RYDOUT, William

While evidence for Rydout’s forebears is lacking, it is possible that the namesake who took part in the Ipswich election for the Parliament of 1411 and arbitrated between two of the borough’s residents eight years later was his father.7 Add. 30158, f. 2. It is unlikely that Rydout himself was the attestor of 1411, given that he did not assume local office until 1433. He went on to hold all the major positions in the borough, and in April 1446 he was chosen to act as an assistant to John Caldwell*, the newly elected alderman of the local guild of Corpus Christi. He was already familiar with the guild’s affairs, since a few years earlier he, Caldwell and others had been responsible for maintaining and repairing its ‘pageants’.8 Ibid. ff. 8v, 9v. In later years Rydout fell out with Caldwell, for in September 1455 he and another burgess, William Heede, were ordered to appear before the bailiffs to show why they should not be disenfranchised for unjustly suing Caldwell contrary to the town’s charter from King John. Apparently they had sued him in Chancery, since later that month they were required to produce the bill by which they had obtained a subpoena against him, but this has not survived. In the same September Rydout and Heede were ordered to provide securities with regard to an unrelated matter, the arrears of £30 in rent that they owed for the farm of a local mill, £20 of which was still outstanding in April 1456. The mill in question was ‘Horswademelle’, which the borough had leased to Rydout for a term of 13 years, beginning in Michaelmas 1444. This was not the first such lease made to him, for he had been among a group of burgesses to whom the authorities had rented out two plots of land in the 1430s, and in 1443 he and two others had acquired the farm of a marsh for a seven-year term.9 Ibid. ff. 8v, 9v, 10v, 20; Bacon, 113; HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 234.

As far as is known, Rydout sat in just one Parliament, the brief assembly of 1447. This assembly, for which the borough allowed him expenses of 26s. 8d.,10 Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., chamberlains’ acct., 1446-7, C/3/3/1/1. cannot have caused him much inconvenience to attend, because it sat at Bury St. Edmunds. After leaving the Commons, he had to wait another 13 years before serving as a bailiff of Ipswich. During his second term as bailiff, he and his co-bailiff, John Walworth†, were caught up in a dispute between Gilbert Debenham I* and John Hyll of Cleydon. Having won a suit for debt against his opponent at Ipswich in late November 1464, Debenham subsequently sued the two bailiffs in the Exchequer for allowing Hyll his liberty before he had settled the debt in question, a sum amounting to just over £15. For his part, Hyll sued Rydout and Walworth in the Chancery over Debenham’s suit at Ipswich. His purpose was to call them to account for ignoring a writ of certiorari that he had secured against Debenham’s action, a neglect of duty that had ensured his condemnation in the borough court.11 E13/151, rots. 26, 28d; C1/27/239.

Rydout may not have survived much beyond 1469 when he relinquished his last offices in the borough. William Rydout, ‘junior’, was active at Ipswich in the following decade but it is likely he was a younger man. A chapman, he had dealings with John Shelley, a mercer from London who sued him at Westminster in 1471 over a debt of £40.12 E13/159, rots. 51d, 53d. The MP had at least one son, John, and it is possible that William junior, along with the Thomas and Robert Rydout who were admitted to the freedom of Ipswich in 1458 and 1465 respectively, were also his children.13 Amor, 260; Add. 30158, ff. 21v, 27.