Murder and mayhem in 15th century Cornwall

David Yorath, ‘John Glynn of Morval (c.1420-1472): A biography’, International Journal of Regional and Local History 16. 1, 2021, pp. 1-13

Fifteenth-century Cornwall could be a violent place. This was a time when some of the gentry, steeled by regular military campaigning in France, were especially prone to a ready resort to violence to achieve their ends. Since A.L.Rowse wrote his classic Tudor Cornwall in the 1940s, historians have been aware of the willingness of the larger landowners – the Bodrugans of Gorran in mid-Cornwall being the classic example – to take matters into their own hands in the late medieval period. In this article David Yorath illustrates a similar tendency among the lesser gentry through an account of the rise and fall of John Glynn of Morval.

John Glynn was born at Morval, a member of a branch of the Glynns of Glynn near Bodmin, present there since the eleventh century. He studied law at a nearby priory and/or the house of a noble family and was by the age of 17 already practising as an attorney, representing Cornishmen at the Court of Common Pleas in London.

After marrying Jane Nicholls of Glamorgan in 1448, John was appointed by the crown to a number of local government roles, for instance being an adjudicator in property cases, a tax assessor, the controller of customs at Plymouth and Fowey in addition to his work as a lawyer. With the absence of many of Cornwall’s leading men in France, a man of ambition like John could play a useful part in keeping the wheels of local administration turning. Seamlessly living through the change of regime in 1461 from Lancastrian to Yorkist, John not only survived but was appointed to the magistrates’ bench. This appeared to confirm his rise and on the back of his various roles he was able to purchase or rent numerous small properties to add to the family’s growing estate in south-east Cornwall.

However, pride in this instance most definitely came before a fall. In 1468 John was appointed deputy-steward to the Duchy of Cornwall. This infuriated the previous holder of that post, Thomas Clemens of Liskeard, who launched a vicious vendetta against John and his estate. This began later in the same year when Clemens and his accomplices ‘interrupted, wounded and imprisoned’ John Glynn and his assistants as they were holding a Duchy court at Liskeard, keeping them captive for five hours. That wasn’t the end of it. Clemens began a campaign of harassment. In October 1469 he led a band of men in a raid on Glynn’s house at Morval. Various goods, money and signet rings were seized while John was forced to sign an agreement to waive any legal recourse against the action.

The waiver was declared void in 1470 but skirmishes between Glynn’s men and those of Clemens continued. These ended tragically for John when he was ambushed and murdered at 4 in the morning in the autumn of 1472, a mile from his home after setting out for Tavistock fair. Thomas Clemens and his allies bludgeoned Glynn to death after which for good measure they dismembered and decapitated him. Clemens was never brought to trial and was still around in 1478 when he supported an application to build a chapel near Looe. Assaults on the Glynn estate continued into the 1470s after John Glynn’s murder. In that decade the family was involved in another dispute with a West Looe man that also involved murder, robbery and abduction. Eventually in 1483, they lost possession of their home at Morval, although John’s sons went on to hold royal offices and one served as an MP.

John Glynn’s rise and precipitous fall indicate that opportunities existed for a man of ambition in the late medieval years but that the social ladder was also perilously fragile. This article is an intriguing account of one biography but leaves a number of questions dangling. For example, Clemens’ murderous reaction to losing the deputy-stewardship seems a trifle excessive. Was he a psychopath or was there more to the story? Had John Glynn been a bit too ambitious and too ready to resort to the law against others?

Moreover, the relationship between law and disorder in fifteenth-century Cornwall could benefit from more research. It’s not that there was no law. Far from it, but there was insufficient ability or willingness to enforce the law. Could the constant recourse to the courts itself be a factor in the extreme violence of the times as, frustrated by it, people turned to direct action to redress real and imagined injustices? And finally, was Cornwall worse than other places and how far down the social scale did this endemic propensity for murder and mayhem extend?