Roger de Beler

A licence obtained in 1316 by Beler allowed him to grant a lay fee in Kirkby-by-Melton, on the Wrethek in Leicestershire, for a warden and two chantry chaplains for the Parish Church 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 other ancestors in a special chantry chapel on the manorial site.

[2][non-primary source needed] On 29 January 1326, while on his way from Kirkby to Leicester, Beler was killed in a valley near Rearsby by his distant cousin[3] Eustace Folville to whom he had previously made threats of violence.

After the Despencers' executions and Edward II's abdication in early 1327, Folville and his band were pardoned,[7][non-primary source needed] 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.

The elder Beler 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 in 1795.