The Grebills of Benenden The Priory of Leeds and the Hersey Trials of 1511

The Grebills of Benenden, the Prior of Leeds, and the Heresy Trials of 1511

p.r. cavill

The Weald sustained a tradition of religious dissent from the early fifteenth century onwards. The market town of Tenterden and nearby villages such as Benenden were at the centre of a Lollard network.¹ In 1511 Archbishop Warham’s visitation learnt that many of Tenterden’s parishioners ‘use to sitt stille in the churche atte processione tyme’.² In his significant study, Robert Lutton has examined and sought to account for Tenterden’s striking heterodoxy.³ He discovered that a significant minority eschewed the elaborate and expensive devotions of the late medieval Church for sparser, more discriminating, and Christocentric forms of piety. As Dr Lutton’s subsequent work has shown, lay piety at Tenterden was unusual within Kent; it did not even resemble the picture at nearby Cranbrook, which shared Tenterden’s reputation for religious dissent.⁴ Lutton also emphasized the importance of the family unit in transmitting this distinctive pattern of piety between generations of inhabitants. Much of the evidence for religious dissent in and around Tenterden comes from the heresy trials that also began in 1511 and continued into 1512.⁵ The Grebill family – husband and wife John and Agnes and their two sons Christopher and John – featured prominently in these trials. This note presents newly identified evidence that illuminates the effect on the Grebills of their convictions and punishments.

The Grebills, Lutton found, were difficult to trace. By the end of the fourteenth century, the family was probably living in Tenterden.⁶ To Lutton’s evidence can be added an entry in the account of William Swan, escheator for Kent and Middlesex in 1450-1.⁷ (The escheator was the royal officer charged with upholding the crown’s feudal and other prerogative rights; holding office for a year, he was usually a minor member of the gentry.) This entry establishes that one member of the family had become involved in Jack Cade’s rebellion. According to Swan’s account, on 8 February 1451 Thomas ‘Gribell’ of Tenterden, yeoman, had been convicted of high treason before the commission of oyer and terminer at Canterbury and hanged. As a consequence, Thomas’s property was forfeit to the crown, which was Swan’s responsibility. Grebill’s goods and chattels, comprising grain, livestock, and the contents of his household, were valued at £21 15s. 6d. Grebill’s tenement and one hundred acres of land in Tenterden were worth £2 13s. 4d. a year. The precise nature of Grebill’s offence is unknown.⁸ Popular protest in Kent in the mid fifteenth century had an anticlerical dimension and maybe even – as indictments alleged – a Lollard constituency.⁹ Two of the three men from Tenterden executed alongside Thomas Grebill in 1451 might also have belonged to families of dissenters.¹⁰ John Frank was probably related to John and Robert Franke of Tenterden, who both abjured in 1511.¹¹ John atte Wode may have been a descendant of Peter Attewyde of Tenterden, who had been arrested for heresy in 1428.¹² Therefore the association of the Grebill family with Lollardy could conceivably have stretched further back than the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when John senior dated his own and his wife’s conversions.¹³

In 1511, when their trials were held, Agnes and John were over sixty years old. While they had formerly lived in Tenterden and were sometimes still described as from the town, their present home was in the neighbouring village of Benenden.¹⁴ Agnes and John had two adult sons: Christopher, aged 22, who lived in Cranbrook, and John, aged 21, who lived in Tenterden.¹⁵ An unnamed daughter, mentioned in a neighbour’s evidence, did not feature in the trials.¹⁶ Archbishop Warham presided over the first trials in the chapel at his palace of Knole. On 29 and 31 April 1511 Agnes denied the articles against her, rejecting the testimony of her husband, her two sons, and a neighbour.¹⁷ Because she refused to confess her guilt, Agnes was regarded as an obstinate heretic. Thus on 2 May she was relinquished to the secular arm to be burnt.¹⁸ On the same day, her husband and two sons abjured their errors.¹⁹ They were ordered, as a partial penance, to watch the execution of William Carder of Tenterden.²⁰ On 5 May Warham imposed further penances.²¹ John senior and Christopher were ordered to perform public penance at Canterbury and in their parish churches, to wear a badge of a burning faggot for life, and not to leave their parishes without permission. John junior was ordered to perform public penance in his parish church.²² At his palace of Maidstone on 3 September, however, Warham increased the elder John’s sentence to perpetual penance in Bilsington Priory.²³ In effect, Grebill was to be imprisoned for the remainder of his life (unless the sentence were subsequently commuted).²⁴

