The above sixteen charges laid at the door of John Bruyn are the record of a session of the peace held at Shrewsbury on 6 March 1414, before a group of justices headed by the earl of Arundel, a magnate with strong landed interests in Shropshire. They, together with reports of other disturbances and lawlessness in the region, were sufficiently disturbing that in June, justices of the King's Bench arrived at Shrewsbury to review and remedy the situation. These charges individually provide indications of the kinds of abuses to which local offices gave scope; together they present a picture of the opportunity for an unscrupulous individual to manipulate a position of authority in his self-interest.

However, Dr. Powell warns that the charges against Bruyn must be seen in the context of wider political factionalism, and suspects the charges may have been trumped-up by rivals. Arundel appears to have perceived his influence in the county to be at risk from John Talbot, lord Furnival, who had some years earlier acquired a landed interest in Shropshire, via his wife. Furthermore, Talbot and Arundel were in 1413 in direct dispute over a parcel of land, and in May John Bruyn led a group of Talbot supporters to defend the property against Arundel's supporters.

The origins of Bruyn's family may have lay in Cheshire, but in the fourteenth century the family established a foothold in Bridgnorth; it also had county interests. John's influence there is indicated by the seven terms he served as bailiff (1403/04, 1405/06, 1407-09, 1410-13 – the indictments above being evidence for the last two), his first term having been preceded by his representation of the borough at parliament in 1402. Even before the Arundel/Talbot quarrel was fully underway, John was in embroiled in trouble. He was indicted before justices of the peace of having, in June 1408, extorted a payment of £2 from a churchman to allow him to take up his appointment as the new prior of the hospital of St. John in Bridgnorth, as well as other minor extortions from local men, including a pipe of wine from Richard Selman. At the proceedings before King's Bench in 1414 were added the accusations, not in the list above, that Bruyn had in 1408 allowed a felon to escape from his custody, and in the following year unwarrantedly confiscated a pack of wool. Whatever the suspicions of him, he was able to gain re-election to the ballivalty, and in December 1408 obtain appointment as the county escheator, a post he held for almost a year; this post, with some authority over matters of land inheritances, could have made him very useful to the Talbot interest. He had been ordered to appear before Chancery to answer such charges and, when he failed to do so, his arrest was ordered in February 1409; however, the orders were cancelled in May when the steward of the king's household, a Cheshire landowner, stood surety for John answering to Chancery and not pursuing any hostility to Selman. We do not know what may have been the outcome.

We must assume factionalism within the borough to explain how Bruyn was able to maintain himself in office for most of the next few years. The tide turned in autumn 1413 when, for whatever reason, Bruyn was not re-elected to the ballivalty; instead his old enemy Selman, along with Richard Horde, were elected. At some point in that year, perhaps after departing office, Bruyn decided it was politic to buy a royal pardon. The parliament of 1413, at which Shropshire was represented by two Arundel supporters, Richard Lacon (Arundel's military lieutenant in the region) and Robert Corbet, nominated for the unpopular job of collecting the parliamentary subsidy Bruyn and four other Talbot supporters, including Robert Lyney of Newport and Robert Swynnerton of Poynton. When they came to carry out their duties, however, Arundel's supporters – particularly Lacon, Corbet and his brother Roger – offered a good deal of resistance and harassment.

In late 1413 a petition to Chancery, purportedly from the burgesses of Bridgnorth (but presumably from the faction opposing Bruyn), asked that John Wynnesbury, a Shropshire J.P. who also happened to be one of Arundel's affinity, be commissioned to assist the town bailiffs in arresting John Bruyn and his supporters, complaining that the sheriff had failed to do so, despite John's many offences; the complainants declared that the Bruyn gang was inhibiting them from leaving the town to conduct trade. A further petition, under the name of the king's tenants at Bridgnorth, likewise complained of Bruyn's oppressions and malicious acts. A petition from chaplain John Dawes declared that Bruyn had threatened him with violence. Together with the complaints made before King's Bench, which include additional charges (assault, unlawful imprisonment, and extortion), to those listed above one has the impression that the Bruyn party was terrorizing both the town and the surrounding hamlets, right up to the time that the king's justices sat down at Shrewsbury in 1414.

