TRENTHAM, John

The connexion of the Trenthams with Shrewsbury can be traced back to 1384 when William Trentham, a saddler, was admitted to the gild merchant. He went on to serve as assessor in 1406-7 and 1416-17, and his putative son or grandson, Thomas, also a saddler, held the more important position of coroner in 1430-1 and was one of the 25 electors of the borough officers in 1434.2 Ibid. ff. 12, 13v, 15v, 16; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 3rd ser. iii. 76; KB27/654, att. rot. 1. Our MP was probably Thomas’s son, and the start of his career precisely mirrored that of his putative father: in 1448 he was chosen as coroner and, four years later, he acted as one of the electors.3 Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, f. 19. He soon, however, exceeded the achievements of his ancestors. By trade he was a draper, and, although no evidence survives to illuminate his commercial activities, he appears to have prospered, at least if one may judge from his prominent and long-sustained role in borough administration.4 He was trading as a draper by 1448: Shrewsbury recs., ct. rolls 3365/886, m. 1d.

In 1455 Trentham became the first of his family to serve as bailiff. His term of office appears to have been a troubled one. A chronicle of the town written in the reign of Elizabeth I reported that, while Trentham was bailiff in 1455-6, Queen Margaret ‘gave bages’, and our MP and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, ‘varyed and had either of them a man slayne’, a juxtaposition perhaps intended to suggest that the two events were linked. Unfortunately the contemporary legal records provide no confirmation of this story, and there is no indication of the grounds of Trentham’s disagreement with the earl, with whose father the Trenthams had been on friendly terms.5 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 4th ser. vii. 112. In 1424-5 Thomas Trentham had given the earl’s father a gift of a pike, and in 1438 he had paid £100 to the receiver of the Talbot lordship of Blackmere: Accts. of the Talbot Household, 1392-1425 (Salop Rec. Ser. vii), 164; Salop Archs. Bridgwater pprs. 212/Box 76, no. 10. There is, however, other evidence to suggest that our MP was of combative temperament. In both 1452 and 1460 he was fined 40d. in the borough court for making affray.6 Shrewsbury ct. rolls 3365/886, m. 1d; bailiffs’ accts. 899, rot. 8d.

Such episodes had no impact upon Trentham’s career. From the mid 1450s until the late 1470s he was one of the town’s principal men of business, entrusted by his fellow townsmen with both office and important tasks. Early in 1459, for example, he was paid by the borough to ride to Wenlock, in company with Roger Eyton* and 30 horse, to witness the hanging of two Lancashire men, who had committed a series of offences against the townsmen.7 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 387, m. 1. For this feud: D.R. Walker, ‘Shrewsbury in the 15th Cent.’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 333-9. On the following 17 Nov., during his second term as bailiff, he was elected to represent the borough in the Parliament that met in the wake of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge, and on 12 Dec., while this assembly was in session, he entered into bonds on the town’s behalf to Geoffrey Southworth*, then sitting for Great Bedwyn, who claimed false arrest on the hands of the townsmen.8 C219/16/5; CP40/809, rot. 158. These bonds were dated at Westminster when our MP, if he attended Parliament, was in Coventry. While bailiff Trentham was also part of a delegation from Shrewsbury, including Thomas Horde*, that travelled to Nottingham about unspecified town business. This is a tantalizing reference. The delegation received payment of as much as £10 and there can be no doubt that the matter was an important one. Its purpose and precise date is unknown, although, since Henry VI was at Nottingham shortly before the confrontation at Ludford Bridge, it is a fair speculation that it took place then.9 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 388, m. 7d.

