WYMONDHAM, John

It is possible that Wymondham, whose origins are extremely obscure, was not born a gentleman, but he was sufficiently prosperous to begin investing in land by the mid 1430s, when he bought two manors at Crownthorpe near Wymondham. Before the end of the decade, he had bought another manor at Roudham, a few miles to the south-east.7 CP25(1)/169/188/131; Blomefield, i. 434. The source of his wealth is unknown, although he or his forebears may have had a background in trade: it is unlikely that he was a lawyer, for he never served as a j.p.8 C. Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, in Regionalism in Late Med. MSS and Texts ed. Riddy, 135. At first sight, his election as a knight of the shire to his first Parliament is startling, but he probably enjoyed the support of the young John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, when he stood for the Commons of 1439. He was already a member of the duke’s affinity at that date, and in the same year Mowbray granted him a five-year lease of the ducal court of Hoo and hundred of Loes in Suffolk.9 KB9/249/108; Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 1/348. It was perhaps the duke who helped him – at some stage before Michaelmas 1441 – to secure a place in Henry VI’s household, his entry to which is otherwise difficult to explain.10 E101/409/9. He was an esquire of the Household until aft. Mich. 1452: E101/410/9.

The duke of Norfolk had a particularly unruly following, and like other members of his retinue Wymondham was guilty of acts of lawlessness. In 1438 he and others acting on their lord’s behalf forcibly disseised Ralph Garneys of the manor of Stockton, Norfolk, and two years later he was indicted for helping Thomas Chaumbre, a Mowbray follower who had played a part in the murder of James Andrew† in July 1434, to escape from the Marshalsea prison. In the indictment Wymondham is described as an esquire, late of Framlingham, Suffolk (where one of Mowbray’s main castles lay), alias John Deye late of Wymondham, Norfolk, alias John Braunche late of Buckenham in the same county.11 KB9/232/1/11; 249/108. The aliases are a further indication of his obscure background, since at this date well established gentry normally had a settled surname. In August 1443 Wymondham took part in raids on Hoo Hall, the Suffolk manor held by Mowbray’s estranged retainer, Sir Robert Wingfield* and a month later he was indicted for this and other forcible entries, as well as various unspecified wrongdoings.12 KB27/735, rex rot. 37. Soon afterwards, he was involved in a disagreement of his own with the duke and left his service, possibly in July 1444.13 Richmond, 135n; Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 6/1.

By that date, Wymondham numbered Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and John Heydon*, both members of the rival affinity of the King’s chief minister, William de la Pole (later duke of Suffolk), among his feoffees. Before the end of the same decade, he himself was also a member of the de la Pole affinity,14 KB9/272/3. although he stayed on friendly terms with individual Mowbray men like John Timperley I*.15 CPR, 1452-61, p. 150. The reason for the breach with the duke of Norfolk is unknown but Mowbray was prone to quarrel with his followers – spectacularly so in the case of Sir Robert Wingfield – and he lost the loyalty of William Brandon† at about the same time that Wymondham left his service.16 H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 112-13, 116.

