WYDESLADE, John

The Wydeslades took their name from the place in north Devon originally known as ‘the wide slæd, where they had been resident for generations.10 It is probable that this was Winslade in East Putford, where Wydeslade is known to have held lands, but there were also four other places in the county which were known as Wydeslade (in Lamerton, Filleigh, South Pool, and Clyst St. Mary): CP40/658, rot. 413; Place Names of Devon (English Place Name Soc. viii, ix), i. 43, 107, 187, 328; ii. 586. It was here that the MP, whose parentage has not been discovered, inherited a small manor and a few parcels of land. If his inheritance had been insubstantial, Wydeslade soon added to it, for by 1436 he was said to command an income of £20 p.a. Part of this sum was derived from holdings centred on the Cornish manor of Treglasta near Launceston and extending over some 1,300 acres, which a few years after his death were said to be worth £8 annually.11 C142/55/106; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (ii); CP40/701, rot. 338; 710, rot. 129d; 712, rot. 126d; 734, rot. 336; LR2/191; SC11/968.

No details of Wydeslade’s early education have come to light, but it evidently entailed some training in the law, and by the beginning of Henry V’s reign he had embarked on a professional career in the ranks of the clerical staff of the law courts at Westminster. He owed his initial advancement to the patronage of a fellow west-countryman, the chief justice Sir William Hankford, who shortly after his appointment in 1413 made Wydeslade clerk of the warrants of the court of King’s bench.12 KB27/610; C142/55/106. An undated memorandum of Wydeslade’s appointment as ‘keeper of the bills of attorney’ was enrolled on the plea roll of the KB in Hil. term 1423, but the evidence of his name at the foot of the relevant rotulets indicates that he held the office from at least the autumn of 1413: KB27/647, rex rot. 17d. Life at the hub of activity near the capital suited the young Wydeslade, and he may have made the most of the opportunities opening to him, for it was in these years that he adopted the motto ‘ioye sanz fin’.13 KB27/622, att. rot. 1; Sel. Cases King’s Bench (Selden Soc. lxxxviii), p. xvi. He began to supplement the fees of his office by acting as an attorney at the assizes, from 1417, and then in the court of common pleas, where he was accredited by 1422.14 JUST1/1531, rot. 46; Yr. Bk. 1 Hen. VI (Selden Soc. l), 40, 89. In particular, he acted for Hankford’s family after his patron’s death in 1423, by serving as his former master’s executor, and as a feoffee for the judge’s grandson, Sir Richard Hankford*, and after the latter’s early death for his widow and her new husband Lewis John*. Later, he transferred his loyalty to Hankford’s daughter and coheiress, the wife of William Bourgchier, afterwards Lord Fitzwaryn, who employed him in the latter part of Henry VI’s reign.15 CCR, 1429-35, p. 85; CP40/658, att. rot. 5; 696, rot. 104; 734, rot. 252; 780, rot. 106.

Within a few years, Wydeslade moved from the King’s bench to the other common law court housed in Westminster Hall, the common pleas. From the summer of 1423 he occasionally performed the duties associated with the office of filacer, without, however, being assigned one of the formal portfolios associated with specific counties.16 CP40/650, rot. 168. It is possible that even at this early stage in his career he was being groomed for further promotion and he may have served a kind of apprenticeship under Thomas Brown III*, one of the prothonotaries of the court, for many years later he referred to the practice he had learnt from his ‘master Broun’.17 Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber (Selden Soc. li), 177. At the same time, his employment by the Hankfords had become just part of an increasingly extensive private practice from which he derived considerable wealth and repute.18 CP40/649, rot. 315; 654, rot. 128; 658, rots. 480, att. 5d; 660, rots. 70, 131, 360d; 667, rot. 321; 670, rot. 31; JUST1/1540, rots. 111, 115, 116. Among the most prominent of the numerous, mainly south-western, gentry who sought his counsel in these early years was Sir John Dynham of Nutwell, whose great manor of Hartland was not far from Wydeslade’s home at Winslade, and from whom he held some of his lands. However, his position was rendered difficult, for Dynham was embroiled in a longstanding dispute with the abbot of Hartland, another of Wydeslade’s feudal overlords. In the event, he appeared in the court of common pleas against Dynham as the abbot’s attorney (and would do so again later, in 1463, in further litigation). In 1444 Wydeslade became involved in the dispute in a different capacity, when he was appointed to a commission of oyer and terminer to settle the discord between Dynham’s son and a new abbot.19 CP40/658, rots. 135, att. 5; 660, att. rot. 2; CPR, 1441-6, p. 292; H. Kleineke, ‘Dinham Fam.’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 181-5; KB27/810, rot. 35.

