WOOD, Robert I

A lawyer, Wood was clerk of the peace for Suffolk for nearly 40 years and spent much of his career away from Ipswich. First heard of in 1402, it was as ‘of Suffolk’ that he stood surety for Thomas Godstone* of Colchester that year,9 CFR, xii. 179-80. and he was for several years an officer on the estates of the prior of Ely in Norfolk and Suffolk. Furthermore, a royal pardon he received in July 1437 described him as ‘late of’ Monewden, ‘Bauderye’ and ‘Crayng’ as well as of Ipswich, indicating interests elsewhere in Suffolk, perhaps largely or wholly in the right of his wife.10 C67/38, m. 11. Monewden is in east Suff. but the other places are unidentified. More often an attestor of parliamentary elections for that county than the borough of Ipswich, he was a mainpernor for Sir Robert Wingfield* when the knight was returned to the Parliament of 1429, the first of his own two known Parliaments. At the end of the following year, he and John Wood† (almost certainly a relative), stood surety for Thomas Denys*, one of the men chosen to represent the borough in the Parliament of 1431.11 C219/14/2. Wood’s widow was to leave John’s da. a bequest in her will of 1448: Reg. Wylby, f. 154.

A portman of Ipswich by the time of the Parliament of 1429, Wood had recently completed a term as bailiff of the town when he entered the Commons again in 1435. During that period of office, he and his co-bailiff, John Deken*, took on the responsibility of supervising the rebuilding of a house at the end of the town’s guildhall,12 Add. 30158, f. 6v. and it was probably during this same term that William Dunton, alnager of Suffolk and Essex, sued him and Deken in the Chancery. Dunton alleged that they and three other Ipswich men had prevented him from serving a precept in the borough on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury, by threatening him with physical violence and death, and had prosecuted him by writ of praemunire in the court of King’s bench. He added that he feared for his life because the sheriff had failed to act upon a writ of supplicavit (requiring Wood, Deken and their associates to keep the peace) he had obtained.13 C1/45/52. Wood appears to have featured in another Chancery case during his fourth term as bailiff. This concerned a debt of £9 13s. 4d., over which John Smith, an Ipswich merchant, had sued Robert Smith in the town’s court. In a bill of about 1443, Robert claimed that the debt was not his responsibility, since it was owed for wine for which the bailiffs of 1442-3, John Caldwell* and Thomas Denys, had sent him to John to buy. He also alleged that John Smith had unfairly persuaded the present bailiffs of the town (presumably Wood and William Weathereld*, the successors of Caldwell and Denys) to refuse him counsel in the debt suit.14 C1/46/363. It is unclear whether Smith was John Smith II*.

Some evidence for the private activities which Wood pursued alongside his busy official career has also survived. In June 1435 he, Robert Cavendish, serjeant-at-law, and Sir Robert Wingfield released a plot of land in London to Robert Warner, a resident of the City, a transaction in which his interest was probably that of a feoffee. A deed of the following year suggests that Wood served John Andrew III*, another Suffolk lawyer with an Ipswich connexion, in the same capacity, and he was again associated with Wingfield and Cavendish in a demise of London property at some date before 1443.15 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 47-48, 107; CAD, ii. B 2179. Although a lawyer and regarded as a member of the gentry (he was styled a ‘gentleman’ in a royal pardon he received in July 1446),16 C67/39, m. 8. Wood also engaged in commerce, obtaining licence from the Crown to ship 160 quarters of barley from Great Yarmouth to Ipswich in early 1440.17 CPR, 1436-41, p. 362.

In spite of his previous association with Sir Robert Wingfield, Wood subsequently fell out with that unruly knight, whose lawless activities prompted him and two other Ipswich j.p.s, William Weathereld and John Deken, to send a justices’ certificate to the King in November 1447. Asserting that a jury they had summoned several weeks earlier had not dared indict Sir Robert, they certified that Wingfield and several of his servants had broken into a house in the borough on the previous 16 Sept., with the intention of beating a local burgess, John Creek. Furthermore, one of his men had nearly killed another burgess and he had helped to shelter three men who had attacked and injured Thomas Andrew, ‘gentleman’ on a royal highway within the borough. In the end, the certificate was to no avail: obliged to appear at Westminster in connexion with these charges on 25 Nov. 1447, Wingfield received a royal pardon in the following Hilary term.18 KB27/746, rex. rot. 46.

Wood died soon after the making of the certificate. Not heard of after 1447, he was certainly dead when his widow, Margery, made her will, dated 17 Apr. 1448. She sought burial in the chancel of St. Clement’s church in Ipswich and provided for a chaplain to pray for the soul of her first husband, Thomas Mowmplerys, in the church of West Creeting. She also directed her executors to dispose of Mowmplerys’s estate, located at Creeting and elsewhere in the Stowmarket vicinity, as well as her own lands in Ipswich and elsewhere. Among those mentioned in the will, for which probate was granted on 4 June 1448, are her two sons, John and Thomas, but it is not clear whether Wood was their father. Margery appointed two executors, Thomas Bishop, the town clerk of Ipswich, and John James. Bishop was also one of her late husband’s executors, for he is described as such in a royal pardon granted to him in October 1455.19 Reg. Wylby, f. 154; C67/41, m. 29. A namesake of the MP was active in Ipswich after gaining admission to the freedom of the borough in 1462, but he is not mentioned in Margery’s will.20 Add. 30158, ff. 24v, 34, 35v; Suff. RO (Ipswich), archdeaconry of Suff. wills, IC/AA2/3/62.