By late 1447, Wymondham and his first wife Margery were feoffees of Sir Andrew Ogard*, who had become associated with the duke of Suffolk’s circle through his marriage to the daughter and heir of her relative, Sir John Clifton.17 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 111, 112. Before his death in September that year, Clifton sold the reversion of his estates at Buckenham and Wymondham to Ogard, in the face of strong opposition from his nephew and heir at law, John Knyvet. Wymondham and his wife were also feoffees for Thomas, Lord Scales, who had bought another part of the Clifton inheritance, and in subsequent years he supported the claims of both Scales and Ogard against those of Knyvet.18 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 90-92; CFR, xviii. 183-4; R. Virgoe, ‘Buckenham Disputes’, Jnl. Legal Hist. xv. 27-29. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wymondham became embroiled in his own quarrels with the latter. In the mid 1460s he sued Knyvet for assaulting some of his servants, whom he had sent to the former Clifton lands at Buckenham to seize livestock he claimed as his rightful damages arising from an earlier suit between him and the same adversary.19 KB27/816, rot. 53. In social terms, Margery was quite a catch for Wymondham. In material terms, she was almost certainly not, since her first husband, Sir Edward Hastings, is said to have impoverished himself in his long dispute with Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, over the right to bear the title Lord Hastings.20 CP, vi. 358-9; Blomefield, ix. 513. Perhaps she viewed her second marriage as a way out of straitened circumstances but Wymondham also gained from the match because Hastings had given her a life interest in four of his manors in Norfolk – Mundham, Ketteringham, Elsing and Weasenham.21 CP, vi. 359. It was as lord of Elsing that Wymondham fell into dispute with Robert, son of Sir Henry Inglose*, and others over the wardship of Amy Groos. The grand-daughter of Oliver Groos† and heir general of the Groos estates, she was also a grand-daughter of Sir Henry, being the daughter of Oliver’s son Simon by the knight’s daughter Margaret. In a lawsuit of the mid 1450s, Wymondham alleged that Robert and his associates had abducted her in 1447, although her wardship had pertained to him since the Groos manor at Swannington was held of Elsing. They retorted that Sir Henry Inglose had acquired custody of the child from Richard, duke of York.22 CP40/772, rot. 336. In addition to her Norfolk estates, Margery had a house at Norwich, where Wymondham resided for part of his career. He formed a strong association with the city and helped to put down a serious outbreak of unrest there in 1443.23 R. Virgoe, ‘Norwich taxation list of 1451’, Norf. Archaeology, xl. 149; PPC, v. 235. Some have speculated that Wymondham was originally from Norwich where a namesake was a freeman of that city in 1414, but this John Wymondham was not necessarily the MP’s father. The name was not uncommon: Richmond, 129.

It was while standing outside his gate at Norwich one morning in May 1448 that Wymondham became involved in a fracas with James Gloys, chaplain to the Paston family. The trouble began over a trivial matter, Gloys’s failure to raise his hat as he walked by, but Wymondham may have been particularly sensitive to social slights, intended or otherwise. Daggers were drawn and he and two of his servants, Thomas Hawys and John Norwode, attacked the chaplain, who fled to the town house of Agnes Paston, mother of John Paston*. As it happened, Agnes and her daughter-in-law, Margaret, were attending mass at a nearby church. Disturbed by the noise (at the very moment of the consecration, or so Margaret subsequently claimed) the two women went out into the street to find out what was happening. There they encountered Wymondham, with whom they exchanged angry words. He called them ‘strong hores’ and, despite his own obscure (and probably non-gentle) background, appears to have referred to the Pastons and all their kin as ‘charles’ [churls] of Gimmingham, a reference to their rumoured servile origins. That afternoon the two women complained about the incident to the prior of Norwich. He sent for Wymondham but, while they were talking, Hawys attacked Gloys again. Fearing further trouble, Margaret Paston sent the chaplain to her husband to ensure his protection.24 Richmond, 132, 134; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 14n-15n; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 223-5; C.M. Barron, ‘Who were the Pastons?’, Jnl. Soc. Archivists, iv. 533. Following the fracas, Agnes sued Wymondham at Westminster; in his response, he claimed that Gloys had assaulted him first and that he had been acting in self-defence.25 CP40/751, rot. 445. It is not known whether this affair was the cause or simply a symptom of the bad blood which existed between Wymondham and the Pastons in the mid fifteenth century. He and John Paston had co-operated with each other less than two years earlier, when they had heard the will of the dying Robert Clere,26 CAD, iv. A7778. so it is likely that the animosity was of recent origin. By 1449 Wymondham was involved in another dispute with Agnes Paston, during which he was said to have ‘laboured’ a jury with offers of money and threats of violence, and at about the same time he and John Heydon brought a suit against one of Margaret Paston’s tenants.27 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 234-5; Richmond, 132.

