WOLATON, John

Rather than being a member of the Nottinghamshire family of this name, as Wedgwood supposed, Wolaton appears to have been a local man. A mere yeoman, he may have owed his return to the Commons to the patronage of Robert, Lord Hungerford (d.1459) and his younger brother, Sir Edmund*, Queen Margaret’s surveyor of the royal forest of Melksham. There is nevertheless a suggestion of irregularity in his return in 1453, in that both his name and that of his parliamentary colleague John Godwin II* were inserted into the sheriff’s election indenture for the borough of Calne (for the first time separate from the general county return) over an erasure.1 C219/16/2.

An inquiry into offences committed on the Crown’s property in Wiltshire ordered following Edward IV’s accession found in June 1461 that Wolaton, perhaps acting in an official capacity of some kind, had during the preceding winter been guilty of damaging the Crown by selling considerable quantities of timber from the forest at excessively low prices.2 C145/318/1.