a trusted counsellor, in 1410 he participated in what has been described as "a show trial of national importance". The previous year, an ecclesiastical court had found John Badby of Evesham guilty of Lollardy. According to church custom, Badby had been given a year's grace to recant. He refused; if anything, his opinions were more entrenched than before. On 1 March 1410, Badby was brought before a convocation at the Friars-Preachers House. Ros and his fellow barons found Badby guilty and passed secular judgement. He was burnt to death (possibly, according to sixteenth-century martyrologist John Foxe, in a barrel) in Smithfield. Regional disorder After the death of the Earl of Stafford in 1403 (whose infant heir had a twenty-year minority), Ros was the leading baron in Staffordshire. He was responsible for upholding the king's peace during a period that has been a by-word for the kind of pervasive lawlessness that Ros, like all regional magnates, was expected to suppress. Particularly well-known is the frequency with which the baronage and gentry indulged in internecine fighting. In 1411, his intervention averted a tense situation which was likely to erupt into armed conflict between local gentry Alexander Mering and John Tuxford. This was only a temporary ceasefire, however; the following year, Ros sponsored a second arbitration between the parties with which they promised to abide on pain of a 500-mark fine. In early 1411 Sir Walter Tailboys caused a riot in Lincoln, attacked the sheriffs, killed two men, and lay in wait outside the city in ambush (preventing its residents from leaving). Lincoln's citizens petitioned the king for justice and explicitly requested that Ros and his kinsman, Lord Beaumont, be appointed to investigate. They found in favour of the Lincoln citizenry and, reflecting the severity of Tailboy's offence, he was bound over to keep the peace for £3,000. Due to such efforts, Simon Payling has suggested that Ros's "reputation for fair-mindedness" made him a popular figure for settling gentry disputes. Despite his aptitude for dispute resolution, Ros was not exempt from local conflict. He became involved in a dispute with his Lincolnshire neighbour, Sir Robert Tirwhit, in 1411. Tirwhit was a newly appointed royal justice and a well-known figure in the county. He and Ros fell out over conflicting claims to common grazing and associated hay-mowing and turf-digging rights in Wrawby. An arbitration took place before Justice William Gascoigne, who ordered a Loveday