Trentham’s career continued to flourish in the 1460s. Early in the decade, probably in 1462, he joined the ranks of the aldermen. He had been too young to figure among the original body of 12 nominated under the new borough constitution of 1445, but he was the third man to be added as existing members died.10 Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, f. 68v. If the list of new aldermen is (as it seems to be) in chronological order, then Trentham was added to the body of 12 between the murder of William Bastard* in Jan. 1462 and the death of John Gamel a few months later. In the same year he was named near the head of the list of the first members of the newly-founded guild of drapers. A quick succession of appointments followed: in October 1464 he served on the jury at the town’s curia magna, followed by successive terms as auditor and bailiff in 1466-8 and 1471-3.11 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 4th ser. ix. 258; Shrewsbury ct. rolls 911. He was also elected twice more to Parliament. On the second occasion, that is, in 1469, he did not sit because the assembly was aborted before it met, but as an MP in the Parliament of 1467 he appears to have discharged a task beyond the usual duties the borough expected of its representatives. After the end of the first session (which lasted from 3 June to 1 July 1467) the borough paid £3 10s. to him and his fellow MP, John Horde*, not for their wages but rather for their costs in forwarding Shrewsbury’s business in Parliament. The nature of that business is not precisely clear: the accounts say the costs were incurred in securing royal letters directed to the bailiffs in respect of the conservation of the peace and the good government of the borough, letters which were publicly read before the community. Further payments followed. After the end of the Parliament’s second and final session on 7 June 1468, Trentham was paid 76s. 4d., which amounted, allowing for travelling time, to about the 1s. a day that the borough generally paid to its MPs. In the same accounts he also received 10s. 4d. that he shared with other delegates who had gone to Wellington, a few miles to the east of the town, to meet the young John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury.12 M. McKisack, Parl. Repn. English Bors. 154; Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/398, m. 2; 401, mm. 1d, 2d, 3d.

Although he did not hold borough office after 1473, Trentham remained a leading townsman for a few years longer. In 1474 he farmed a tenement with a garden by ‘Le Cornmarket’ from Thomas Mytton† at the considerable rent 12s. p.a. On 1 Jan. 1478 he was named among the attestors of the Shropshire county election, although, if this implies that he held property outside his native borough, no record survives of these holdings. A few months later, on 10 Apr., he headed those who swore to observe the new ordinances for the governance of the town laid down by Anthony, Earl Rivers, and John Alcock, bishop of Worcester; and at the end of the year he again acted as a juror at the town’s curia magna.13 Salop Archs., deeds 6000/3973; C219/17/3; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 4th ser. iii. 156; Shrewsbury ct. roll 932. Thereafter, however, Trentham fades from the records, and he appears to have given up his place in local administration to his son, Thomas, who served as assessor in 1476-7 and on the jury of 25 in 1477 and 1482.14 Shrewsbury assembly bk. 3365/67, ff. 24v, 25, 26. Still alive as late as 1481-2, when the wardens of the fraternity of drapers acknowledged the receipt of 2s. from him for an old debt, he was dead by 25 Dec. 1490, when a charter of his son and heir, Thomas, names his wife as a widow.15 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 4th ser. iii. 163; Salop deeds, 6000/6297.

Evidence from the end of Trentham’s life shows that he had interests further afield. On 14 Feb. 1476 John, son of a wealthy London mercer, John Middleton* (d.1477), granted all his goods to four trustees, including a draper, Roger Trentham, who was presumably a younger son of our MP. A Chancery case dating from soon afterwards gives this transaction a context. The younger John Middleton and his brother, Stephen, petitioned against our MP and another prominent man of Shrewsbury, Thomas Thornes. They alleged that a bond in £100 that they had entered into to the defendants bore the condition that, within a month of his father’s death, the John should make a sure estate to his wife, Katherine, of property in the parish of St. Lawrence in Old Jewry, London. Clearly this bond was part of a marriage settlement, and it is a reasonable assumption that Katherine was the daughter of either our MP or Thornes. If the petition is to be credited, the two Shrewsbury men, in the elder John’s lifetime, then took away both the bride and goods of the Middletons worth as much as 500 marks, suing the petitioners at common law for the younger John’s understandable failure to make the settlement on the wife who had abandoned him. Trentham’s reply reveals no further information: he denied both the condition and the alleged offences, for which the petitioners had already sued him and Thornes at common law.16 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1557; C1/56/85.

Trentham’s descendants maintained and extended the family’s importance. His son, Thomas, also a draper, served, as he had done, as many as four terms as bailiff, and his grandson, another Thomas†, sat for the borough in Parliament on at least two occasions. Richard†, son of the younger Thomas, made a career in the royal household, sufficiently benefiting from the dissolution of the monasteries to advance the family to the ranks of the wealthy gentry. His lease of the lands of Trentham priory in Staffordshire raises the probability that the family name reflected their place of origin. In a later generation a daughter of the Trenthams, a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth I, married Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford.17 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 4th ser. iii. 177; The Commons 1509-58, iii. 480-1; 1558-1603, iii. 528.