GREENHAM, Thomas

More may be added to the earlier biography. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 233-4.

By a final concord levied in Michaelmas term 1438 Greenham mortgaged his manor of Ketton and a moiety of that of South Luffenham to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, undertaking to pay 300 marks for redemption in six instalments of 50 marks on pain of forfeiting the property. CP25(1)/192/9/10; CP40/712, rot. 110d. His entry into such an unfavourable arrangement supports the view that he was heavily in debt. He had already sold his manor of Maids’ Moreton and some minor holdings at Hemingbrough in Yorkshire and was later, if he had not already done so, to sell that of Denton in Huntingdonshire. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 234; CP25(1)/22/120/22; 280/158/13. It may be, however, that his decision to mortgage his caput honoris of Ketton was not taken freely. The issue of an oyer and terminer to investigate his alleged raid on Cromwell’s park at nearby Collyweston eight months before the levy of the fine suggests the possibility that Cromwell exacted the mortgage as the price of the settlement of an unrelated dispute between them. It is probably more than a coincidence that, two weeks before the fine, our MP was able to secure a pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for failure to appear before the commissioners. Moreover, later evidence strongly indicates that some impropriety on Cromwell’s part lay behind the mortgage. An account of Cromwell’s executors shows that one of their responses to their testator’s injunction that they make redress to those he had wronged was to restore the property at Ketton and South Luffenham to our MP’s widow, with the issues from Cromwell’s death. For accounting purposes they reckoned the cost of this restoration at the considerable sum of £800, the capital value of the property at 20 years’ purchase together with the issues they had taken since Cromwell’s death: Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Cromwell pprs. Misc. 357, m. 2. The executors valued Ketton and South Luffenham at £38 7s. 4d. p.a. above reprises, in other words, at a capital value not far short of £800: ibid. Misc. 356 (1). This implies that the restoration was made soon after Cromwell’s death in 1456.

If Greenham appears as the victim in his dealings with Cromwell, he appears in a less favourable light in another quarrel. In Trinity term 1436 John Rewe, an attorney from Somerset (who, judging from contemporary complaints against him, was of unsavoury reputation), had sued him for a debt of £20 on a bond of 12 July 1431. Our MP entered the formal plea of imprisonment and duress and a jury was summoned from Rutland, but he also resorted to another less routine and more ruthless subterfuge. At a session of the peace held at Oakham on the following 4 Oct. Rewe was indicted for assaulting one of Greenham’s servants and taking 40 marks from him. The probability is that this was a false indictment secured by Greenham, then one of the county j.p.s. How the matter was resolved does not appear save that Rewe, in Hilary term 1441, appeared in person in King’s bench to pay a small fine on the trespass part of the indictment (the assault) and successfully plead insufficiency in respect of the felony part (the taking of the money). CP40/702, rot. 117; KB27/719, rex rot. 5. For complaints against Rewe: C1/11/31; 45/31; SC8/48/2359. It is possible that his apparently corrupt behaviour cost our MP his place on the bench in November 1437, although it is equally possible that his removal was due to Cromwell’s hostility.

Earlier Greenham had been involved in a more violent confrontation. According to an appeal sued by John Culpepper*, who had been Greenham’s fellow Rutland MP in the Parliament of December 1421, on 17 Jan. 1429 he had been attacked at Exton by a yeoman of Morcott, William Wright, and as a result of this premeditated assault had lost the use of two fingers. Among the 15 men he named as Wright’s abettors were two of rank: our MP and John Zouche, a younger son of the baronial house of Zouche of Harringworth. The assault was probably an episode in the dispute between Culpepper and Lord Zouche over ‘the Zouche fee’ in Exton, and this appeal provides the only evidence of his connexion with that lord. KB27/672, rot. 69; VCH Rutland, ii. 130.

The later history of the Greenhams was undistinguished. In 1496 another Thomas Greenham, who was probably our MP’s grandson, sold his manor in South Luffenham to Sir John Digby of Eye Kettleby (Leicestershire), and in the 1550s the manor of Ketton was also lost to the family. VCH Rutland, ii. 204, 256-7.