Family and Education

m. by 1412, Joan, da. and coh. of David Sulgene (d.1380), of Sulgene, Cornw.1

Offices Held

Tax collector, Cornw. July 1446.

Biography

The whereabouts of the MP’s home, ‘Tredinney’, has yet to be discovered, and he is not known to have held property in or near Liskeard, the borough which he represented in Parliament. His father-in-law’s lands at Sulgene and elsewhere were valued in 1384 at 50s. a year, but only came into his possession after the deaths of his wife’s sister (or half-sister), Joan, wife of Sir Vivian Penrose, and her uncle, John Sulgene (who was held to be an idiot), and even then they had to be shared with two more sisters and their husbands. In about 1417 John Skewys* alleged in a suit in Chancery that Tredinney and William Trembagh, supported by a band of armed men, had disseised him of two messuages and half a Cornish acre of land in the vills of ‘Trescrewyn’ and ‘Boswolvell’. Apart from these properties Tredinney also possessed land at Carnanton in Mawgan (in the hundred of Pydr), and in 1451 he was assessed for a tax on landed income on the basis that his holdings were worth £4 a year.2

It may have been this Richard Tredinney who in 1411 appeared in the King’s bench as bailsman for Adam Vivian*, but the reference to Richard Tredinney ‘the younger’, who some time in Henry V’s reign was sued in the court of common pleas for debt, is a warning that there was more than one contemporary figure with this name. It was probably the MP, however, who in May 1420 stood surety in Chancery that Thomas Weryng, the under bailiff of the hundred of Trigg, and Robert Kayl* of Ethy would keep the peace. Before 1434 Tredinney, described as a ‘gentleman’, had run up debts of £7 in London to a carpenter and a brewer, but he was able to obtain a royal pardon of outlawry for failing to answer these and other charges in the courts. He is recorded as a witness to a deed dated in Cornwall in November 1440 and, 25 years after his only known appearance in the Commons, as a collector of parliamentary subsidies.3

Ref Volumes: 1386-1421

Author: L. S. Woodger

Notes

• 1. C1/6/39; KB27/605 m. 41d; CPR, 1385-9, p. 86.
• 2. C1/5/99, 6/39; Feudal Aids, i. 228; E179/81/92; CIMisc. iv. 271.
• 3. CCR, 1419-22, p. 106; CPR, 1429-36, p. 311; KB27/602 m. fines; CAD, iv. A9991.