Wilscotes is described as a cloth-maker in a near-contemporary list of the officers of Northampton.Northampton Recs. ed. Markham and Cox, ii. 557 (where he is erroneously named Charles). Nothing is known of him before his election as bailiff in 1424 and very little after. In Michaelmas term 1426 he and a more important townsman, Henry Stone*, had an action for a debt of £5 pending against a husbandman of Duddington near Collyweston in the north of the county. He was elected to the 1432 Parliament, and in the following year he offered mainprise for the attendance of one of the elected MPs, William Rushden*. CP40/663, rot. 177d; C219/14/3, 4. By the summer of 1435 he was serving as one of the four borough coroners, and in January 1443 he witnessed a grant by Stone and Rushden. He was still alive in 1445 when he stood surety in the court of King’s bench on behalf of another of the leading townsmen, Thomas Knightley*.CCR, 1437-45, p. 46; KB27/736, rot. 46d.
