WYDEWELL, Edmund

A native of Yarmouth, Wydewell was active by September 1436 when he began a suit for debt in the borough court.9 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls, 1435-7, Y/C 4/144, m. 6d; 145, m. 11. A merchant, he features as such in customs accounts for the town. In December 1447, for example, he exported fish (worth £54) and worsted cloth. Ten years later, he shipped abroad a cargo of maslin (a mixed crop of wheat and rye), oats and woollen cloths, this time aboard his own vessel.10 E122/151/75, m. 1; 194/9, m. 2d. As the first of these shipments indicates, he was involved in the local fishing industry, and he was renting a ‘fish house’ at Yarmouth from the abbey of St. Benet of Hulme by 1450.11 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll, 1449-50, Y/C 4/156, m. 8d. He also held a quay in the town, and shortly before his death the borough court amerced him for not keeping it in a satisfactory state of repair.12 Ibid. 1478-9, Y/C 4/183, m. 11d.

During his first Parliament, Wydewell had to attend to personal matters as well as his parliamentary duties, for he helped to administer the will of his father, who died in early 1451.13 Reg. Aleyn, f. 65. The Parliament was dissolved in late May 1451 and four months later he was appointed one of Yarmouth’s bailiffs, an office in which he was to serve seven terms in all. During the second of these terms, he and his co-bailiff, Alexander Brygate, became embroiled in a controversy with the Cinque Ports. The Ports enjoyed access to fishing grounds off the Norfolk coast and possessed jurisdictional rights at Yarmouth’s autumn herring fair, to which they sent four representatives, known as bailiffs. Disputes were not uncommon, and the controversy in which Wydewell was involved erupted after he and Brygate arrested the Ports’ bailiffs at the fair of 1456. On 28 Oct. that year the Crown (no doubt responding to a petition from the Ports) ordered the two Yarmouth bailiffs to explain themselves and to send the prisoners to the Chancery. In response to the royal writ, Wydewell returned that he and Brygate had made the arrests after several merchants from Norwich and Bishop’s Lynn had sued the Ports’ bailiffs in the borough court on the 25th of the same month. According to these plaintiffs, a fisherman from the Cinque Ports, William Stamer of Hastings, had stolen a boat and goods worth 2,000 marks from them while fishing off Great Yarmouth, and they demanded redress from the Ports’ bailiffs for the offences done by their fellow Portsman. Not prepared to accept this turn of events, the barons of the Cinque Ports filed a bill in Chancery in November 1456, outlining their towns’ traditional rights at Yarmouth and demanding that Wydewell and Brygate should account for their actions. They did not, however, assume that Stamer was innocent, for they arrested him and his crew in the meantime. (Later, in May 1458, they wrote to the aggrieved merchants from Norwich and Lynn, inviting them to sue him for robbery, provided that they ceased all legal process against Robert Onewyn I*, one of the men arrested at Great Yarmouth.) In short, the quarrel between the Ports and Great Yarmouth was jurisdictional and concerned the right or otherwise of Wydewell and his associate to act as they had done against the Ports’ bailiffs. The Ports were still pursuing a claim for the wrongful arrest of their representatives in the summer of 1457.14 H. Swinden, Yarmouth, 220; C1/26/566; White and Black Bks. of Cinque Ports (Kent Rec. Ser. xix), 36-39.

A year later, Wydewell and Hugh atte Fenne* appeared in the borough court to sue another burgess for debt.15 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll, 1457-8, Y/C 4/163, m. 5d. Wydewell enjoyed a close relationship with atte Fenne, with whom he sat in the Parliament of 1450-1. He was a feoffee for Hugh, who was very probably his brother-in-law.16 C140/55/22; R. Virgoe, ‘Hugh atte Fenne and Bks. at Cambridge’, Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. x. 93. In the early 1460s he and atte Fenne co-operated with each other to support another Yarmouth burgess, John Russe†, then in dispute with a rival for office in the town.17 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 281-2. Hugh was a friend of the well known Pastons, self-proclaimed heirs to the estates of the late Sir John Fastolf of Caister next Yarmouth, and it would appear from their correspondence that Wydewell was likewise on cordial terms with them. In a letter of perhaps late 1461, Robert Cutler, vicar of Caister, told John Paston* that he was ‘meche be-held on-to Tomas Grene and to Edmund Wydewel, broder to Hew a Fen, for thei reporte meche worchepe of zowre masterchepe in al materes’.18 Ibid. 260. The Pastons took an interest in affairs at Yarmouth and in the autumn of 1462 Margaret Paston informed her husband of the news of Wydewell’s election to a third term as one its bailiffs.19 Ibid. i. 286.