Lutton connected the Grebills’ convictions to a case brought in the court of chancery against the younger John and one other.²⁵ The documents are catalogued in the National Archives as C1/336/24-27. The first three stages of chancery’s bill procedure survive: two bills of complaint (24 and 25), the defendants’ answer (26), and the plaintiff’s replication (27). The fourth element, the defendants’ rejoinder, is missing. Annotations on the dorses of the bills recorded subsequent process. These establish that the case was heard between November 1514 and June 1515. The existence of two separate bills of complaint (24 and 25) is a complication. The substance of the two bills is the same, even if the phrasing is not identical. The annotations suggest that chancery proceeded upon both bills at the same time; the survival of a single answer and replication shows that the bills were treated as making one and the same case. Both bills contain errors, possibly caused by making fair copies from earlier drafts. One error is significant because it relates to the plaintiff’s identity. In the first bill (24), the plaintiff described himself as Thomas More of ‘Keneyndeyn’ in the county of Kent, gentleman. ‘Keneyndeyn’ was an old spelling of Kennington, which lay fifteen miles from Benenden. The remainder of this text and the other bill (25) show, however, that ‘Keneyndeyn’ had been a copyist’s misreading of ‘Benendeyn’ or Benenden. The plaintiff was therefore the Grebills’ neighbour. It should be added that this Thomas More was not the future lord chancellor.

More’s bills complained against John Grebill junior and Richard Babbe, also of Benenden. At issue was a messuage with fifty acres of arable land, pastures, and woods in Benenden that had formerly belonged to John Grebill senior. Both sides agreed that Robert Lamb, Roger Morris, Walter Taylor, William Reynolds, John Ford, and John Vincent had become jointly seised of this estate to the use of Richard Chetham, prior of the house of Augustinian canons at Leeds in Kent. According to More, he had then agreed to purchase the estate from Chetham. More claimed that the prior’s six feoffees had settled the estate upon him and that he had paid the prior part of the sum agreed. Now, however, More found his possession troubled by the defendants, John Grebill junior and Richard Babbe, who had supposedly made rival covenants. The defendants had also detained the evidence that More needed to make good his title: such an allegation was a standard requirement in order to justify hearing a case outside the common law courts. The defendants’ answer described an alternative sequence of events. Around Michaelmas in the third year of Henry VIII’s reign (29 September 1511), John Grebill senior had conveyed the estate to the prior’s six feoffees. Subsequently, the defendants alleged, More had attempted to purchase the land from the prior, but could not agree terms. Later on, John Grebill junior had approached the prior with the intention of buying back the estate, ‘for Asmuch as hit had long tyme conteynued in his Auncestours’. Once this purchase had been agreed, the prior had arranged for his feoffees to convey the estate to Grebill. Next Grebill had enfeoffed the estate to his co-defendant, Richard Babbe, to hold to Grebill’s own use. Then Grebill sold the estate to Babbe in its entirety, so that Babbe now stood enfeoffed of the estate to his own use and that of his heirs.

