MP for Leicestershire

From : http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/13...r/bellers-james-1421

The Bellers family, which may be traced back to the early 12th century, had by our period formed two branches: the senior one retaining the original estate at Ab Kettleby, to which line Sir James and his sons James and John belonged, and a much wealthier cadet branch seated at Kirby Bellars, represented by Sir Roger Bellers† (d.1380), whose only child Margaret married Sir Robert Swillington.1

Sir James Bellers’s first wife, Lettice Prest, died before 1377, when custody of certain properties at Melton Mowbray, seised by royal officials to cover her late father’s debts, was granted to her daughter, Elizabeth Talbot. Yet there had evidently been seven sons (including James the future shire knight) born of that marriage, for all seven were named in an entail made in 1381 after Sir James had remarried, it being settled that the family manor of ‘Sixtenby’ (?Sysonby), along with 50 messuages and other properties at Dalby, Somerby, and elsewhere in the same area of Leicestershire, should pass to Sir James’s male issue by his second wife, with successive remainders to his older offspring. Thus excluded from inheriting those particular family holdings, James may nevertheless have acquired others, not governed by entail, after his father’s death. However, this event did not occur until some 30 years later, for Sir James, who had represented Leicestershire in four Parliaments between 1376 and 1383, probably lived on until 1411.2