TREWE, John

A merchant,8 Colchester ct. roll, 1423-4, D/B 5 Cr44, m. 9d. John Trewe ‘cobelere’ was presented in the borough court in 1412, for sheltering and maintaining robbers and prostitutes in his house, and there was a John Trewe, cordwainer, living in Colchester in the late 1420s, but presumably these were namesakes: ct. rolls, 1411-12, 1427-8, D/B 5 Cr38, m. 23d; 48, m. 24. Trewe was originally from Kelvedon to the south-west of Colchester. While he became a freeman of Colchester as early as October 1406, it appears he did not hold office in the borough before Henry VI’s reign.9 Colchester ct. roll, 1406-7, D/B 5 Cr36, m. 3d. A John Trewe was a member of the retinue of the duke of Clarence in 1419 but there is nothing to link him with the MP: DKR, xliv. 612.. His career as an office-holder there lasted some 20 years, during which he served one or more terms in nearly all of the principal offices in the borough, and he was already a man with considerable experience of local administration when he entered his only Parliament.

At Colchester Trewe may have lived in Stockwell Street where he owned a house, although he also possessed properties (including two meat stalls) in other parts of the borough, and at Lexden within its liberty.10 Colchester ct. rolls, 1429-30, 1447-8, 1470-1, D/B 5 Cr50, m. 13d; 62, mm. 22d-23; 74, m. 13. His main business interests were in the cloth trade, concerns that may have featured in a quarrel between him and a fellow townsman, the mercer John Gosse, that was referred to the arbitration of other burgesses in late 1423.11 D/B 5 Cr44, m. 9d. Trewe found a market for his cloth in London,12 Colchester ct. roll, 1425-6, D/B 5 Cr46, m. 17. although he also had dealings in East Anglia and the Midlands. In about 1430, a merchant from Melton Mowbray who had sold him a consignment of woad sued him in the Chancery alleging fraud.13 C1/7/112; VCH Essex, ix. 34 Over a decade later, Trewe fell into another dispute, this time with a Colchester fuller, leading to proceedings in both the town and at Westminster. The fuller accused him of an unjust seizure of a piece of woollen cloth; Trewe riposted that he had taken the cloth as a distraint after his opponent had failed to pay him an annual rent of one mark for a messuage in the suburbs.14 KB27/724, rot. 87. In December 1439, at a time of nationwide dearth, Trewe was one of several Colchester merchants whom the Crown licensed to purchase grain in Norfolk and Suffolk and to ship it, free of customs and other taxes, to their own town.15 CPR, 1436-41, p. 355. Another of those involved was John Rouge*, for whom Trewe acted as a feoffee, as he did for Robert Priour* and Thomas Southam, a London grocer who had married a woman from Colchester.16 D/B 5 Cr50, m. 36; 57, m. 25; Mercers’ Co., London, St. Paul’s school, cart., ff. 214-16, 222-3.

Trewe drew up his will on 12 May 1445 and probably died not long afterwards. He requested burial in the parish church of St. Martin in Colchester, to which he left 40s. for its high altar and 20s. for its fabric. He also bequeathed 3s. 4d. to St. Paul’s in London, perhaps in recognition of the part that the City had played in his business affairs. For the further good of his soul, Trewe arranged for a chaplain to sing masses in St. Martin’s for ten years and left sums to the Franciscan friary in Colchester and the poor of a local hospital. He provided for his wife, Isabel, by awarding her all his household goods and awarding her an estate for life in his holdings in Colchester and elsewhere in Essex. When he made his will, Trewe was owed £70 in debts (including £30 by Gilbert Debenham I*) and he bequeathed these to his younger son Robert, for whom he also reserved certain rents in the Colchester parish of St. Peter. John, his elder son, would succeed to the rest of his estate after Isabel’s death. Trewe appointed three executors, his son John, wife Isabel and William Saxe*, and in June 1448 they went to the borough court to have the will enrolled.17 D/B 5 Cr62, mm. 22d-23. His elder son was a ‘gentleman’,18 Colchester ct. roll, 1455-6, D/B 5 Cr66, m. 1. so it is likely that the MP himself had been a figure of some substance. It is not clear when young John came into his own, although his mother was still alive in the spring of 1457.19 Ibid. 1456-7, D/B 5 Cr67, m. 17.