None of the formal chancery proceedings referred to the reason behind the original conveyance. The presiding judge, the Lord Chancellor Archbishop Warham, cannot have missed the fact, however, that John Grebill senior made the conveyance shortly after he had sentenced him to perpetual penance on 3 September 1511. This sentence was to take effect once Grebill had performed the penances that had already been imposed four months earlier.²⁶ If we assume that Warham’s stipulations were carried out exactly and immediately, then Grebill would have performed public penance at Canterbury’s marketplace on Saturday 6 September, at Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday 14 September, and at Benenden parish church on Sunday 21 September. If so, then his decision to convey the land around 29 September coincided with his confinement to Bilsington Priory. As Lutton suggests, Grebill was probably acting to preserve the estate for his family.²⁷ The precise purpose of the conveyance, however, remains uncertain. Forfeiture of property was normally imposed in Eng-land only on obdurate or relapsed heretics (like Grebill’s wife Agnes).²⁸ Nowhere was it held that Grebill’s estate was forfeit because of his con-viction. Instead, Grebill may have sought to prevent the estate being broken up, which could have occurred if the lands were held to have escheated (reverted) to their lords through vacancy. He or his family may also have needed money immediately, although no reason is known. The younger John may have been the one who bought back the estate because his elder brother Christopher was confined to the parish of Cranbrook under the terms of his penance. Richard Babbe possibly provided John with the means so to do. Such help could be reflected in the subsequent conveyance to Babbe, if that had been made on the understanding that once he had extracted this sum by farming the land, Babbe would then have restored the estate to the Grebills.

In the end, however, neither Richard Babbe, John Grebill junior, nor Thomas More enjoyed the land, which passed instead to a third party unconnected with the foregoing proceedings. The Grebills’ estate was indeed forfeit to the crown, but for another reason entirely: mortmain.²⁹ The original conveyance to Prior Chetham fell foul of legislation that restricted the passing of real estate to perpetual corporations such as religious houses. Conveying land to such institutions deprived the crown and other lords of the feudal and tenurial incidents that otherwise arose when their tenants died. Thus in 1279 the first statute of mortmain (also known as De viris religiosis)had prohibited the practice.³⁰ The penalty was to be forfeiture, initially to the immediate lord, then (if he proved negligent) to any intermediate lord, and lastly to the crown as ultimate lord. The first royal licence to alienate land in mortmain, however, was granted the following year. Each licence required an inquisition ad quod damnum in order to determine ‘what damage’ the acquisition might cause the crown or other lord. The inquisition also established the annual value of the land, because the fine payable was a multiple of this amount, usually between three and five times as much.³¹ Several means of evading mortmain legislation existed. One was to convey the property to a group of nominees, who then held it to the use of the donee or purchaser, the religious institution.³² The transaction of 1511 took this form: John Grebill senior gave the land to six nominees, who held the property to the use of Prior Chetham and his successors. Such an enfeoffment, however, had been prohibited by further legislation in 1391, and it was this law that Grebill had broken.³³ The success of such an enfeoffment therefore depended on the continued concealment of the true nature of the conveyance.

Escheators were responsible for enforcing mortmain legislation. Some time in 1515 Kent’s escheator, John Marshall of Crayford, must have learnt of John Grebill senior’s conveyance. Acting on his own authority (virtute officii) rather than upon receipt of a writ (virtute brevis),Marshall arranged for an inquisition to be held at Biddenden on 11 September 1515. The indented text delivered to chancery on 4 October has survived, as has the abridged copy then sent to the exchequer.³⁴ This inquisition closely resembled an inquisition post mortem, although it did not address whether John Grebill senior was still alive. For an escheator’s inquisition, the sheriff was supposed to empanel jurors resident in the county who were ‘sufficiently inherited and of good Fame’.³⁵ In practice, jurors in inquisitions post mortem were usually local men of moderate means.³⁶ The same description may well have fitted the sixteen jurors in this inquisition, although their places of residence and occupations were omitted from the chancery text. Richard Glover, William Leede, and Stephen Philpot came from Benenden, Stephen Patynden from Rolvenden, and Henry Scott from High Halden.³⁷ Other jurors bore the local surnames Asten, Dyngelden, Duke, Lucas, and Pynde.³⁸ Richard Foule belonged to a well-to-do and prominent Tenterden family.³⁹ None of the jurors had been accused of holding suspect beliefs in the recent heresy trials or visitation; none is named by Lutton as a religious minimalist. It needs stressing that these jurors were not identifying an offence that otherwise would have escaped unnoticed. Rather, the inquisition was held in order to give the crown title.⁴⁰ Marshall arranged the inquisition because somehow he had known already of the conveyance.⁴¹

