William Grylls

Birth, Marriage and Death information

     William Grylls was born circa 1518.
     He married Dyonis Glanville, daughter of John Glanville and Thomazine Browne, on 21 October 1578 at St Mary Magdalene, Launceston, CON, ENG.
     He died in 1602.

Other information

     A survey made by the Launceston Corporation in the 1580s listed Sampson Grills as one of the largest property owners. His brother, William, in his will of 1602 left further lands - 'to my cousin [nephew] John Grylles of Lyncolnes Inn my customary lands in Dunheved alias Launceston, and other lands in Cornwall and Devon, excluding the ones in Calstock already mentioned. He also left over £200 in monetary bequests, so he was also a very wealthy man.
William, Sampson's brother, seems to have been a colourful character. By 1543 he was already established in Launceston with goods valued at £2. He was a wool draper by trade. In 1578, when he was nearly 60 years old, he married Dionys, daughter of John Glanville of Tavistock. She was aged about 16. She was described as being 'skilful in buying and selling of wares and merchandise,' so William after a while 'remitted the custody, order and government of his house and shop wares, merchandise and money to the value of 1000 marks or thereabouts, and divers servants and apprentices unto Dionys his wife, who divers years kept, ruled and governed the same with care and diligence'. He presumably then had time to pursue other ways of making
money, not always honourably.
In 1580 he was accused by John Bewes of attacking and assaulting him as he came out of church. William Grills allegedly had a gang of supporters with him. Apparently John Bewes was about to complete a successful action in the stannary court to establish his title to certain Launceston properties, and William Grills and his supporters had taken this 'amiss'. John Bewes could not find any friendly witnesses in the assault case and complained that his property action was now also failing since the witnesses had been intimidated by 'those well disposed towards Grills'. The outcome of the case is unknown.
In 1588, certain dubious actions by Dionys, William's young wife, resulted in eight years of litigation. On his return, from a trip William discovered several bales of cloth missing. His wife told him that she had given them to
Degory Hicks to sell, that he had sold them but had not given her the money. Hicks denied this when the matter was taken to court. However William suspected a fraud conspiracy and John Chaundler, in whose house Hicks had rooms, was interrogated in court. He was askedin court. He was asked whether Hicks and others 'did practise persuasion on the mind and affections of Dionys and set her love and affection on Degory Hicks', whether the group had conspired to murder William, whether he (Chaundler) had had a secret room built in his house and whether any of William's goods and money were ever in that room, whether Dionys had any knowledge of or gave her support to the alleged fraud or had given Degory Hicks any money or goods. Chaundler gave some evasive but revealing answers. Yes, Hicks had received goods from Dionys, had sold them and failed to give her the money. On his return William had failed to get a satisfactory explanation from Dionys, and had gone to Hicks to try to get the money, unsuccessfully. Because William himself was in debt, Dionys had tried to intervene but when she went to see Hicks he prevented her from returning to her husband for seven days. 'As a result Dionys' marital fidelity is now suspect though Hicks denies carnality'. Chaundler claimed that he had intervened to release Dionys.
The next part of the story is uncertain, but presumably William attempted to implicate Chaundler as the architect of the fraud and failed again. William continued to try to get the money back from Hicks ,in the courts of Launceston and Westminster, possibly in the end successfully. Meanwhile, because Chaundler had implicated Hicks but denied any complicity, he found himself the object of abuse from Hicks, Hicks's friends and the relatives of Dionys. He tried to get redress in the town court, but since the mayor was Hicks's brother and the recorder was John Glanville, Dionys's kinsman, the case somewhat naturally went against him. The abuse continued and Chaundler's trade declined, so he took his case to Westminster. Nicholas Glanville and Richard Wheaton denied any abuse or obstruction. Dionys was also in court, denying any complicity in the assaults and once again any complicity in the original fraud case. Her answers to the interrogation were recorded as follows: '[For] a long time after she married the said William Grills [she] did verye dutifullye and lovinglye behave herselfe towardes her said husband to the good lyking of her sayd husband and the good report of all her neighbours. And that she continued . . . . untill the complainant Oohn Chaundler] together with the said Degory Hicks . . . . . did most leudly seduce and allure her . . . . to consent unto many unlawful actions and practyses being so vyle that she . . . . thinketh in regard of modesty that it is verye unseemlye for her . . . . to disclose [them] unto this honourable court'. She begged not to be asked to make any further disclosures and asked for the case to be dismissed.
William Grills was also interrogated. He said that long ago he had forbidden Dionys to have any dealings with Chaundler, and Dionys would not be disobedient. Chaundler lost his case and was sent to Marshalsea prison himself. What happened to Hicks is not related.
An enormous amount of money must have been spent on all these lawsuits and an even more generous amount of lies must have been uttered by the many participants. William and Dionys separated and she returned to her family in Tavistock where she married again after William's death.
In 1599 William had a further brush with the law when he was accused by the Corporation of 'using false weights'. Once again the outcome is not known. The Corporation also rapped the knuckles of the mayor for allowing such
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...body of Alice sometime his wife begotten . . . . ' (a house and some fields) '. . . . if there is no issue from the said Alice to revert to my rightful heirs' There is a high probability that the wife of William Grylls Jnr . at that time was Alice Glanville, one of the six daughters of John Glanville of Tavistock, and the wording above suggests that the marriage may have taken place only shortly before William Grylls Snr's death in 1577.
However, here is where mystery sets in . In the Devon Visitation of 1620, Alice Glanville is shown as the sixth daughter of John Glanville and as having married as her second husband' Grills'. Alice's elder sister, Dionys, the fourth daughter of John Glanville, was the young lady of 16 who married in 1578 the elderly merchant of Launceston also called William Grills. If Dionys was 16 in 1578 and if Alice was indeed a younger sister, it would appear, somewhat unbelievably, that Alice was married for the second time in about 1577, when she may have been about 12 years old. It seems unlikely that the mediaeval practice of dynastic marriages of pre-pubescent children was carried on among the merchants of Elizabethan Tavistock, but not however impossible. Perhaps the printed version of the 1620 Visitation got the order of the daughters wrong. What however is certain is that astute Gryllses from both Tavistock and Launceston were making successful bids for the young daughters of the most wealthy merchant in Tavistock. Dionys and Alice's brother, Nicholas Glanville, mentioned 'my verye good frendeWilliam Grilles of Tavistock gentleman' in his will of 1598. There was, as has been suggested before, a strong link between the two families.
Extract from "Grylls and Grills: The story of a Cornish Clan...written by Richard G. Grylls...published 1999."