Throughout the 1420s Wydeslade’s professional activities kept him on the move between Westminster and the south-west, and his increasing experience led to his appointment as an associate assize justice in the region in 1430. A familiar figure in Devon, in 1431 he was a natural choice as a parliamentary representative for the burgesses of Barnstaple who often returned outsiders to Parliament. Further duties as a justice of oyer and terminer and a series of royal commissions in the south-west throughout the 1430s and early 1440s were to follow, forcing Wydeslade to continue his peripatetic lifestyle. In particular, in 1439 he was appointed to a series of commissions of oyer and terminer to settle several violent disputes between the leading members of the Devon gentry which were seriously disturbing the peace. It was, however, in that autumn, that he achieved sudden and dramatic advancement in his profession. In September Sir Richard Newton was appointed chief justice of common pleas, and within weeks of taking office he appointed Wydeslade chief prothonotary of the court, in succession to the ageing Thomas Heuster*. His new responsibilities demanded that he should spend the legal terms at Westminster, while during the vacations he was with increasing regularity employed as an associate justice of assize.

Yet Wydeslade still found time to conduct an extensive private legal practice. Soon some of the greatest men of the south-west, both laymen and clergy, came to be numbered among his clients, who included Bishop Edmund Lacy of Exeter, the abbot of Tavistock, the prior of Launceston, William, Lord Botreaux, Sir William Bonville and Sir Robert Chalons†. The corporation of Plymouth engaged his services,20 CP40/670, rot. 121; 677, rot. 336; 683, rot. 545; 686, rot. 41; 695, rot. 336; 697, rot. 128d; 700, rot. 435d; 702, rots. 127, 135; 703, rots. 427, att. 3; 710, rot. 125; 713, rot. 333; 718, rots. 105d, 113d; 720, rot. 107; 734, rot. 296; 745, rot. 52d; 758, rot. 147; 761, rot. 225; CP25(1)/22/122/16; 46/83/111; C146/175; JUST1/1536, rots. 14d, 24d; 1540, rot. 77; KB27/736, rex rot. 9; 746, rot. 97; 798, att. rot. 1; C244/18/60; E40/1861, 2625. and on many occasions he acted as attorney for the sheriffs of Devon, ensuring the passage of writs from the common pleas to the office-holder.21 CP40/766, rot. 108d; 780, rot. 322. Ranking among the most senior clerks in the royal courts he could command wide respect among others of his profession, such as John Copplestone*, and the later serjeants William Hyndeston* and William Boef*.22 CP40/720, rot. 312; CP25(1)/46/83/122; C1/17/237, 315-20; C254/145/274; CFR, xvi. 158-9; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 324. On occasion, the justices themselves called upon the expertise of their clerks, as in 1443 when Wydeslade was consulted over the privileges of the Chancery, or in 1459 when the prothonotaries, headed by Wydeslade, were summoned to testify to their practice of entering assizes into the record.23 Yr. Bk. Mich. 22 Hen. VI (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), 7; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, 177. At other times Wydeslade proffered his opinion on points of law, even when he had been called simply as a witness.24 C1/17/318. His standing was reflected in his admission to the prestigious London fraternity of St. John the Baptist in 1443-4.25 Guildhall Lib., London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 373.

The sheer extent of Wydeslade’s activities in these years could on occasion lead to problems, as in the case of debt litigation brought by Henry Webber, dean of Exeter cathedral, in his capacity as executor of Bishop Lacy. Webber had placed the obligation on which the suit was based in the chief prothonotary’s keeping, but within a short time the document went missing from the court records, and Webber was left to assert in Chancery that it had been ‘privily taken’ from Wydeslade’s custody.26 C1/45/371. While Webber did not press the matter against either Wydeslade or his executors, on other occasions the prothonotary’s employment placed him in more serious difficulties, as did the execution of the will of John Hengstecote, one of the filacers of the King’s bench. Several wills of members of Hengstecote’s family were being administered around the same time and the executors of one of them proceeded to pursue Wydeslade for some of the filacer’s debts.27 CP40/720, rot. 114. At times Wydeslade’s clients themselves could be of questionable character. In the early 1440s Stephen Marcey, abbot of Dureford, granted an annuity of £20 to him, his fellow prothonotary and former mentor Thomas Broun and a number of associates, but in about 1444 Marcey was deposed under accusations of squandering the abbey’s resources and incurring unsustainable debts – a valid charge, as the abbey’s annual income was said to amount to only about 100 marks. Marcey’s successors sought to revoke the grant, and met attempts by the deprived grantees to distrain the abbey estates for payment with successful action in Chancery.28 C1/15/27-28; 27/178; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 306-7; VCH Suss. ii. 90; C253/38/303.