The evidence presented in the inquisition extends and slightly alters the account given in the chancery proceedings. The estate of John Grebill senior was described as comprising a messuage, two gardens, a cowshed, a kitchen, a bake-house, forty acres of land, and twenty acres of woodland, which were together worth £2 a year. The conveyance to the prior’s six nominees was supposedly made on 1 December 1511. This date was over four weeks after that given in John Grebill junior’s chancery answer, and referred to a time when his father would probably already have been confined. The inquisition described the prior’s use as having ended on 12 May 1512 without explaining why it had done so. This date could have marked the point at which the younger John reacquired the estate. The inquisition also identified the two lords of whom the estate was held. This was necessary because, in the first instance, unlicensed mortmain was an offence against the immediate lord, rather than the crown. If the immediate lord failed to assert a claim within one year, then the crown could state a residual claim. The buildings and twenty acres of land belonged to Thomas More’s manor of Brenchley, which may explain why he had wished to purchase the estate.⁴² More presumably did not appreciate that one part of Grebill’s estate might have been his by right already, had he acted within a year of the conveyance. The remaining forty acres (including the twenty acres of woodland) belonged to the manor of Comden, which was held by Combwell Priory. One juror, Stephen Patynden, was related to the house’s prior Thomas Patenden.⁴³ Archbishop Warham’s visitation of 1512 heard that the priory’s manor of Benenden was poorly maintained; such neglect may explain why the house had not acted.⁴⁴

This mortmain inquisition was also a consequence of the activities of Richard Chetham, the prior of Leeds between 1492 and 1524.⁴⁵ An assistant to Archbishop Warham at the heresy trials, Chetham had been present when the elder John was sentenced to perpetual penance.⁴⁶ Stephen Castelyn of Tenterden, who received the same sentence, was imprisoned in Leeds Priory.⁴⁷ Prior Chetham was a serial offender against the statutes of mortmain, perhaps because licences had been expensive in Henry VII’s reign.⁴⁸ The six feoffees named in Grebill’s conveyance were among the prior’s regular nominees; several may have been acting in a professional capacity.⁴⁹ The Grebills’ misfortune was to have conveyed land to a religious house whose acquisitions shortly afterwards received close scrutiny. The priory possibly triggered this attention by acquiring on 28 June 1513 a licence to purchase lands to the value of £20.⁵⁰ The evidence survives principally in the individual accounts that successive escheators presented each year to the exchequer, which were written up in a single enrolled account.⁵¹ At an inquisition on 24 October 1513, the escheator Robert Nayler identified six properties acquired without licence in Henry VII’s reign.⁵² On 12 October 1514, the priory sought permission to acquire the manor of East Sutton (having already secured some of its lands illegally) in fulfilment of the licence granted in June 1513. This request led to the holding of an inquisition ad quod damnum at Strood (by Rochester) on 19 October 1514 by Nayler’s successor, Thomas Burgoyn, and then to permission being granted the next month.⁵³ Burgoyn also inquired on 19 and 20 October into the priory’s previous purchases. This inquisition identified a further fifty mortmain offences committed in Henry VII’s reign.⁵⁴ Burgoyn claimed these lands for the crown, listing them in his account.⁵⁵

