BENTHAM, Robert II

Well established in Gloucester and its environs, the Benthams had held a small estate to the east of Gloucester, including a manor at Bentham, since at least the early fourteenth century.3 C115/76, ff. 197v-198; 83, ff. 120-1; PCC 6 Marche (PROB11/2A, f. 41); Add. Ch. 23845. Robert’s place in the family tree is uncertain but it seems likely that he was the brother or son of John Bentham alias Draper of Bristol. John himself was the son of Margery Bentham of Bentham, but his father is unidentified.4 But it is possible that Margery’s husband was either the John Bentham junior of Gloucester who died in about 1404 or his father and namesake: PCC 6 Marche. During 1407, his mother and her sister Elizabeth (both widows at that date) made a release to him of the Bentham lands. As his alias suggests, John must have traded as a draper, since he granted his aunt Elizabeth an annual rent of three yards of woollen cloth and 40s. in cash shortly before she surrendered her interest in the Bentham estate to him.5 Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 377-8. Early in Henry VI’s reign, he was at loggerheads with the prior of Llanthony by Gloucester, from whose manor of Brockworth the Benthams held their manor of Bentham. Whatever its cause, the quarrel was referred to a hearing on 25 Oct. 1423 at St. Paul’s in London. Perhaps John had disputed the prior’s feudal lordship, for two years later he was obliged to go to the priory to do homage to Prior John Wyche for that property, in connexion with which in the spring of 1428 he paid Wyche a feudal relief of 33s. 4d.6 C115/76, ff. 196v, 197, 198.

The subject of this biography retained a connexion with Bristol during the earlier part of his career, when he also had dealings in London. In November 1430 he obtained a pardon, as ‘Robert Bentham alias Draper of Bristol’, for an outlawry he had incurred for failing to answer John Grene in a suit for a debt allegedly contracted in the City.7 CPR, 1429-36, p. 90. Later, in the middle of the following decade, he entered into a couple of bonds with the London mercer Thomas Bernard as a security that he would pay Bernard just over £16. By 1449, Bernard’s widow had gone to law against him in the court of common pleas for failing to pay that sum, although he alleged that he had received a deed of release from Bernard at Gloucester in July 1447. The plea roll does not however record any trial; nor does it reveal the nature of his dealings with the mercer or the reason for the bonds.8 CP40/753, rot. 176.

Bentham would appear to have moved to Gloucester by September 1434 when he paid homage to the prior of Llanthony for the manor at Bentham, just as John Bentham had done in 1425. Later that decade, he himself fell into dispute with Llanthony priory over the lands he held of it, a quarrel which was referred to the arbitration of three local lawyers, his fellow burgesses John Edwards*, Thomas Deerhurst* and Thomas Bisley*. In their award, dated 1 July 1439, the arbitrators instructed the priory to allow Bentham and his heirs to hold ‘Benthammes’ and two other properties, ‘Passemers’ and ‘Ryngettes’, in fee. They also directed it to remit all outstanding arrears of amercements that Bentham had incurred in its manor court at Brockworth, in return for his future good service, presumably as a feudal tenant. Furthermore, the arbitrators decided that Bentham had a hereditary right to a holding known as ‘la Ruyding’, although he was to make a release to the priory of other lands that hitherto he had claimed. In June the following year, Bentham and the priory reached a further agreement about lands within the parish and lordship of Brockworth, apparently without the assistance of arbitrators.9 C115/76, f. 257; 83, ff. 120-2.

