GREVILLE, John

It is not altogether clear that Greville abandoned the calling of a merchant shortly after his father’s death, as assumed in the previous biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 240-2. In July 1422, he took a bond in statute staple for £20 at Westminster from Thomas Child, a security perhaps arising from commercial dealings between the two men. He appears also to have possessed some legal expertise, even if there is no direct evidence that he received any formal training in the law. He was a commissioner of gaol delivery in 1424 and 1438, and he was among those who received a commission to hold an assize of novel disseisin over a tenement in Daglingworth in February 1427. The plaintiffs were John Bisley† and his wife, the defendants James, Lord Berkeley, the nephew and successor of his former patron, and others.3 C241/217/37; C66/420, m. 17d.

In the same period, Greville participated in a dispute of his own. Thanks to settlements made before the death of his first wife Sibyl Corbet in 1425, he had the right to retain the bulk of her estates for life, but he was quarrelling with her uncle of the half-blood, Guy Corbet, by the spring of 1426. Guy began suits in the court of common pleas, both against Greville for unjustly withholding a bag of charters from him, and against his elder brother Lewis Greville for likewise detaining a couple of obligations. Before the end of the same year, however, he and his new wife Joyce reached an agreement with Guy over the Corbet manors of Ebrington and King’s Bromley, two of the manors he had held in Sibyl’s right.4 CP40/661, rot. 212; Devon RO, Fortescue mss, 1262M/TZ/14.

The Warwickshire lands that he had inherited from another brother, Richard, may explain how Geville came to have dealings with the guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-upon-Avon, which entertained him with wine on one occasion in 1442 or 1443. Evidently, he became a member of the guild, which numbered other gentry among its ranks, and whose members remembered him in their prayers after his death.5 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Guild of Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon mss, BRT1/1, f. 56.