WRYTHER, John

Wryther, who acquired a messuage in Shoreham in the summer of 1402,3 CP25(1)/240/80/25. was one of the eight townsmen whose arrest was ordered in May 1407 after a Portuguese merchant alleged that they had in their possession a cargo illegally seized in the Channel a year earlier. They were to be brought to Chancery to answer the accusation, but whether they had themselves been responsible for the capture of the Portuguese vessel or had purchased the goods from the seamen who were does not transpire.4 CPR, 1405-8, p. 354; Cal. Signet Letters ed. Kirby, 692. Such dubious matters apart, Wryther made a living through trade, and although his early dealings are only documented intermittently it is clear that he developed widespread interests which brought him prosperity. He was part owner and master of La Nicholas of Shoreham, which carried wool over to Calais for the famous London mercer Richard Whittington†, and in 1421 he supplied salt for the preparation of meat sent from Sussex to Normandy for consumption by the retinue of the Earl Marshal, John Mowbray.5 CCR, 1405-9, p. 178; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis 1985), 351. Other of his shipments included a cargo of barley and oats dispatched in October the same year on The Jamys of Shoreham, and one of grain and herring loaded on The Trinite, which sailed the following January. Wryther represented his home town in Parliament in 1427, by which date he was regularly importing wine through the larger port of Southampton, where it was transferred together with other commodities, such as iron, cereals and soap onto small boats for shipment along the Sussex coast.6 E122/34/8; 184/3; Port Bk. 1427-30 (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1913), 28, 31, 58, 64, 69, 71. He also shipped wine from Bordeaux directly to Winchelsea: E159/206, recorda Easter rot. 15d. While up at Westminster to attend the Commons he took the opportunity to bring suits in the court of common pleas against his debtors, appearing in person to do so.7 CP40/667, rot. 30. Indeed, in the previous five years he had often initiated litigation against men from Sussex who owed him money for goods he had supplied.8 CP40/647, rots. 84d, 189; 652, rot. 368d; 658 rot. 365.

As Wryther’s trading concerns expanded in the late 1420s he reached the decision to set up a business in Winchester, one of the most important centres of cloth production in the country and the location of expanding markets. A measure of the success of his enterprise is that in 1430 he paid as much as 40s. towards the parliamentary fifteenth collected in the city, a sum which suggests he was then the third wealthiest person dwelling there (two others paid 50s. each, but no-one else proffered more than 20s.).9 D.J. Keene, Surv. Winchester (Winchester Studies, 2), i. 406; ii. 1392. The newcomer probably resided in a substantial house in Wongar Street, and in 1437 began a tenancy of the adjacent ‘Loggegardyn’. In the tax assessments of the previous year he was said to possess land in Hampshire worth £5 p.a.10 Ibid. ii. nos. 366, 378; E179/173/92. Wryther continued to trade through Southampton, notably in iron and wine which as before he re-shipped to Shoreham and Winchelsea, only now he also had iron, oil and woad delivered by cart to Winchester.11 Brokage Bk. 1439-40 (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1941), 14, 18, 83, 86, 101; Port Bk. 1435-6 (Soton. Rec. Ser. vii), 68; 1439-40 (ibid. v), 21, 34. It is indicative of the expansion of Wryther’s trade inland that his customers came to include not only landowners and artisans from Sussex, but also others from Oxford, Buckinghamshire and Southwark.12 CP40/715, rots. 154d, 365, 633; 724, rot. 184d. To further his dealings with Italian merchants who traded through Southampton and in London, Wryther entered a partnership with Peter James* (who had represented Southampton in the same Parliament of 1427). On 1 June 1430 the two men were bound over to pay Battista de Negroni and another Genoese merchant the large sum of £223 4s. 2d.13 Cal. P. and M. London, 1413-37, p. 261. Such trading activities inevitably led to further litigation against Wyther’s many debtors, whom he energetically pursued in the common pleas throughout the 1430s. As before, he took the opportunity of attendance at Parliaments at Westminster to visit in court in person.14 CP40/680, rot. 29; 686, rot. 259d; 687, rots. 13d, 156; 691, rot. 543; 699, rot. 398d.