The enmity between Wymondham and the Pastons was stimulated by local politics, since by now the MP was associated with the de la Pole affinity while the Pastons and men like William Yelverton* were friends of Sir John Fastolf, one of its principal opponents. When the duke of Suffolk fell from power in February 1450, Fastolf and his allies took the opportunity to act against his followers. In October that year Yelverton’s clerk, William Wayte, suggested that the authorities at Norwich should draw up a bill outlining the wrongs which Wymondham and three others of Suffolk’s men, Tuddenham, Heydon and William Prentys, had allegedly done to their city. The intended recipient of the proposed bill was Richard, duke of York, who now held sway in national politics and to whom Wymondham’s old master, the duke of Norfolk, had allied himself.28 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 47-49. Fastolf had a particular reason for disliking Wymondham, who in recent years had helped other de la Pole men to dispute his title to a manor at Caister. The knight was determined to oppose any attempt by him and other de la Pole men to seek an acquittal in connexion with this affair, and in the autumn of 1450 Wymondham was indicted for his part in it at sessions of oyer and terminer at Norwich. During these proceedings, presided over by William Yelverton, Wymondham was also indicted for his assault on James Gloys and for fabricating an inquisition held by the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk a decade earlier. This document had recorded the supposed indictment of Gregory Draper* and other citizens of Norwich for a forcible entry on to the park at Gressenhall, one of the Norfolk properties Wymondham held in the right of his first wife, in October 1439. In the face of such pressure, Wymondham sought to come to terms with Fastolf but, before the end of 1450, he had dropped any ideas of reconciliation, having secured the protection of Lord Scales. After the fall of the duke of Suffolk, Scales provided a rallying point for Wymondham and other members of the de la Pole affinity who had remained in the service of the duke’s widow.29 A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 156-7, 160-1;

Apart from securing protection from his enemies, Wymondham had another important reason for seeking the good lordship of Lord Scales, since the peer played a key part in his purchase of Felbrigg and seven other manors in north-east Norfolk which had belonged to Sir Simon Felbrigg KG. Before his death in 1443, Sir Simon, who had no surviving sons, had agreed that Scales, one of his feoffees, might buy the reversion to these manors, to vest after his widow’s life-interest expired. A few years later, Scales undertook to pay over £850 for it, although the proposed purchase was delayed by disagreements between the widow, Katherine Felbrigg, and some of her late husband’s trustees. It was never completed, perhaps because Scales ran into financial difficulties. By the autumn of 1451 he had made way for Wymondham, but it is not known what the latter paid Katherine for it. His acquisition was not trouble-free since John Dam*, one of Sir Simon Felbrigg’s executors and trustees, claimed a right to a part (albeit a small one) of the Felbrigg estate. In response, Wymondham and Katherine agreed to stage a collusive legal action by which he would win the lands claimed by Dam from her, and then allow her to occupy them for the rest of her life. Katherine survived until the end of the decade, but Wymondham gained possession of the Felbrigg manors in March 1454, when she leased them to him for 20 years, for an annual rent of £90, probably a very hard bargain on her part. There is no doubt that Wymondham’s readiness to meet her demands, as well as those imposed on him during his earlier acquisition of the manor of Wicklewood, was influenced by his desire to obtain land. He had bought Wicklewood and other lands in the Norfolk hundreds of Forehoe and Shropham from William Rookwood and his wife, Elizabeth, in 1443. Having handed over £80 of the asking price of 320 marks immediately, he had committed himself to paying the arrears of £4 which the manor’s farmers owed Rookwood and agreed to present Elizabeth with a gown worth ten marks.30 Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, 138-9; Procs. Chancery Eliz. ed. Caley and Bayley, ii. pp. xxiii-xxviii; Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 1/304/1, 4-8; 336/5-7; 337; 338; 339.

Nearly a decade later, Wymondham and Rookwood (or perhaps William’s son and namesake) acted together on behalf of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, standing surety for the knight when he promised to keep the peace towards the Mowbray retainer, John Howard*, in the spring of 1452.31 KB9/85/2/48. In the same year, the sheriff of Norfolk received orders to distrain Tuddenham, along with Wymondham and John Heydon, to compel them to appear in King’s bench in connexion with an indictment for maintenance.32 KB27/766, rex rot. 44d. By this date, however, the pressure they and other de la Pole men had faced from their opponents since the fall of the duke of Suffolk was easing, because the duke of York, from whom Fastolf and his friends had sought support, had lost his hold on the government. Wymondham was to remain a thorn in the side of Sir John Fastolf and the Pastons for the remainder of the decade. In Michaelmas term 1457 he and his servant, John Ferrour, appeared in King’s bench to answer a suit brought by John Paston and Fastolf’s servant, Thomas Howes. Paston and Howes accused them of having assisted the leading de la Pole retainer, (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, to abduct their ward, Thomas Fastolf†, a young relative of Sir John’s, in the previous year. Wymondham and Ferrour responded by referring to the letters patent by which Wentworth claimed the wardship and stating that they had in fact helped Sir Philip, in their capacity as his ‘servants’, to rescue Thomas from the clutches of Paston and Howes.33 KB27/786, rot. 66; 794, rot. 66d. KB27/770, rot. 87 shows that Ferrour was Wymondham’s servant. Wymondham took a particular interest in the ward, managing to marry him to his daughter, Ela, in 1458. Sir John Fastolf was furious about the match, which took place without his agreement and while he was still pursuing Thomas’s new father-in-law through the law courts. He never forgave Thomas and excluded him from his will.34 Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, 132; Wyndham, 15-16.

