Polydore Vergil says that Greenshield "was greatly renowned neither at home nor in warfare".

[2] However, in Elizabethan England he acquired a reputation as a great warrior who is supposed to have led an expedition against the French at Hainaut.

[3] Greenshield's supposed conquest of Hainaut is also described in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, in which it is stated that "to repair his father's loss" he fought "a second battle at Henault with Brunchild [Prince of Hainaut] at the mouth of the river Scaldis".

Brute Greenshield, a play about the king, was performed by the Admiral's Men in 1598, but the text is lost.

Hainaut was also important to Elizabethans because the Earl of Leicester had led Elizabeth's army against the Spanish there in 1579, so "the Greenshield episode thus prefigures Merlin's prophecy that Elizabeth shall 'stretch her white rod over the Belgicke shore'".