Roger de Beler

Roger Beler was a Baron of the Exchequer and right-hand man of the despised Hugh le Despencer and ineffective King Edward II who was killed by the Folville Gang in 1326.

He was son of William Beler, and grandson of Roger Beler, sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1256. His mother's name was Amicia. That the family was settled in Leicestershire we know from a licence obtained by the judge in 1316 to grant a lay fee in Kirkby-by-Melton, on the Wrethek in that county, to the warden and chaplains of St. Peter, on condition of their performing religious services for the benefit of the souls of himself and his wife Alicia, his father and mother, and ancestry generally.

In the civil dissensions of the period, in which Piers Gaveston lost his life, Beler was of the Earl of Lancaster's party, and in October 1318 was included in the amnesty then granted to the earl and his adherents. Shortly afterwards he received a grant of land in Leicestershire as the reward of undefined 'laudable services' rendered by him to the king. In the same year the offices of bailiff and steward of Stapleford, in Leicestershire, of which apparently he was already tenant, were entailed upon him. In December 1318 he was one of a commission for the trial of sheriffs and other officers accused of oppression in the counties of Buckingham, Bedford, and Northampton.

In 1322 he was created baron of the exchequer in the room of John de Foxle, and placed on a special commission to try certain 'malefactors and disturbers of the peace' who had allegedly broken into and pillaged certain manors belonging to Hugh le Despenser (amongst whom were Ralph and Roger la Zouch and William Trussell who was to later become Speaker of the House of Commons and inform Edward II that he must abdicate), and upon another commission for the same purpose in the following year. In July 1323 he was one of the Justices appointed to investigate the conduct of Sheriffs, Collectors and Bailiffs in Northamptonshire and Rutland. In 1324 he sat on a commission for the trial of persons charged with complicity in a riot at Rochester.

Sir Roger was summoned as a Justice to Parliaments at Westminster in January 1324 and November 1325.

On 29 January 1326, while on his way from Kirkby to Leicester, he was killed in a valley near Rearsby by his distant cousin Eustace Folville to whom he had previously made threats of violence. Sir Roger la Zouch, Lord of Lubbesthorpe was named as the instigator of the murder and accessories included two of his sons, Ivo/Eudo la Zouch the eldest son of his uncle William la Zouche, 1st Baron Zouche of Harringworth and Sir Robert de Hellewell one of William's retainers pointing to it having a political element linked to the approaching rebellion against the corrupt Despencers and inept Edward II. Eustace and his gang fled to Paris, and their lands confiscated.

Eustace Folville and his followers returned to England perhaps in Queen Isabella's invasion in September 1326. After the Despencers' executions for crimes against the country, and Edward II's abdication in early 1327, Eustace Folville and his band were pardoned, and became celebrated, although they were to flirt with outlawry and vigilantism for many years.

Beler's killing had not been an isolated attack on an official of the Despencer/Edward regime in the run up to the 1326 invasion; in July 1325 the deputy of the keeper of confiscated Contrariant castles in the Welsh Marches was brutally attacked and had his eyes torn out and limbs broken and in October the Constable of Conisborough Castle, which held imprisoned Contrariants, was besieged in its church.

Alicia survived her husband by nearly twenty years, dying in 1344. The judge left an heir named Roger, who, being an infant, became a ward of the crown. Alicia was placed in possession of the estates in Leicestershire during his minority. The judge was buried at Kirkby in the church of St. Peter, where a monument in alabaster, representing him as a knight in complete armour, was extant at the date of publication of Nichols's 'History of Leicestershire' (1795), though the lines of the drapery were with difficulty traceable.