WOTTON, John

John’s family background is obscure, as is his relationship to Nicholas Wotton II* of Ramsbury, for whom he was acting as a feoffee at the time of his election to Parliament. Nicholas came from Wootton Bassett, to the south of Cricklade, and his acquisitions of substantial landed holdings there and elsewhere in Wiltshire are well documented, but little is recorded about the property of his putative kinsman. What is known is that John’s wife inherited from her uncle Thomas Weston a messuage, a moiety of a similar building, five acres of land and annual rents of 3s. in Chelworth near Cricklade, of which the couple took possession in the spring of 1424.2 CIPM, xxii. 254; CFR, xv. 77. Elsewhere in Chelworth the MP leased a toft and carucate, for which together with other land at Calcutt he paid an annual rent of 33s. 4d. to Sir John Berkeley† (d.1428) of Beverstone. Wotton served Berkeley as a feoffee of manors in Somerset, which were ‘leased’ without royal licence to Sir John and his second wife.3 CIPM, xxiii. 106-7; CCR, 1422-9, pp. 370-1, 377. Given this connexion, we may be confident that it was the same John Wotton who was party to the settlement of estates in Gloucestershire on the marriage of Berkeley’s son and heir Sir Maurice II*,4 CCR, 1454-61, p. 417. especially as the MP’s home near Cricklade was close to the Gloucestershire border; and that it was he who attested the shire elections of 1427.

Wotton’s occupation is not known, but he may have been the ‘clerk’ who was a feoffee for Robert atte More† and his wife Joan in the manors the latter had inherited in Wiltshire and Hampshire, during the years from 1419 to 1430; and who, as a trustee, in July 1425 conveyed Joan’s inheritance of an acre of land in Cricklade, the advowson of the church of St. Sampson there, and, in a separate transaction, the manor of Cricklade itself, to Sir Walter Hungerford†, a prominent member of the Council of Henry VI’s minority and shortly to become treasurer of England.5 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 374, 388; Hungerford Cart. i (ibid. xlix), 56-59; ii (ibid. lx), 1129, 1131-2; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 693; iii. 770-1. It may be that the description ‘clerk’ refers to an office rather than indicating that Wotton was a cleric. The MP acted as a trustee for Nicholas Wotton in the manor of Westrop and Hampton by Highworth from 1431 until 1446, then settling it on Nicholas for life with remainder to his daughter Elizabeth, in accordance with a licence from the King.6 CPR, 1429-36, p. 118; 1446-52, p. 52; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 315-16. Following his election to Parliament for Cricklade in 1432, John twice stood surety for later representatives of the borough: John Castelcombe*, returned in 1437, and Thomas Child*, elected in 1447.7 C219/15/1, 4.