Yet the canny Chetham regained all the lands that he had acquired for Leeds Priory in Henry VII’s reign. He had taken the precaution of obtaining in May and in October 1509 Henry VIII’s first general pardon, which covered mortmain offences committed before the king’s accession.⁵⁶ Chetham’s attorney, John Webbys, had then registered the first pardon in the court of the exchequer that July.⁵⁷ When the cases resulting from the two mortmain inquisitions of 1513 and 1514 came before the court, Webbys pleaded the pardons on the prior’s behalf. Consequently, the cases were dismissed in January 1514 and in April 1515 respectively.⁵⁸

The expectation of another general pardon may have encouraged the astute prior to acquire more land without licence in August 1511, in July 1514, and between July and November 1515. A third inquisition, held by the escheator John Meyny at Bearsted on 15 May 1516, identified these acquisitions, along with two more previously made in Henry VII’s reign.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, in the parliamentary session held in November and December 1515, an act had passed pardoning (among other misdeeds) mortmain offences committed before 13 November 1515.⁶⁰ Chetham’s latest acquisition had been made only three days earlier. Again, the prior’s attorney pleaded the general pardon in the exchequer and Chetham was thus discharged.⁶¹

By comparison, John Grebill junior was unlucky: had the inquisition into his father’s estate been delayed by only three months (from September to December 1515), then he too could have pleaded this pardon. Indeed, because the pardon had been issued as an act of parliament, Grebill need not have sued for it, but would have benefited automatically.⁶² Grebill may have been doubly unlucky. Whereas the three inquisitions into the prior’s mortmain offences in 1513, 1514, and 1516 produced composite presentments, the inquisition into his father’s estate occurred in isolation. Presumably, this inquisition was based on discrete information not avail-able when the first two general mortmain inquisitions had been held. One possible source could even have been Thomas More’s suit in chancery. Both sides in this case were enjoined to produce their witnesses on 17 November 1514, 22 January, 6 February, and 30 April 1515. By 24 June 1515, John Grebill junior had probably defaulted on his appearance, for he was commanded to give daily attendance thereafter.⁶³

No further evidence relating to this case or to Grebill himself has been found. Perhaps Grebill had now realized that defending his title against Thomas More was irrelevant. Thus on 11 September the escheator John Marshall seized the estate, paying 7s. 7½d. into the exchequer for the sixty-one days until the end of his term of office.⁶⁴ The annual value of the Grebills’ estate appeared in the next escheator’s account, and also in the following two accounts but as a sum that could not be levied, whereupon the entry was removed during the exchequer’s audit.⁶⁵ In fact, the king had already granted the estate to the Kentish courtier Sir Edward Neville while celebrating Christmas at Eltham Palace on 28 December 1515.⁶⁶

This case turns out to revolve around an anomalous circumstance so peculiar that it seems to resist any generalization. A Lollard falling foul of mortmain legislation is a sad irony, because the typical mortmain offender was seeking to fund the masses that would speed souls through purgatory, a doctrine that Lollards rejected.⁶⁷ The Grebills may not have recovered from this disaster as they had that of 1451, for the family has not been traced in the following decades.⁶⁸ The Grebills’ double misfortune could be attributed to forces beyond the locality: the zealous Archbishop Warham, perhaps also an unsympathetic judge in chancery; an officious escheator and a worldly-wise prior; a greedy courtier and his generous king. What happened to their estate was good law, and a line of egregious heretics did not deserve the royal grace that might otherwise have mitigated such bad luck. That may have been the view of Archbishop Warham, Sir Edward Neville, and the king himself. Whether the Grebills’ neighbours agreed is harder to surmise. Lutton suggests that Tenterden’s broader constituency of laymen disengaged from conventional religiosity sympathized with and protected those who crossed over into doctrinal disagreement with the Church.⁶⁹ Yet the Grebills and their associates took care to conceal their dissenting practices.⁷⁰ We should not discount the possibility that local inhabitants caused the Grebills’ detection in 1511 or identified their mortmain offence in 1515. What the more conventionally pious in and around Tenterden made of less orthodox residents remains tantalizingly uncertain.

endnotes

¹ J.A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414-1520 (Oxford, 1965), ch. 7; R. Lutton, ‘Heresy and Heterodoxy in Late Medieval Kent’, in S. Sweetinburgh (ed.), Later Medieval Kent, 1220-1540 (Woodbridge, 2010), 167-87; M. Reynolds, ‘Lollardy in Kent: The Heresy Trials of 1511-12’, in T. Lawson and D. Killingray (eds), An Historical Atlas of Kent (Chichester, 2004), 78-9, 195-6.