At this date Wymondham was seeking a wife for himself, for his first wife, Margery, had died in 1456. Before the end of the decade, he married Elizabeth, the widow of Sir John Heveningham and William Allington II.35 Possibly it was in connexion with his second marriage that he bought a consignment of fine cloths of various colours from the London mercer, Richard Needham*, in Nov. 1457. He neglected to pay, driving the aggrieved Needham to legal action in the ct. of c.p. nearly a decade later: CP40/821, rot. 111d. Like Margery, Elizabeth was an extremely good match for the likes of Wymondham and there is no doubt that he was extremely keen to have her. He asked Alice, duchess of Suffolk, to intercede with John, her son by Heveningham, who strongly opposed a match he thought demeaning to his mother, prevailing upon the duchess to write to Elizabeth on his behalf. According to the hostile Margaret Paston, Wymondham made Elizabeth substantial offers, pledging immediately to pay off Sir John Heveningham’s debts of 300 marks (claiming that he had recently raised 700 marks by selling the marriage of an unnamed son of his to a London merchant) and promising to include the manor of Felbrigg in her jointure. Margaret reported that he would never gain young John Heveningham’s good will but she feared that such offers would sway his mother. She asked her husband for a copy of Wymondham’s pedigree, so that she could show it to Lady Heveningham, who believed he was ‘mor worcheppfull in berthe and in lyuelode’ than it was possible to prove. Despite the opposition of his prospective stepson, Wymondham got his way and Elizabeth was his wife by 28 Oct. 1459, when he settled his Felbrigg purchase on her. Not long afterwards, the Pastons heard rumours that he was planning to acquire for his new wife property at Caister which had belonged to the recently deceased Sir John Fastolf.36 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 160, 162, 256; ii. 177; Ketton-Cremer mss, WKC 3/1.

Fastolf had died on 5 Nov. 1459, the very day on which Wymondham was returned to the Parliament that opened at Coventry later that month. His election indicates that, like other members of the de la Pole affinity, he had aligned himself with the Lancastrian government. The Parliament, packed with supporters of the royal court, attainted the duke of York, the earl of Warwick and the other Yorkist lords, and in its aftermath Wymondham served on several anti-Yorkist commissions. During the assembly, he attempted to do down the Pastons by putting it about that Sir John Fastolf’s chief executor, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, had attained his executorship through ‘meigntenaunce’, as part of a scheme to ensure that they would secure the knight’s inheritance. For his pains he received a dressing down from Waynflete, then chancellor of England, and was rebuffed by the treasurer, the earl of Wiltshire.37 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 187.

The Parliament did nothing to resolve the country’s political divisions. In the summer of 1460, the Yorkists won the battle of Northampton and seized control of both the King and government, a change at the centre of power which left Wymondham and other de la Pole men highly vulnerable to attack from their enemies. At about this date, it was said that he, Tuddenham and Heydon had become counsellors of the maverick Thomas Daniell*, but it is unlikely that he could have given them much help.38 Ibid. 205. In any event, at the end of July the three men threw themselves on the mercy of the new government, from whom they sought letters of protection. The government, intent on preserving order in the localities, ordered that anyone with complaints against them was to pursue his grievances through the law and that none was to despoil or rob them.39 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 221-2.

