WYKE, John I

Owing to his very common name, Wyke is impossible to identify with certainty. As a result, the cursus honorum above is speculative rather than definitive, but it is very likely that he was of sufficient status to exercise at least some of the offices listed. The lack of any known references to a John Wyke ‘of Malmesbury’ in the surviving sources might suggest that the MP was an outsider to the borough he represented in Parliament, even though he was probably from Wiltshire.

To compound the problems of identification, Wiltshire did not lack for men named John Wyke or Wykes during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Among them was a millward married to an Agnes, with whom he possessed a messuage at Christian Malford in 1379. Presumably, the John Wyke and his wife who took part in a land transaction at Wootton Bassett a decade later were not the same couple, since her name was Margaret rather than Agnes, although it is possible that the millward had remarried.3 Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 17, 126. In 1438, Robert Hampton sued Margaret, wid. and executrix of John Wykes, and her new husband John Waldyf in the Chancery over the Wilts. manor of Broad Blunsdon. If this was the same Margaret, she must have been an old lady by 1438: C1/9/25. There was also a baker from Marlborough named John Wyke whose wife Margery fell into disgrace early in the reign of Henry IV. Indicted for poisoning and killing her husband’s servant, Walter Swan, she fled to the sanctuary of St. Peter’s church, Marlborough, where she confessed her felony to one of the coroners of Wiltshire, John Alyngton. For her crime, Margery was sentenced to abjure the realm but she managed afterwards to secure a royal pardon, dated 24 Nov. 1401.4 CPR, 1401-5, p. 18. Likewise active in the early fifteenth century was John Wyke of Lydiard, assessed at 20 marks p.a. in lands for the subsidy of 1412.5 CAD, i. C1329; Feudal Aids, vi. 537; Wilts. Feet of Fines, 274. There was also a John Wyke (not identified by residence) who was among those commissioned in 1415 and 1416 to hold assizes of novel disseisin in Wiltshire.6 C66/398, m. 1; 399, m. 34d. It was also in 1415 that a John Wykes helped the financially hard-pressed Edward Langley, duke of York, to mortgage estates in Wilts. and other counties but it is not known whether he himself was from Wilts. He died at some stage before Nov. 1431: CPR, 1413-16, pp. 349-50; 1429-35, p. 134. (Possibly this justice of novel disseisin was the John who served as a j.p. in Wiltshire in the 1420s.)

Records from Henry VI’s reign also contain references to various men from Wiltshire named John Wyke or Wykes. Among them were a merchant from Trowbridge and a ‘gentleman’ from Marden. By the late 1420s, John of Trowbridge had become a feoffee of the nearby manor of Great Chalfield for William Rous esquire (d.1452). Rous did not however enjoy an undisputed title to the manor, which was the subject of a lengthy series of quarrels until it was finally secured by one of the claimants, Thomas Tropenell*, in the later fifteenth century.7 Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, i. 284-5, 290-1, 316-17, 319-20, 349; VCH Wilts. vii. 60-61; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 18, 487; CP40/654, rots. 280, 355; E159/236, recorda Mich. rot. 40. The survivor of Rous’s feoffees, this John Wyke died in the autumn of 1460 and was buried in Trowbridge parish church. His will of October that year mentions his then wife Joan (not his first spouse) but it does not refer to any children or to the town of Malmesbury.8 PCC 21 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 164); Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 196. John of Marden served as a juror at sessions of oyer and terminer held at Salisbury in 1453,9 KB9/133/77. by which date he himself was the subject of legal action at Westminster. He, two husbandman and an ostler were said in February 1452 to have waylaid one William Cook at Marden, stealing from him various valuable robes and other goods worth £100 and of a purse containing six marks in cash, all items that he was safe-keeping for the west-country esquire Thomas Bonville*. Within a few months, Bonville was suing Wyke and his associates for trespass in the court of King’s bench, where Cook also brought an appeal against the same defendants. Cook’s action came to pleadings in Hilary term 1455, when Wyke and his co-defendants appeared at Westminster in person. The matter was referred to a jury although it does not appear that a trial took place.10 KB27/766, rot. 59d; 771, rot. 58d; 773, rot. 19d; 774, rot. 74; 775, rot. 26. Later in the same decade, the Crown pardoned Wyke the outlawry he had incurred for failing to answer another suit that Bonville had brought against him at Westminster, this time over a debt of £40.11 CPR, 1452-61, p. 447.

While it is impossible to confirm whether he was any of the men mentioned above, there are at least reasonable grounds for assuming that the MP was associated with two influential knights, Sir Henry Hussey* and Sir William Sturmy*. At the beginning of 1417 Hussey conveyed his manor of Standen in Wiltshire to John Wyke, John Bird* of Marlborough and other feoffees, while in 1418 and 1422 John Wyke witnessed deeds for Sturmy, a knight of the shire for Wiltshire in no fewer than eight Parliaments.12 Wilts. Feet of Fines, 356; CCR, 1413-19, p. 458; 1422-9, p. 195. Coincidentally or not, Sturmy was a fellow justice of the John Wyke named in the previously mentioned novel disseisin commissions of 1415 and 1416: C66/398, m. 1; 399, m. 34d. Given that Bird was a close connexion of Sturmy as well as an associate of Hussey, it is likely that Hussey’s feoffee was the same man as Sturmy’s witness. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Bird stood surety for the Malmesbury MP of 1426 upon the election of the latter to Parliament,13 C219/13/4. and accompanied him to the Commons as an experienced Member for Marlborough. The elderly Sturmy was not returned to the Commons that year but, besides Bird and Wyke, he was linked (in some cases closely) with both of the knights of the shire for Wiltshire, as well as the burgesses who sat for Great Bedwyn and Ludgershall in 1426.