Edward Somerton

Edward Somerton (died 1461) was an Irish barrister and judge who held the offices of Serjeant-at-law (Ireland) and judge of the Court of King's Bench (Ireland).
He was born in Ireland, but little is known of his life before 1427 when he is recorded in London, where he was studying law at Lincoln's Inn. He returned to Ireland and was appointed King's Serjeant for life in 1437; he also acted as counsel for the city of Waterford.
His duties as Serjeant were onerous (he was effectively in modern terms a Government minister), and he complained that his salary of £9 per annum was entirely inadequate given his workload. The Crown evidently agreed, and in 1440 his salary was supplemented by an additional 100 shillings a year. His successor, Thomas Snetterby (in office 1447-55), later made similar complaints about the low pay, as did the Attorney General for Ireland, Robert FitzRery (in office 1450-63), and both men received the same additional payment.
His period as King's Serjeant, the official who was then the Crown's senior legal adviser, was one of great political turbulence, marked by fierce conflict between the rival Butler and Talbot factions, and his name appears frequently in the Patent Rolls in connection with the various political controversies of the time. There is reason to think that he personally tried to stay neutral in the conflict so far as possible: although Robert Dyke, the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, was a bitter partisan on the Butler side 
and an opponent of the Talbot faction, Somerton valued him highly as an "honest and honorable man" who had given many years of good service to the Crown, and it was on his nomination that Dyke was made Lord Treasurer of Ireland in 1444.
He was a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. In that capacity he "spoke as the mouth of the Council" at its meeting at Trim, County Meath on 5 June 1442, when Richard Wogan, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, a prominent member of the Talbot faction, was questioned about certain articles he had sent to the Parliament of England denouncing his political enemy, James Butler, 4th Earl of Ormonde, the head of the Butler faction. After the Council, in Wogan's absence, had examined the articles, Somerton, who was described as the Prolocutor of the Council, declared that the Council found the charges against Ormonde to be false, and further declared that Wogan had acted without their authority in sending the articles to the English Parliament.
In 1447 he was appointed a judge of the Court of King's Bench. In 1457 he asked for permission to found a chantry at the Church of St. Nicholas Within, Dublin. He died in 1461.