In the following autumn, shortly before the Parliament of 1460 opened at Westminster, John Paston received a letter from his mentor, Friar Brackley. Brackley advised him, should he be in London when the assembly began, to seek a commission for Wymondham’s arrest from the chancellor.40 Ibid. ii. 212-14. Whether Paston acted on this advice is not known, but the breakdown of government caused by the renewal of civil war at the end of the year brought new problems for Wymondham. During this disorder, John Felbrigg, a member of the junior Suffolk branch of Sir Simon Felbrigg’s family, took the opportunity to seize the manor of Felbrigg, which had recently reverted to the MP. When he entered the manor with a large force of armed men on 9 Feb. 1461, Felbrigg found Wymondham away but his wife at home. Elizabeth struggled valiantly to keep possession, locking herself in a chamber despite threats to fire the building, but in the end Felbrigg dragged her out by the hair.41 Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, 139; Blomefield, viii. 112. With the accession of York’s son as Edward IV the following month, Wymondham’s hopes of recovering the property must have sunk, but he was nothing if not tenacious and adaptable. In June 1461 he told Clement Paston that he would find himself a new master, prompting Clement to believe that he meant to enter Edward IV’s service, and that he would regain Felbrigg by Michaelmas, ‘ore there xall be v c hedys brok there-fore’.42 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 199. As he predicted, Wymondham succeeded in winning the favour of the new regime and recovering Felbrigg. At the beginning of Edward’s reign he placed his son-in-law, Thomas Fastolf, in the household of the then duke of Norfolk, specifically, it was said, to win help against John Felbrigg.43 Ibid. ii. 240. The duke was a supporter of the Yorkist King, as was the recently knighted John Howard, in whose household the MP put his young son and namesake, again in the early 1460s.44 Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, p. xv. Early in 1462, Edward IV’s most powerful supporter, Richard, earl of Warwick, began a lawsuit in King’s bench against John Heydon, Sir Thomas Tuddenham, Wymondham and Robert Durant (‘late of Westminster, yeoman’) for a trespass committed in Middlesex. The brief entry in the plea roll provides no information about the supposed trespass, but the earl’s suit may have had a connexion with a disturbance that at Westminster Hall in November 1458, in which members of his retinue had exchanged blows with a group of Household men and others allied to the Court. Matters had got so out of hand that he had been forced to make a hurried escape by his barge on the Thames, and he came to view the incident as attempt on his life. It had certainly been the subject of a previous action of 1460 that he had brought against Heydon, Tuddenham, Durant and others – but not Wymondham – in the common pleas.45 KB27/803, rots. 4d, 35d; CP40/799, rot. 490. Later in the same year, and again in the capacity of a defendant, Wymondham settled up with a couple of household servants of John, Lord Lovell and Holand. They had sued him in the c.p. over a bond for £20 he had entered into with them in Oxon. in Feb. 1459, but the circumstances giving rise to this dispute are a mystery: CP40/800, rot. 114. Whatever the reason for it, Warwick’s suit of 1462 appears not to have progressed to pleadings. In any case, Wymondham was able to purchase a royal pardon, dated 14 Jan. 1462,46 C67/45, m. 49. and he sported the King’s livery when he attended the Thetford assizes two years later.47 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 298. Winning back Felbrigg took longer than he had hoped. In September 1461 a jury indicted John Felbrigg for seizing the manor, and in the following month the King ordered Howard, then the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, to return the property to Wymondham and his feoffee, John Timperley II. This was easier said than done, for Felbrigg had fortified the manor-house against all comers. His men, who included Simon Dam, son of the man who had caused problems for Wymondham and Katherine Felbrigg some ten years earlier, declared that ‘rather than we shall suffre it to be delyuered thus by the lawes we shall dye all yt be wythyn and also of those that will put us out and kepe us out shall also dye’.48 KB9/297/53-55. In December Howard’s successor as sheriff, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, attempted but failed to recruit a force of gentlemen to accompany him to Felbrigg Hall.49 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 263. Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, 140, wrongly assumes that Howard was still sheriff at this date. In the end, Wymondham made good his claim to the manor a decade later when he reached a settlement with Felbrigg, to whom he paid 200 marks.50 CP25(1)/294/75/24. Richmond, ‘John Wyndham’, 140, mistakenly suggests this settlement occurred in early 1462.

