Family and Education

b. by 1532, 2nd s. of John Games alias ap Morgan by 1st w., and bro. of Edward. m. Gwenllian, da. of Thomas Gwyn of Trecastle, 1s. 3da.2

Offices Held

Bailiff, Brecon forest, Brec. temp. Mary, lordship of Brecon, temp. Eliz.; escheator, Brec. 1574-5.3

Biography

Meredydd Games’s father sat for Breconshire in 1545 and his elder brother for Brecon Boroughs five times before his own election. A townsman of Brecon, who was to be assessed there for subsidy in 1563 as having lands worth £5 a year, Games is recorded as taking part in the shire election for the Parliament of March 1553 and as one of the electors of his brother for the Boroughs on that and the next occasion. His own return to Mary’s third Parliament may have been promoted by the 12th Earl of Arundel. The compiler of the list of Members of that Parliament noted that ‘Ll[?oydd] Gryffith brought the return for Brecknok from my l[ord] steward’; the sheriff had presumably followed the custom of sewing together the returns for the shire and the Boroughs and sent them to Arundel as lord steward of the Household for transmission to Chancery. Nothing has been found to connect Arundel with the sheriff, John Lloyd, or either of the men returned, although Games, unlike Rhys Vaughan II, was to be absent when the House was called early in January 1555 during Arundel’s own period of absence from the Lords; for this dereliction Games was informed against in the King’s bench in Easter term 1555 but had no further process taken against him. He may have sat for the Boroughs again in the following Parliament, that of October 1555, for which the name of their Member is lost.4

It was after 1563 that Games settled at Buckland. He was domiciled there when he brought a suit in the Exchequer against his nephew, a justice of the peace, for withholding money due to the lordship of Brecon; as his information was addressed to Burghley, who became treasurer in 1572, and the nephew was put on the bench at about that time, this is one of the last glimpses of him. After his escheatorship in 1574-5 nothing more has been found about him.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: P. S. Edwards

Notes

• 1. Huntington Lib. Hastings mss Parl. pprs.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference. Jones, Brec. ii. 175; iv. 33, 190.
• 3. Jones, iv. 228; E112/58 Brecon/5.
• 4. E179/219/53; C219/20/176, 177, 21/217; Huntington Lib. Hastings mss Parl. pprs; M. A. R. Graves, ‘The Tudor House of Lords 1547-58’ (Otago Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1974), 249-50; KB29/188.
• 5. E112/58 Brecon/5; Exchequer (Univ. Wales Bd. of Celtic Studies, Hist. and Law ser. iv), 33 wrongly gives Games’s name as ‘Grimes’.