² Kentish Visitations of Archbishop Warham and his Deputies, 1511-1512, ed. K.L. Wood-Legh, KAS, Kent Records, 24 (1984), 207.

³ R. Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006). See also R. Lutton, ‘Connections between Lollards, Townsfolk and Gentry in Tenterden in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in M. Aston and C. Richmond (eds), Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages (Stroud, 1997), 199-228, and id., ‘Godparenthood, Kinship, and Piety in Tenterden, England 1449-1537’, in I. Davis, M. Müller, and S. Rees Jones (eds), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), 217-34.

⁴ R. Lutton, ‘Geographies and Materialities of Piety: Reconciling Competing Narratives of Religious Change in Pre-Reformation and Reformation England’, in R. Lutton and E. Salter (eds), Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c.1400-1640 (Aldershot, 2007), 1-39.

⁵ Kent Heresy Proceedings 1511-12, ed. N. Tanner, KAS, Kent Records, 26 (1997).

⁶ Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 174-5.

⁷ The National Archives: Public Record Office, E357/42, rots 71-2.

⁸ I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991), 152-3.

⁹ J.A.F. Thomson, ‘A Lollard Rising in Kent: 1431 or 1438?’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 37 (1964), 100-2; ‘Some Ancient Indictments in the King’s Bench referring to Kent, 1450-1452’, ed. R. Virgoe, in F.R.H. Du Boulay (ed.), Documents Illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society, KAS, Kent Records, 18 (1964), 218-19, 257-8; Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 152-4.

¹⁰ The third man was William Roger. His widow was apparently murdered on 26 April 1451: ‘Some Ancient Indictments’, ed. Virgoe, 251.

¹¹ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 90-1, 110-11; Kentish Visitations, ed. Wood-Legh, 207; Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 1, 162, 167, 170, 176-7.

¹² Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 151, 173.

¹³ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 11, 18-20.

¹⁴ Ibid., 11, 16, 98 n. 1.

¹⁵ Ibid., 4, 21.

¹⁶ Ibid., 22.

¹⁷ Ibid., 16-24.

¹⁸ Ibid., 25, translated in N. Tanner, ‘Penances imposed on Kentish Lollards by Archbishop Warham 1511-12’, in Aston and Richmond (eds), Lollardy and the Gentry, 246.

¹⁹ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 26-32.

²⁰ Ibid., 36 (trans. in Tanner, ‘Penances’, 246-7).

²¹ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 39-40 (trans. in Tanner, ‘Penances’, 247).

²² Tanner, ‘Penances’, 234-9.

²³ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 98-9 (trans. in Tanner, ‘Penances’, 248-9).

²⁴ Tanner, ‘Penances’, 240-2.

²⁵ Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 175. Lutton owed the reference to Andrew Hope.

²⁶ Tanner, ‘Penances’, 241.

²⁷ Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 175.

²⁸ See the present author’s ‘Heresy, Law, and the State: Forfeiture in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, English Historical Review (forthcoming).

²⁹ S. Raban, Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279-1500 (Cambridge, 1982).

³⁰ 7 Edw. I, in The Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 11 vols (London, 1810-28), i. 51.

³¹ Raban, Mortmain Legislation, 69-70.

³² Ibid., 91-3, 114-29.

³³ 15 Ric. II, c. 5 (Statutes of the Realm, ed. Luders et al., ii. 79-80).

³⁴ TNA: PRO, C142/78/139; E150/473/10.