In 1429 Wryther had paid the authorities at Winchester five marks to be exonerated from serving as a bailiff in the city.15 Black Bk. 67. Yet he was prepared to take up the superior office of mayor, to which he was duly elected in September 1431. During his mayoral term the citizens returned him to the Parliament summoned to assemble on 12 May 1432, and when serving as a Member of the Commons on 22 June he was appointed as joint alnager of Winchester and the county as a whole for the next ten years, after he and Walter Hore agreed to pay for the farm of the alnage one mark a year more than the 48 marks p.a. previously offered by John Veel*.16 CFR, xvi. 73. In the following year he was involved in the management of La Starre Inn in the High Street, which belonged to the city.17 Keene, ii. nos. 82/89. It is perhaps a mark of his popularity in Winchester that he was elected to Parliament twice more before being re-elected mayor for a second term in 1437.

Meanwhile, in July 1437 Mercy Carew, the wealthy widow of Nicholas Carew†, and herself the heiress of much property in Winchester, had sealed bonds promising to pay Wryther £60 in three instalments, ending in August 1440. Although the purpose of the transaction remains unclear, it evidently had something to do with the rental income of £4 p.a. which Mercy received from land at Otterbourne, for not long afterwards this came into the possession of Wryther and his wife.18 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 126-7, 129; CP25(1)/207/33/11. It might be assumed that Wryther’s wife was one of Mercy’s daughters, but she was not mentioned in her will: Surr. Arch. Collns. xliii. 53-55. Wryther and his joint farmer of the alnage were obliged to petition for a special writ of discharge at the Exchequer for two of their 30 official seals, which while in the keeping of Philip atte Welle of New Alresford ‘by fortune of fire were brent and molten in the house of the said attorney’, but this discharge was not obtained until July 1443, some 18 months after he and Hore had been dismissed from their office.19 E101/344/17, m. 15. Curiously, the two men had lost their positions in January 1442 (a few months before the end of their fixed term) after a petition had been sent to the King from the mayor, bailiffs and commonalty of Winchester, complaining that the subsidy had been committed at farm to ‘certain persons who dwell far from the city’, and that this had resulted in losses, injuries and vexations to the city’s inhabitants.20 CFR, xvii. 230. It would appear, therefore, that Wryther had left Winchester once more. At Easter 1444 he and his wife formally relinquished to Thomas Tremayne II* their messuage and garden in Wongar Street, and at the same time they conveyed to a group of men, including Robert Colpays* and Thomas Gardener*, the £4 annual rent they received at Otterbourne.21 CP25(1)/207/33/11, 12; Keene, ii. nos. 366, 378. Evidently, the couple had moved back to Sussex, although not necessarily to their former home at Shoreham. Four years earlier Wryther had acquired an estate at Ringmer and Malling close to Lewes, and in 1442 he and Amicia had purchased a house nearby in Cliffe.22 CP25(1)/241/88/23; 89/5. This was where they now took up residence.

The elderly Wryther was among the prominent men of Cliffe who thought it prudent to obtain royal pardons in the immediate aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, which caused serious unrest in the region. In the same year, 1450, he is recorded bringing a suit against two of the leading merchants of Salisbury, William Hore II* and Thomas Freeman*, for a debt of 20 marks, and in the Easter term of 1453 he sued Thomas White, a draper from Southampton, for the substantial sum of £84.23 CPR, 1446-52, p. 354; CP40/759, rot. 54; 769, rot. 58d. The date of his death, which occurred within the next four years, is not recorded, but his widow lived on at Cliffe, clearly in prosperous circumstances. When she died intestate in 1457 Archbishop Bourgchier, in whose immediate jurisdiction Cliffe lay (as part of the deanery of South Malling), appointed none other than his own brother, John, Lord Berners, and his nephew Humphrey Bourgchier, together with Sir Richard Fiennes, to administer her estate. The commissioners, named on 19 June, were instructed to complete an inventory by 15 Aug. The archbishop subsequently excommunicated Thomas Sherman alias Baker* of Lewes for violating this sequestration of Amicia’s goods, and petitioned Pope Calixtus III to aggravate the processes against him.24 Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 181; CPL, xi. 156-7. It is possible that Sherman’s wife, Joan, was a kinswoman of the Wrythers, for at the close of the century her son Thomas claimed ownership of property at Ringmer and Cliffe in accordance with a settlement allegedly made by Amicia in favour of his parents and Joan’s issue.25 CP40/948, rot. 348.