Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

Grenettour was among the free suitors to the hundred court of Easebourne (in which hundred Midhurst was situated), as a tenant of Richard, earl of Arundel; and it was as a resident ‘of Easebourne’ that he took out a royal pardon on 9 June 1398. (Perhaps he was fearful of being too closely associated with Arundel, who had been executed for treason the previous year.)1

In 1402 Grenettour was one of those men of Midhurst indicted for poaching in Sir John Bohun’s warren of ‘Wephull’ in the spring of the previous year, and of being party to the plot to murder Bohun, the lord of the borough. Allegedly, he and some 70 others from the town and neighbouring countryside had assembled on 29 Dec. 1401 at ‘Wephull’ intending to ambush Bohun and his followers, only for the ensuing skirmish to end with the death of one of their ringleaders, William Baggele*. He was nevertheless allowed to go free after paying a fine in the King’s bench. In the course of the proceedings it was asserted that Grenettour’s landed holdings were worth less than 40s. a year, but he protested that their value was higher than this, a contention which a local jury confirmed.2

In 1404 Grenettour stood surety in Chancery for John Clever, who had appealed against a sentence of excommunication delivered by the bishop of Chichester to the court of the archbishop of Canterbury. At the assizes held at East Grinstead in 1408 he was accused of assisting Juliana Holt to secure unlawful possession of land at Trotton, near Midhurst.3

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

Or atte Grenette.

• 1. Two Fitzalan Surveys (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxvii), 111; C67/30 m. 18.
• 2. Suss. Arch. Colls. xcv. 52; KB27/506, rex rot. 2.
• 3. CCR, 1402-5, p. 373; JUST 1/1521 m. 34.