Remarkably, Wymondham must have made his peace with the Pastons not long afterwards, for in November 1465 he wrote a courteous letter to the then imprisoned John Paston. Its purpose was to offer Paston’s wife Margaret lodging in his ‘pore hous’ in Norwich, so that she could escape an outbreak of disease at the place she was staying, and in a postscript he gave the troubled Paston moral support, urging him to ‘hold vp your manship’.51 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 312-13. By this date Wymondham had established firm ties with Ipswich, where he had become a freeman in June 1463.52 Add. 30158, f. 25v. It is likely that he owed his admission to the freedom to the good offices of Sir John Howard, whose local business enterprises gave him considerable influence in the borough, but there is no evidence that he developed his own commercial interests there. A year later, ‘Wendame’ was a member of the party which accompanied Sir John on campaign against the Lancastrians in northern England, but this was probably the son Wymondham had placed in Howard’s household, and who was married to Margaret, one of Howard’s younger daughters, in about 1467.53 Howard Household Bks. 197. It is not clear whether the younger John was the son whose marriage Wymondham had claimed, while seeking the hand of Elizabeth Heveningham, to have sold to a London merchant. If he did have any other male offspring, it is likely that they predeceased him, since the younger John is the only son to feature in his will: Reg. Gelour, ff. 116-18. As part of the marriage settlement, Howard agreed to keep the couple and their servants in his household for two years and he gave them his manor of Colby.54 Howard Household Bks. p. xv. At this date the younger John Wymondham, apparently born in the early 1450s, was some years short of his majority.55 C140/55/24. Yet he had already stood surety for his father, as ‘of Ipswich’, over a debt of £10 that the latter owed a couple of Londoners and, characteristically, had failed to repay,56 CP40/818, rot. 151; 819, rot 157d; 820, rots. 142d, 161d; 821, rot 143. and he was old enough to attest the return of his father-in-law and (Sir) Thomas Brewes* as Suffolk’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1467. Wymondham also attested the same election, and he and another of Howard’s associates, James Hobart†, sat in the same Parliament as burgesses for Ipswich. He visited the borough after the first session of Parliament, becoming involved in a fracas with John Walworth while he was there.57 It is not clear if Walworth was the Ipswich MP of 1472 or his father and namesake. According to a bill which he afterwards filed in Chancery, Walworth had asked Edmund Wynter II* and John Gosse, the bailiffs of the borough, to take sureties of the peace from his three ‘mortal enemies’, Wymondham, the priest William Warner and John Salamon, yeoman, because he feared bodily harm at their hands. The bailiffs had failed to ensure he was protected and within hours of making his request his opponents had attacked him and his servants in the street. The purpose of Walworth’s bill was to make Wynter and Gosse account for their failure to keep the peace, but neither the outcome of his suit nor the reason for the enmity between him and the MP is known.58 C1/10/231.

By the time of his last Parliament, Wymondham was an old man although evidently a vigorous one. He lived to see the Readeption of Henry VI and the restoration of Edward IV and he pursued a Chancery suit against William Swan of Norwich, one of the executors of Nicholas Aldewyn of that city, either in the late 1460s or early 1470s. In his bill, Wymondham said that he had purchased a messuage in Norwich, along with the reversion of another there, from Swan’s co-executor, William Dynne. His complaint was that Swan had refused to co-operate with this transaction by relinquishing his interest in those properties.59 C1/41/288. Late in life, at some stage between 1472 and his death, Wymondham himself was the defendant in a Chancery suit brought by his erstwhile associate, John Timperley II. Timperley stated that he had stood surety for the MP a decade earlier, as a guarantee that Wymondham would pay a debt of £10 to Master John Selot, master of St. Giles’s hospital in Norwich. Yet Wymondham had breached his promise to settle with Selot, leaving Timperley liable to legal action on the part of the latter.60 C1/48/364. Timperley’s bill is the only evidence for this Chancery suit and it is not known whether he and Wymondham were still at odds at the latter’s death.