Wydeslade does not, on balance, appear to have been a litigious man, and only a few examples of suits brought on his own account can be found.29 CPR, 1441-6, p. 387; 1446-52, p. 303; CP40/749, rot. 1; 760, rot. 186d; 779, rot. 601. For example, in 1428 he pursued the notorious Adam Vivian* for a debt of £6, and in January 1446 a group of lesser Devon men were outlawed at his suit, on accusations of having assaulted and threatened his servants at Great Torrington.30 CP40/669, rot. 12; 740, rot. 409. Towards the end of his life, however, he showed more of an inclination to settle his own affairs at law, and brought a series of actions against various individuals for debts and infringements of his title to property, as well as accusing a band of Cornishmen of injuring one of his servants and stealing goods worth £20.31 CP40/799, rot. 511; 802, rots. 1d, 110, 216; 806, rot. 319; 810, rot. 104d; 813, rots. 101, 307; CPR, 1467-77, p. 4. The sums Wydeslade sought to recover are indicative of the wealth which he had been able to accumulate as prothonotary. The fees of his office were substantial, and were richly supplemented by the income from his private practice.32 CCR, 1454-61, p. 349; Hastings, 104; CP40/769, rot. 372.

It is not clear what expressly motivated Wydeslade in the summer of 1451, when he settled his Devon estates on feoffees and provided for their disposition in the event of his death, but he may have fallen ill and felt the need to put his house in order. He stipulated that when he died his widow should keep the lands on condition that she did not remarry, but failing that they were subsequently to pass to his son Richard and his heirs, with remainder to his younger son, John. Only if the issue of both sons failed were his holdings to be sold to provide for masses for his soul and those of family members and his principal patrons, Sir William Hankford and Sir Richard Newton.33 C142/55/106. In the event, Wydeslade lived on for another 17 years. He continued as prothonotary and as an associate justice of assize after Edward IV’s accession, but from about 1463 began to scale back his activities outside Westminster. In the late summer of 1468 he was replaced as first prothonotary by William Copley who had previously been third prothonotary.34 Reps. Spelman, ii. 375. Wydeslade died on 10 Sept. that same year, having made a short will on 1 July. In this, he asked that his executors should go to law to recover his debts, and asked that a trental of St. Gregory should be said for his soul and those of all whose goods he had acquired undeservedly. Otherwise, his pious bequests amounted to just £4 16s. 8d., although he made a point of separately leaving 16s. 8d. to the warden of the London Greyfriars – where he was eventually buried in the ambulatory between the choir and the high altar – to ensure that the stipulated masses would be sung.35 CFR, xx. 216; PCC 24 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 190); Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 385. Reps. Spelman, ii. 375 and C.L. Kingsford, Grey Friars of London, 101, citing Stow’s original notes of Wydeslade’s tomb inscription, give the death date as 1469, but this must be wrong as the date of probate demonstrates. The execution of the will was committed to Wydeslade’s wife, Elizabeth, and John, his younger son, who in line with the testator’s instructions personally appeared in the court of common pleas the following year to recover money owing to him.36 CP40/833, rot. 278d; 840, rot. 487. The younger John, who died in 1485, had been practicing as a lawyer alongside his father since the early 1450s. From later in that decade he sat as a justice of assize and of gaol delivery on the south-western circuit, having previously served as clerk of the assize in Devon,37 C261/11/8; CP40/866, rot. 315; KB27/827, rot. 34; 854, rex rot. 9d; Cornw. RO, Launceston bor. recs., B/Laus/147, m. 2. and in the 1470s he followed his father into the service of the common bench, where he was appointed a filacer in 1472.38 C1/54/128; CCR, 1447-54, p. 332; CPR, 1467-77, p. 400; CP40/806, rot. 308; 820, rot. 33d, 342; 836, rot. 202; PCC 21 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 163v-164); Hastings, 145, 153. It was a different John, the MP’s grandson, who married Agnes (or Anne), gdda. and ultimate h. of the Exeter lawyer William Wynard: C1/10/257; C140/25/40; CP40/864, cart. rot. 2; Stonor Letters (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix, xxx), i, p. xxxi; ii. 100; Baker, ii. 1713.