Robert Corbet (died 1420)
A retainer of Thomas FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel, and implicated in his alleged misrule in Shropshire, he accompanied his patron to the Siege of Harfleur and suffered a temporary eclipse after his death.
As Corbet's wardship became available, the king was moving against Arundel and his allies, and he was arrested on 12 July 1397, to face attainder and execution on 21 September.
Thus he compelled Worcester to cede the wardship of Corbet to John Burley, a Shropshire MP and a retainer of the young earl.
[8] An inquisition of 1406, presumably related to Corbet's taking livery of his estates, lists some of the properties that had been in his mother's hands at her death.
He obtained royal permission to enfeoff Burley and a group of associates with the estate, entailing it on himself, his wife, Margaret, and their descendants.
In the same year he attended the election of Arundel's supporters, David Holbache and John Burley as knights of the shire at Shrewsbury Castle.
The other member was Richard Lacon,[11] who was married to Corbet's cousin,[3] and had profited materially from his closeness to Arundel and the House of Lancaster.
[11] The MPs for Shrewsbury were Holbache and Urian St. Pierre, and these joined with Corbet and Lacon to act as mainpernors in Chancery for Matthew ap Meredith, guaranteeing his good conduct, while the parliament was still in session.
[7] The triumph of Arundel was soon followed by a furious reaction, led by John Talbot, Lord Furnival, the future Earl of Shrewsbury.
[11] Talbot's resentment became so threatening that he was sent to the Tower of London for a time in November and both he and Arundel were made to put up large guarantees of good conduct.
Arundel's men faced a litany of charges, the most serious being that they had organised a raid on Much Wenlock on 18 May 1413, employing an armed force of 2,000 from Cheshire.
The accused argued that they were simply intervening in Wenlock as justices of the Peace, enforcing the law against malefactors, including Talbot.
At the 1415 parliament he was accused of another catalogue of assaults on tax collectors, general commotions and threats against complainants, in association with his brother,[13] but the matter seems to have gone no further.
Corbet seems to have crept back into favour, although the precise reasons are unknown; possibly his offences were fading from memory.
[17] Their son is a still more curious figure, qualified by his name, at least, as a candidate for identification with the poet Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur.
A letter from A.T. Martin making just such an identification appeared in the Athenaeum in September 1897[18] and was taken seriously for some time by editors of Malory, including the very scholarly Alfred W.
[19] G C Baugh, C R Elrington (Editors), D C Cox, J R Edwards, R C Hill, Ann J Kettle, R Perren, Trevor Rowley, P A Stamper, A History of the County of Shropshire: Volume 4: Agriculture, Institute of Historical Research, 1989, accessed 28 November 2013.
