the ambush of the shire knight, James Bellers, on his way home from attending Henry V’s first Parliament.4

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

  • 1. CIPM, xii. 19, 235; Leics. Village Notes ed. Farnham, iii. 200; iv. 350-1; Leics. Med. Peds. 49-51; Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 168-9; CPR, 1364-7, p. 435; 1385-9, p. 282; CCR, 1369-74, p. 81; 1377-81, p. 390.
  • 2. CCR, 1369-74, p. 331; CPR, 1374-7, p. 385; 1408-13, p. 447; CFR,, ix. 128; E401/35; Reg. Gaunt 1379-83, i. 2, no. 52; HMC Hastings, i. 101.
  • 3. Yr. Bk. 1387-8 ed. Thornley, 245-9; Lincs. AO, Reg. Buckingham, f. 351v.
  • 4. Trans. Lecis. Arch. Soc. 1. 13