NICHOLAS, John

The identity of this MP is impossible to establish for certain, not least because the vagaries of late medieval spelling make it conceivable that his surname was actually a variant of ‘Nicoll’ and that he and John Nicoll III* of Malmesbury were one and the same man.1 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 633, assumes that this was the case and, furthermore, that Nicoll and John Nicoll II* were likewise the same person. There was a Nicholas family long established at Roundway, near Devizes, the fifteenth-century heads of which included at least three John Nicholases, although it is impossible to prove it included the Member of 1450.2 VCH Wilts. vii. 191; Feudal Aids, v. 231. If not John Nicoll III, it may well be that the MP of 1450 was the John Nicholas who served as a Wiltshire juror, at the inquisition post mortem for Margaret, widow of the chief justice Sir William Cheyne in October 1443,3 CIPM, xxvi. 68. and at sessions of oyer and terminer held at Salisbury in the summer of 1451 and Bradford-on-Avon in early 1453. Dominating the proceedings of both oyer and terminer sessions was the murder at Edington of the unpopular Bishop Aiscough of Salisbury at the time of Cade’s rebellion.4 KB9/133/14d; 134/1/34. There was also a John Nicholas active in Wiltshire in the late fifteenth century. He married Agnes, widow and executrix of Thomas Hall of Trowbridge and the heiress to a dozen messuages in Steeple Ashton, West Ashton and Hinton. During her previous marriage, Hall had conveyed these holdings to William Reynold of Trowbridge and Richard Lymbury, to hold to the use of her and her heirs, but in the later 1480s or early 1490s she and her then husband, John Nicholas, sued the same feoffees in the Chancery for refusing to release these properties to them. At about that date or a little later, the couple pursued another suit in the same court against Reynold alone, for failing to settle a debt with Thomas Hall.5 C1/103/4; 216/8.