The most striking feature of Morewell’s career is his long and loyal service to several members of the royal family, beginning with Edward III’s mother, Queen Isabella (d.1358), whom he attended in some unrecorded capacity. We know no more about him until November 1364, when King Edward sent him as a messenger to John Montfort, duke of Brittany. The two young men (who were probably near-contemporaries) may well have become connected before this date, since the duke grew up at the English court and did not recover his inheritance until 1361. Morewell’s mission, which followed the crushing defeat inflicted by Duke John upon a rival claimant to the duchy, was perhaps concerned with negotiations for the marriage, solemnized two years later, between John and the earl of Kent’s eldest daughter, Joan Holand. Although unforeseen at the time, the match had momentous consequences for the house of Montfort, since in 1377 Joan’s young half-brother, Richard, ascended the throne of England. Morewell himself benefited from this chain of events, being able to retain, indeed, even improve, his position in the royal household after Edward III’s death. His early years as a courtier were, meanwhile, crowned with success. He returned to England in March 1365, and in the following year received two annuities, both of which describe him as an esquire of the body. The first, of £20, was awarded in September 1366 and makes specific reference to his previous employment by Queen Isabella; and the second, which he received in the following December, gave him a further £15 p.a., payable from Calne in Wiltshire for life in return for the ground that his services to the King and Queen Philippa. Morewell seems to have been particularly close to the latter, who made him one of her personal attendants, and in February 1367 gave him certain property in Bristol to hold rent-free until his death. This grant, together with the annuity of £15, was confirmed by Richard II in May 1378, but some problem seems to have arisen over the regular payment of the fee by the farmers of Calne, who received royal letters close reminding them of their obligation on at least two occasions after this date.
Queen Philippa’s death in 1369 may have led Morewell to withdraw temporarily from the royal household, although the return to England in 1373 of John, duke of Brittany (who had been expelled from his duchy by the French), brought him back to the Court. On 1 July of that year, the duke, as recently created earl of Richmond, granted his ‘cher et bien ame bacheller’ an annuity of ioo marks from his lordship of Hastingrope (this pension was also to be confirmed later by King Richard, and, like the others, was awarded for life). Within three days of being formally retained by the duke, Morewell joined with him in offering securities of £9,000 for a loan of the same amount which Edward III had agreed to make to his kinsman—a loan which was still unpaid in 1386, when our Member and his associates were finally excused any liability for their part in the transaction. Over the years, Morewell came to play a prominent part in Duke John’s affairs: at some point before June 1377, for example, he acted as a messenger between the duke and Edward III during their rather tense exchanges over the fate of Charles of Blois’s two sons, who were then hostages in England; and in the following year he was commissioned to investigate a complaint by his patron about disorder at the manor of Cheshunt. It is also worth noting that in the summer of 1380 his appointment as a surveyor of the subsidy in Hertfordshire was revoked because he was ‘abiding continually in the house of the King’s sister, the duchess of Brittany, as one of her household’. The confiscation of the earldom of Richmond as a direct consquence of Duke John’s unpaid debts to the Crown was somewhat mitigated by the decision, made in November 1381, to place Morewell in control of all the revenues assigned partly to the use of the duchess while she remained in England and partly for the payment of such standing charges as his own annuity.
There is no means of telling if Morewell was a native of Hertfordshire. He had certainly established connexions there by 1376, when he began to appear as a witness to various property transactions, most notably for the Baud family, whose estates in Hertfordshire and Essex were entrusted to him on his marriage to Alice, the widow of William Baud, at some point over the next ten years. By 1386, Morewell had assumed control of land in and around the manors of Little Hadham, Bishop’s Stortford and Upwick in his capacity as guardian of Baud’s three young sons; the manor of Corringham must also have come into his hands at this time as he subsequently presented to the living.