³⁵ 34 Edw. III, c. 13 (Statutes of the Realm, ed. Luders et al., i. 368); 8 Hen. VI, c. 16 (Statutes of the Realm, ed. Luders et al., ii. 252-3).

³⁶ M. Holford, ‘“Thrifty Men of the Country”? The Jurors and their Role’, in M. Hicks (ed.), The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem: A Companion (Woodbridge, 2012), 201-21.

³⁷ TNA: PRO, C1/321/82; PROB11/17/94; Kentish Visitations, ed. Wood-Legh, 200, 216, 219-20.

³⁸ TNA: PRO, E179/125/324.

³⁹ Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 40-4, 144, 187-8.

⁴⁰ M. McGlynn, The Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court (Cambridge, 2003), 30-2.

⁴¹ Cf. Hicks (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions, 5, 11, 86-90, 187-9.

⁴² E. Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 12 vols (2nd edn, Canterbury, 1797-1801), v. 288-9.

⁴³ TNA: PRO, C1/297/58-9; D.M. Smith (ed.), The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, iii: ¹³⁷⁷-¹⁵⁴⁰ (Cambridge, 2008), 419.

⁴⁴ Kentish Visitations, ed. Wood-Legh, 48-50; R.C. Fowler, ‘Religious Houses’, in W. Page (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Kent, ii (London, 1926), 160-1.

⁴⁵ Smith (ed.), Heads of Religious Houses, 461; Fowler, ‘Religious Houses’, 162-5.

⁴⁶ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 98.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 106-7.

⁴⁸ Raban, Mortmain Legislation, 190.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 121-4.

⁵⁰ TNA: PRO, C66/621, m. 6, calendared in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, eds J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie, 21 vols in 36 pts (London, 1862-1932), i/2, no. 2137/8.

⁵¹ TNA: PRO, E357/76.

⁵² TNA: PRO, E357/76, 4-5 Hen. VIII, Kent, new escheats.

⁵³ TNA: PRO, C142/29/86; C66/623, m. 13 (Letters and Papers, eds Brewer, Gairdner, and Brodie, i/2, no. 3499/55).

⁵⁴ TNA: PRO, E150/472/5-10.

⁵⁵ TNA: PRO, E357/76, 5-6 Hen. VIII, Kent, new escheats.

⁵⁶ Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1964-9), i. 79-83.

⁵⁷ TNA: PRO, E159/288, recorda, Trin., rot. 7.

⁵⁸ TNA: PRO, E159/292, recorda, Mich., rot. 11; E159/293, recorda, Mich., rot. 54.

⁵⁹ TNA: PRO, E357/76, 7-8 Hen. VIII, Kent, new escheats.

⁶⁰ 7 Hen. VIII, c. 11 (Statutes of the Realm, ed. Luders et al., iii. 203-5).

⁶¹ TNA: PRO, E368/292, recorda, Pas., rot. 2.

⁶² K.J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge, 2003), 57-8, 60-1.

⁶³ TNA: PRO, C1/336/24-5 (dorses).

⁶⁴ TNA: PRO, E357/76, 6-7 Hen. VIII, Kent, new escheats.

⁶⁵ TNA: PRO, E357/76, 7-8 Hen. VIII, Kent, old escheats; E136/100/6, 8-9 Hen. VIII, Kent, old escheats; E357/76, 9-10 Hen. VIII, Kent, old escheats; E368/293, status et visus compotorum, Pas., rot. 3.

⁶⁶ TNA: PRO, C82/427; C66/626, m. 14 (Letters and Papers, eds Brewer, Gairdner, and Brodie, ii/1, no. 1353).

⁶⁷ Kent Heresy Proceedings, ed. Tanner, 46.

⁶⁸ The surname does not appear in the court roll for the manor of Benenden from 1520 to 1524: Kent History and Library Centre, CKS-U49/M26.

⁶⁹ Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion, 170-81.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 167-9.