The attempt to arrest Bruyn, along with Lyney and others, at Oldbury proved abortive, despite that, as the collectors of the subsidy complained, a large group of about 120 men, including Horde, had attacked them there, stolen their goods, and killed their horses. The collectors continued to pursue this complaint before the parliaments of 1414 and 1415. Meanwhile, Arundel had gained the upper hand. Just a few days after the conflict at Oldbury, the king required Arundel and Talbot to give guarantees they would maintain the peace; Arundel having the ear of the king, Talbot was temporarily taken into custody and early in the following year shipped off to Ireland as king's lieutenant there. At the same time Arundel obtained a commission of the peace to investigate accusations against Bruyn and Robert Swynnerton (extortion), as well as supporters of another lord with whom Arundel was in contention; his fellow justices included Robert Corbet, John Wynnesbury, and other of his known supporters. It was not uncommon in this period for judicial commissioners to take advantage of their positions of authority to further the interests of themselves or the faction they supported. A jury of Bridgnorth men presented fifteen of the accusations, while the sixteenth was presented by a jury of county men who included Richard Lacon and John Corbet.

Although Arundel tried to obtain a swift royal confirmation of the convictions, the king preferred to send his justices of King's Bench into the region to make their own investigations. The concern about disarray of administration in Shropshire had prompted a complaint by parliament, and the king was doubtless concerned about the resistance to the subsidy collectors. The king's justices not only paid attention to Bruyn but also to Arundel's leading cronies. Wynnesbury was investigated for plundering and setting afire the house of the prioress of Brewood; he, Corbet and a third Arundel supporter were dropped from the county bench in 1416, after the earl of Arundel's death, when John Talbot's influence in the county was on the rise (he later became earl of Shrewsbury). Of Bruyn's immediate fate we are uncertain; he was said in summer of 1416 to be in prison, but was able to make use of the pardon obtained three years earlier to win his release.

With the shift in power towards the Talbots, Bruyn's fortunes rebounded. He was appointed county sheriff in 1420, remaining such for three consecutive years, and was immediately thereafter made escheator again for a further year, following which he served as a county J.P. until 1432, again holding the shrievalty in 1431/32. In 1423 he was granted the wardenship of the forests of Morville and Shirlett (just north-east of Bridgnorth); the grant of that to someone else in 1437 is indicative of his death.

Was Bruyn an abuser of his position as bailiff, or was he simply a target as a leader of the pro-Talbot faction that was trying to protect Shropshire from the depredations of Arundel's lieutenants, as Dr. Powell proposes? Our concern here is less with Bruyn's guilt or innocence than with the plausibility of the charges. Were I to make public accusations against my hometown mayor that he had been running a protection racket targeting small businesses, had systematically blackmailed or bribed political opponents and even had one murdered, was heavily involved in drug-smuggling, and had introduced hallucinogenic drugs into the local water-supply, I should be considered a lunatic or a troublemaker. I ought instead to fabricate accusations that I expect to be, at first glance, credible in the context of existing public opinion concerning political corruption; I might for instance claim that he had received kickbacks from contractors. The charges against Bruyn needed to be compatible with the worldview of politics at that time, notwithstanding that the lengthy list of charges presented in total a picture of a wholly corrupt administrator.

To some extent Arundel's influence over the initial hearings in March 1414, both in packing the bench and perhaps the juries, might be thought to mitigate the need for credibility. But he then faced the challenge of convincing higher authorities, up to the level of the king. Despite the fact that the king was not prepared to take his word for it, on the whole we have to accept that the accusations laid against Bruyn had to be credible to stick, and.were the sorts of crimes or abuses of power that the community, the courts, and the king could believe possible for someone in a position of power at that time.

It is not unlikely that real events lay behind some or all of the charges, but that the interpretation given them was skewed. Several of the actions taken by Bruyn might, for example, have been related to official distraints, while others are indicative of political factionalism in the town. Whether such were the case and Bruyn's perhaps heavy-handed actions were necessitated by political opposition, or whether Bruyn was an unscrupulous man ruling the town by intimidation in his own self-interest, as his enemies charged, we see here an indication of the types of abuses of power which might arise, in extreme cases.