WODEFOLD, Giles

In Hilary term 1442, when he was up at Westminster representing Lewes in Parliament, Wodefold, together with his wife Agnes, brought suits in the court of common pleas against the debtors of her former husband the merchant John Parker. These were for quite substantial sums of money, including one of £26. He also commenced pleas on his own account, but generally for the smaller amounts of four marks or £2.3 CP40/724, rots. 357, 378. Such actions continued during the remainder of the decade.4 CP40/740, rot. 497. It may be that Wodefold, like his father and Parker, engaged in trade, but no more precise details of his occupation have survived. What property he possessed in Lewes, either by inheritance or in right of his wife, is also uncertain, although he was party to a final concord in 1446 relating to a messuage, a garden and a moiety of a well,5 CP25(1)/241/89/28. and is known to have held a shop which later came into the possession of John Parker his stepson, so presumably pertained to the latter’s inheritance.6 Arundel Castle mss, A1869. In 1448, along with his brother Robert and their brother-in-law Richard Sutton, he was enfeoffed of a tenement in Lewes’s market and an adjoining property known as ‘Holtes Place’.7 CAD, i. C493. These were apparently the premises which, after Giles’s death, were claimed by Sutton’s brother Thomas.8 C1/52/163-6.

Nothing is recorded about Giles’s participation in local government, but the Wodefold brothers undoubtedly occupied a prominent position in their home town, and their fellow burgesses not only returned Robert to the Parliament of 1447 but selected Giles to represent them for a second time two years later. Both brothers were executors of the will of their father William, and together with the latter’s widow Mary they brought suits in the common pleas in the Michaelmas term of 1450 in an attempt to recover debts owing to his estate. At the same time Giles and his wife were still pursuing the debtors of her former husband.9 CP40/759, rot. 221. Giles is not recorded thereafter, and died before Easter 1453, by which date his widow was being sued by a dyer from Chichester for a debt of £3 14s. 9d. She was still living in 1460.10 CP40/769, rot. 168d; 799, rot. 98d.