WOTTON, Nicholas I

Some modifications need to be made to the earlier biography.3 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 905-7. This biography erred in stating that it was the London MP who acquired land ‘in and around Kingston-upon-Thames [sic] and Kingston Blount in Oxfordshire’. The man concerned was his namesake Nicholas Wotton II*, and it was to the latter’s da., Agnes (who married William York), that this estate descended: C139/154/27; C1/16/319; CAD, ii. C2041; vi. C3818, 4374, 6160; VCH Oxon. viii. 25-26. There is no evidence that the London MP was survived by a daughter.

The identification of Wotton’s first wife as a daughter of Robert Corby, the former knight of the shire for Kent, is suggested by the details of several transactions concerning lands in that county and Essex. The connexion between the two men was well established by 1400 when the manor of Bayhouse in Essex was conveyed by Corby to our MP, and this remained in the possession of the latter’s family until the early sixteenth century.4 VCH Essex, viii. 61; Essex Feet of Fines, iii. 242.

In the 1440s Wotton made an agreement with John Bamburgh*, the Kentish lawyer, for one of his sons, Richard, to marry Elizabeth, Bamburgh’s daughter and coheir, but neither father lived to see the contract fulfilled: in his will of December 1449 Bamburgh instructed his executors to honour their undertaking.5 Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Rochester consist. ct. wills DRb/PWr 1, ff. 87, 101.