There is no evidence for Bentham’s property at Gloucester, and he appears not to have exercised municipal office there prior to his election as bailiff in 1451. In all, he was to serve three terms as bailiff, the first two of them consecutive. He held the office in troubled times, and his first term coincided with a period of serious tension between the government and its leading opponent Richard, duke of York. York was active in the west of England in early 1452, prompting the authorities to dispatch a commission of oyer and terminer to that part of the country a few months after he had submitted to Henry VI at Dartford in March that year. Accompanied by the King himself, the commissioners reached Exeter on 17 July 1452, before travelling northwards to hold sessions at Gloucester, where presumably Bentham and his co-bailiff William Benson would have waited upon their entourage, and other towns. Bentham’s second term as bailiff overlapped with the Parliament of 1453, an assembly that resumed all grants to those who had accompanied York to Dartford, and which marked the zenith of the political recovery of the government and the court after the crises of 1450-2. Although bailiff, he sat in the Parliament as one of the MPs for Gloucester, having attested his own election to the Commons. While still an MP, but after his term as bailiff had expired, he and his co-bailiff of 1452-3, William Newman, received a royal writ. Dated 20 Nov. 1453, this required them to answer for having as bailiffs failed to pay John Andrew I* his expenses of £18 6s. as one of Gloucester’s MPs in the previous Parliament. In their return to the writ, Bentham and Newman asserted that it was for their successors as bailiffs, William Eldesfeld* and Thomas Bye, to respond to any claims which Andrew might have against the borough.10 R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 102; KB145/6/32, recorda.

It is possible that the assembly of 1453 was not Bentham’s only Parliament, for a Robert Bentham had sat for Cricklade and Heytesbury, in the Parliaments of February and November 1449 respectively. It is nevertheless more likely that the Member for the boroughs in question was a minor household servant of the same name. Not long after leaving the Parliament of 1453, the MP was a plaintiff in the court of King’s bench at Westminster. Employing his fellow burgess Thomas Buckland* as his attorney, he sued John Brok and Thomas Bridde of Gloucester for having forcibly seized a prisoner who had been under his custody as bailiff. Between early 1455 and late 1456, however, Brok and Bridde missed successive return days given to them to appear in court, and it would seem that the case did not progress any further.11 KB27/774, rot. 97d; 775, rot. 8; 776, rots. 7d, 44d.

Bentham survived into Edward IV’s reign, and in the spring of 1462 the court of King’s bench ordered the sheriff of Gloucestershire to distrain him and his fellow bailiff of 1452-3, William Newman, so that they might answer to the Crown for the value of the ‘jacks’ and weapons confiscated from three suspected felons during their term of office. Although on several occasions the sheriff took distraints from the two former bailiffs so that they might appear in the court of King’s bench over this matter, they had yet to do so at the beginning of 1463.12 KB27/804, rex rot. 4d; 805, rex rot. 23; 806, rex rot. 28d.

Thereafter Bentham disappears from view. He died, intestate, before Easter 1465, at which date William Nottingham II* and William Hampton† of London were suing Alice, his widow and administratrix, for a debt of £20.13 CP40/815, rot. 53d. Bentham had at least one son, William, who pursued a career as a merchant of Calais. Although he had moved away from Gloucester, it was to the town’s authorities that William Bentham turned for help in the early 1490s when he found himself obliged to defend his family’s honour. In a certificate issued on his behalf on 11 June 1492, the mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of Gloucester stated that a certain individual (whom they did not name) had maliciously put it about that William was of ‘vile Condicion’ because the Benthams were bondsmen of the abbey of Gloucester. In refutation of these aspersions, they asserted that he was a ‘gentleman’ of free blood like all of his ancestors, ‘time out of mind’, and that the Bentham estates were worth over 20 marks p.a. Finally, they declared that his father, ‘Robert Bentham esquire’, was ‘a man of worshippe and of verry sadde and honorable condicion demeanor and disposicion’, and that his three terms as a bailiff of the town demonstrated the respect in which his fellow burgesses had held him.14 Add. Ch. 23845. The certificate appears not to have exaggerated the status that the MP had enjoyed in his lifetime, for contemporaries had acknowledged him as a ‘gentleman’, and sometimes as an ‘esquire’.15 CCR, 1441-7, p. 461; C219/16/2; C115/83, ff. 120, 121.