Wymondham died at Norwich on 4 June 1475,61 C140/55/24. having made his will the previous April.62 Reg. Gelour, ff. 116-18. He had spent his later years in the city and most of his charitable bequests were to religious institutions there. In the testamentary section of the will, dated 6 Apr., he requested burial in the church of the Austin friars at Norwich where his first wife lay. His second wife, Elizabeth, had also predeceased him, and he asked the friars, to whom he left £20, to sing for the souls of both women, as well as those of himself and his ancestors. For the same spiritual purposes, Wymondham set aside 116s. 8d., so that a chaplain, Thomas Pekke, might maintain a chantry over a period of ten years. He appointed Pekke, Edmund Bokenham esquire and John Ferrour his executors, named the lawyer, Henry Spelman, as supervisor of the will and asked James Hobart and Nicholas Ovy to assist these men in the role of co-administrators. To this testament Wymondham added a will for his lands, dated 26 Apr. First, he settled his manors at Tuttington, Banningham, Ingworth and Colby on his son John and John’s wife and children. Secondly, he instructed the feoffees of his manors at Crownthorpe and Wicklewood and other lands in the hundred of Forehoe to use the income from these properties to perform his will, before conveying them to the younger John. Thirdly, the latter and his heirs were to have Felbrigg Hall, along with the manors of Aylmerton and West Runton, also once part of the Felbrigg estate, but only after John Howard, now Lord Howard, surrendered an obligation for £1,000 to the MP’s executors. Wymondham had given this bond to Howard the previous decade, as a security that the proposed marriage between their children would take place, but it is not known why he had failed to retrieve it. Whatever the state of the relationship between the two men at this date, he was clearly concerned that Howard might use it to trouble his executors and heir. Should this happen, his executors were to sell the three manors, along with all his properties in Forehoe hundred, and use the money raised for the good of his soul. The bond was still on Wymondham’s mind the following month, when he added a codicil to the will. This testified that on 12 May his son had seen, heard and understood the will and had promised to try to recover the document from his father-in-law. (Despite Wymondham’s concerns, there is no evidence that Howard tried to take advantage of the obligation after his death.) In the codicil Wymondham also altered his directions regarding Crownthorpe, Wicklewood and the other Forehoe lands, declaring that young John might have them immediately after his death, providing he paid the executors 320 marks (or more if necessary) towards fulfilling the will. The testator made no direct provision in terms of lands for either of his daughters, the already mentioned Ela Fastolf and Isabel, who had married Simon Wiseman, although he ordered that they should inherit his estate if their brother John died childless.63 Wyndham, 15; PCC 11 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 97v). Wymondham’s inquisition post mortem, dated 14 Apr. 1477, lists only three of his manors, those of Felbrigg Hall, valued at £10 p.a., and Aylmerton and West Runton, respectively estimated to bring in net annual incomes of four marks and ten marks.64 C140/55/24. The best indication of his considerable landed wealth is a tax assessment of February 1451, before he had purchased the Felbrigg lands, which valued his lands at £66 p.a.65 Virgoe, ‘Norwich taxation list of 1451’, 149. Both this and valuations given in the inquisition post mortem were probably underestimates, and it is likely that he had enjoyed an annual landed income of about £150 after acquiring the Felbrigg lands. Apart from his own estates, Wymondham had acquired interests in other properties in the right of both his wives. Margery had held Clifton lands at Wolferton in north-west Norfolk, where he must for a time have resided. (He was described as ‘of Wolferton’ in 1450.) Furthermore, as already noted, she had possessed a life interest in the Norfolk manors of Mundham, Ketteringham, Elsing and Weasenham, and during her lifetime Wymondham had presented rectors to the Hastings livings at Brisley, Gressenhall and Stanfield in the same county.66 Blomefield, ix. 196, 470; x. 52; KB9/272/2; CP, vi. 359. Elizabeth is said to have been an heiress, but the only property she certainly brought in marriage to the MP was the Heveningham manor of ‘Rothings’ in South Walsham. Settled on Wymondham for life in 1472, it subsequently reverted to her son, John Heveningham.67 CP25(1)/170/192/37; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 307. Given his substantial inheritance, it is not surprising that Wymondham’s own son became one of the leading gentry of Norfolk. Knighted after the battle of Stoke in 1487, Sir John Wymondham was executed in the early sixteenth century for his alleged involvement in the treasonable conspiracy of Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, but his downfall would prove only a temporary setback in the fortunes of the Wymondham family.68 Blomefield, viii. 112.