With this appointment, the first of three consecutive terms as bailiff, Edmund embarked upon the busiest period of his official career, since he also sat in the Parliament of 1463-5 and became controller of customs at Yarmouth a few weeks after the first session of that assembly. Apart from his office of controller, he proved of some service to the Yorkist Crown in other respects. In 1462 he lent Edward IV £16 13s. 4d.20 E405/40, m. 1. and in the following year he contracted, for £100, to supply a considerable quantity of victuals to the campaign that the King intended to lead into Scotland.21 E403/830, m. 4. During the later 1460s Wydewell was one of the borough’s auditors and served a sixth term as bailiff, and he became a customs collector there in August 1469. While this position must have occupied an appreciable amount of his time, it did not come without reward, since periodically the Exchequer would pay him and a fellow collector, Hugh Austyn, ad hoc sums of up to £10 to share between them in recognition of their work.22 E405/54, m. 8; 55, m. 4d; 56, m. 2d; 57, mm. 4, 4d; 59, m. 3d.

Notwithstanding his service to Edward IV, in December 1470 Wydewell was an attorney in the borough court for John Wenlock*, Lord Wenlock,23 Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll, 1470-1, Y/C 4/175, m. 6d. who had come out in support of the recently restored Henry VI. Yet it seems unlikely that Wydewell was a strong advocate of the Readeption. The political events of 1470-1 did not interrupt his career as an office-holder, and he remained active as such in the last decade of his life. In early 1473 the Crown pardoned him in his capacity as collector and controller of customs,24 C67/49, m. 30. and he continued as controller for some months after completing his final term as bailiff in 1475. Only some 18 months before his death, the government placed him on a commission of sewers.

During his later years, Wydewell was also busy with private affairs. In this period he pursued suits in the borough court, including a plea upon the Statute of Labourers against William Whytyng, presumably an absconding employee,25 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls, 1470-1, 1474-5, 1476-7, 1478-9, Y/C 4/175, m. 9d; 179, m. 1d; 181, m. 3; 183, m. 1. and helped to administer the estates of two fellow burgesses. When Hamon Pulham* drew up his will in July 1475, he named Wydewell, his ‘worshyppfull frend’, as its supervisor.26 Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Gelour, ff. 125-6. Some six months later, Hugh atte Fenne appointed the MP one of his executors; he also bequeathed to him his two best gowns and a sum of 20 marks.27 R. Virgoe, ‘Will of Hugh atte Fenne’, Norf. Rec. Soc. lvi. 50, 52. Wydewell was active as Hugh’s executor before his own death, for he and a co-executor, Henry Heydon, presented a rector to the atte Fenne living at Herringby, Norfolk, in 1478.28 F. Blomefield, Norf. xi. 225.

Wydewell made his own will on 11 May 1479 and died on the following 29 Sept. Requesting burial next to his father’s tomb in the cemetery of St. Nicholas’s church at Yarmouth, to the high altar of which he left 26s. 8d. He also donated 20s., along with all debts owed to him, to the light of Our Lady there. Among Wydewell’s other religious bequests were the sums of 13s. 4d. that he left to each of the Dominican, Franciscan and Carmelite houses at Great Yarmouth and to that of the Augustinians at nearby Southtown. In return, the friars were to pray for the souls of himself and his benefactors. Wydewell awarded his long-lived mother a life interest in one of his messuages at Yarmouth and an annuity of 40s., and he left his daughter Margaret (yet to find a husband although by then aged about 27) 100 marks towards her marriage. To his wife, Christine, he bequeathed the messuage in which they lived, along with all his household goods, a sum of £40 and a ship called Le John. He awarded the remainder of his goods to his executors, Thomas Duke, Thomas Baynard† and Edmund Jenney†.29 PCC 12 Logge. Duke and Baynard were his sons-in-law, having respectively married his eldest and youngest daughters, Agnes (at least 30 years old at her father’s death) and Rose (then aged about 24), and Jenney was a kinsman and executor of his associate, Hugh atte Fenne.30 C140/70/29; Virgoe, ‘Hugh atte Fenne and Bks.’, 95. Banyard had close links with Great Yarmouth, for he was steward of the borough in the mid 1470s,31 Gt. Yarmouth ct. rolls, 1473-4, 1474-5, 1476-7, 1478-9, Y/C 4/178, m. 1; 179, m. 1; 180, m. 1; 181, m. 1. and sat for it in at least one Parliament of Henry VII’s reign. All three executors were gentry of Suffolk and an inquisition post mortem held in the county after Wydewell’s death shows that he himself had possessed properties there. Worth at least ten marks clear p.a., these were all situated in Lothingland hundred, that part of Suffolk closest to Great Yarmouth, and consisted of arable, wood and grazing land in Gorleston, Bradwell, Hopton and other parishes. Wydewell left no surviving male heirs, so his estate was divided between his three daughters, although while she lived their widowed mother, still alive in late 1485, retained her interest in it.32 C140/70/29; Gt. Yarmouth ct. roll, 1485-6, Y/C 4/190, m. 2d. Miles Wydewell, one of Hugh atte Fenne’s feoffees in the mid 1460s, and John Wydewell, who was put on a royal comm. at Yarmouth in 1477, were evidently relatives, but their exact relationship to the MP is not known: CPR, 1461-7, p. 471; 1476-85, p. 49; CP25(1)/170/192/20.