GREEN, Thomas II

This MP provides an insurmountable problem of identification. There were two contemporary Thomas Greens in Leicester, both of whom were of sufficient status to have been, with equal likelihood, returned to Parliament. In the borough records they are generally distinguished, the one referred to as ‘draper’ and the other as ‘tapicer’ or ‘senior’, but no such additional descriptions are provided in the election returns of 1450 or 1459. Although both served as mayor, neither enjoyed a career of particular prominence in Leicester affairs. The tapicer first appears in the records in April 1433, when Isabel Oadby released to him and Emma, his wife, all her right in a messuage in Applegate in the parish of St. Nicholas which she and her late husband, a gentleman named John Oadby, had previously granted to them. It is likely that this was the part of the town in which Green resided, for, in the 1440s, he leased from the duchy of Lancaster a bakehouse there.2 Ibid. 418; DL29/212/3259, 3263.

Green last appears for certain in the records in June 1455 when, again with his namesake, he attested the town’s parliamentary election.3 C219/16/3. His disappearance from the records after this date makes it likely that it was the draper who represented the town in the Parliaments of 1459 and 1461, but it could, with equal probability, have been either draper or tapicer who had done so in 1450. Similarly, it is not possible to say which of them sat on a jury of the town before the county j.p.s on 1 Jan. 1453, or which of them attested the parliamentary election of the following 1 Mar.4 KB9/270A/48; C219/16/2.

The tapicer was succeeded by his son and heir Robert, who enjoyed a long career in borough administration, serving as coroner and auditor of accounts in the 1470s and 1480s. A deed of 1471 raises the possibility that the successful churchman, Henry Green, rector of Loughborough and a royal chaplain in the late 1450s, was of the same family as the tapicer’s, for he was one of the feoffees who had earlier made a settlement in favour of Robert and his wife Margaret. In June 1508 Robert appeared in portmanmoot to acknowledge that he had sold to the mayor, William Mey, his late father’s lands in Leicester and Bruntingthorpe, a few miles to the south of the town.5 Leicester Bor. Recs. ii. 381, 430, 445, 451-2, 454-5. For the career of the rector: Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, ii. 815.