Nothing is known of Higham’s early life or background, although he may have been a kinsman of Henry Higham, esquire, with whom he acquired property in Kent during the summer of 1425. He first appears in October 1412 as a litigant in the court of common pleas, where he and another draper were suing William Swetteman of Coventry for a debt of £9. Over the next five years he became involved in the property transactions of his friend, William Cromer, an influential member of the Drapers’ Company, who later made him one of his executors.
Very little evidence of Higham’s other affairs has survived. In August 1422 a merchant from Lucca paid him £100 for 38 woollen cloths woven in Ludlow, and in the following year he supplied a far smaller consignment of fabric worth £5 to the King’s great wardrobe. At about this time he shipped a bale of cloth into the port of London, but the customs records are too fragmentary to give any idea of the scale of his operations. He evidently did a considerable amount of business with Italians, for in December 1430 Nicholas Johan of Bologna made him an assignment of £139 payable over the next two years by various debtors of theirs. Together with John Fenyll and William Cromer he was owed money by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; and when Cromer died in 1434 he left his share of this unspecified sum to be divided between his two surviving partners.
Higham’s London property was said to be worth £14 a year in 1436. Some of it lay in Candlewick Ward, where he was living in 1419, and which he represented on a jury at the husting court four years later. Through his wife, Margery, Higham acquired a messuage and six cottages in the parish of St. Botolph Without Aldgate. These had been leased to Margery’s first husband by the prior of the church of Holy Trinity the Great, who sued Higham in 1434 for delapidations.
Although he never rose to aldermanic rank, Higham played a not undistinguished part in the government of London. He attended at least four of the parliamentary elections held in the City between 1419 and 1432; and in October 1427, almost immediately after serving a term as sheriff, he was made keeper of one of the keys to the common chest. It is a mark of Higham’s status that no less than four papal indults were awarded to him during this period, namely two in September 1427 permitting him and his wife to have a portable altar and celebrate mass in places under interdict, and another two in the following October allowing the draper alone to have plenary remission of sins at the hour of death and to choose his own confessor. In June 1437 Higham was a grantee of the goods and chattels of a clerk named John Preyur; and three years later he was still active enough to audit the accounts of a former warden of London Bridge. He died before 10 June 1444, when his son, Robert, took formal seisin of his patrimony.