WODEFOLD, Robert

Unlike his father, who was a draper engaged in the wool trade, Robert trained to be a lawyer. He first appeared acting on behalf of his father in suits for debt brought in the court of common pleas in 1433, and did so again in 1435. He also took briefs in these years for other litigants from his home county, and for men from Kent, both in that court and in the King’s bench.2 CP40/691, rots. 86, 447d, 472; 699, rots. 269d, 572d, 661d, 671; KB27/694, rot. 59. That his work often kept him away from Sussex is indicated by the description ‘of London, gentleman’ applied to him on 7 Dec. 1439 when he was among those who offered securities under pain of £100 that Hugh Ashbury*, William Redstone* and William Bridges II* would present themselves in the court of Chancery a few days later.3 CCR, 1435-41, p. 351. His family remained prominent in Lewes, and five years after his brother Giles was first elected to Parliament for the borough he himself was chosen as its representative at the Parliament summoned to Bury St. Edmunds. The two brothers and Mary Wodefold, their father’s widow, were active as executors of William Wodefold’s will in 1450.4 CP40/759, rot. 221.

Curiously, although Robert was appointed a commissioner of arrest in Sussex in 1452, he then played no further part in the administration of the region until very much later in his career, when he must have been an old man. Meanwhile, he had established himself as a landowner in his home county, perhaps through inheriting property from his father and brother. In Michaelmas term 1455 he brought a plea in person against a butcher named William Strode of Fletching for abducting his ward Thomas Cony at Ringmer. The dispute had apparently arisen over the arrangements for the ward’s marriage.5 CP40/779, rot. 622. While he continued to hold the property in St. Andrew’s parish, Lewes, which had long been in the family’s possession,6 Suss. N. and Q. v. 100; Add. Chs. 30565, 30567, 30569. from the late 1450s he ceased to be resident in the town, choosing instead to live a short distance away at Cliffe.7 KB27/784, rot. 47. He also acquired property at Alfriston, and in 1461 accused a hosier of Waldron of forcible entry there and assaulting his tenants.8 CP40/802, rot. 48.

Naturally enough, Robert and his brother Giles were party to property transactions on behalf of Richard Sutton, who married their sister Margaret. In 1448 they were jointly enfeoffed with him of a tenement in the market at Lewes and an adjoining building called ‘Holtes Place’.9 CAD, i. C493. In the will Sutton made in 1456 he instructed his feoffees to give Margaret seisin for life of all his lands and tenements, or if she was in necessity to sell them on her behalf. After her death any properties remaining were to pass to his daughter Marion and her heirs if she had married on the advice of her mother and uncle Robert Wodefold. Otherwise, or if Marion died without issue, Wodefold was to sell the premises to provide prayers for the testator’s soul. Wodefold and the widow were to be executors.10 C146/9538. Disputes over the estate arose much later, in the late 1470s or early 1480s, following the deaths of Margaret and Marion, when Sutton’s brother Thomas claimed in a petition to Chancery that a group of feoffees (himself, the Wodefold brothers and John Parker V*), had held property to the use of Richard and Margaret Sutton for their lives, and then to their issue, with remainder to him and his heirs, but that the surviving feoffees, Robert Wodefold and Parker, refused to transfer it to him according to the entail. Nevertheless, Wodefold denied that any such entail had been made, and in response to the petition he stated that the enfeoffment of 1448 had been to the use of Richard Sutton and his heirs, recited the will, and reported that in accordance with Sutton’s wishes Margaret had received the revenues from the property for her lifetime. As Marion had died childless, he now stood sole seised of the property and intended to fulful the provisions of his brother-in-law’s will by selling it to maintain a chantry priest.11 C1/52/163-6. In the meantime, since the late 1450s Wodefold had also acted as a feoffee of the manors of West Firle and Catsfield to the use of Elizabeth Carpenter, aunt of the prominent Sussex lawyer Bartolomew Bolney*, and he continued to hold Catsfield in the mid 1470s for the purpose of carrying out Bolney’s will.12 Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 75-76, 83. By the latter date he and Bolney were serving together as members of the quorum on the county bench, a position Wodefeld held for nearly nine years.

It seems likely that Wodefeld’s marriage to Margaret Weston was not his first, for it took place late in his life and after the birth of her son and eventual heir, John Welles (b.c.1476).13 C142/27/62. Margaret, who must have been considerably younger than Wodefold, had not yet inherited her share of the Weston estates, although at the stage our MP married her it may have been clear that her brother would not produce children. Wodefold did not survive much longer; he died at an unknown date between April 1483 (when appointed to assess the subsidy on aliens) and Trinity term 1484, when his widow and John Potman, a yeoman from Bedyngham, were acting as executors of his will.14 Add. 39377, f. 3. By September 1485 Margaret had taken a third husband, John Apsley†, who like Wodefold was a lawyer. She then inherited a moiety of the former Weston estates in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire.15 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 162. Having outlived Apsley too, she made her will on 7 Sept. 1511, in which although she asked to be interred near the tomb of her father in the parish church of Buxsted, rather than next to one of her husbands, she did make provision for an obit to be said annually for ten years in the church of St. Thomas at Cliffe for Wodefold’s soul. The descent of Wodefold’s property is uncertain, but it may have been included in the lands at Cliffe and Ringmer which passed on Margaret’s death to his stepson John Welles. The latter was to pay for the obits from the issues received.16 PCC 27 Fetiplace (PROB11/17, f. 211); C142/27/62.