WYNDOVER, Henry

It is quite likely that this MP was the Henry Wendover who was regularly granted writs of aid to buy victuals for the royal household for at least nine years from the closing months of Henry IV’s reign and through most if not all of that of Henry V.2 CPR, 1408-13, pp. 345, 450; 1413-16, pp. 7, 188, 189, 300; 1416-22, pp. 5, 234, 281, 336. As a yeoman of the bakery he was paid wages of war as accompanying the latter King on his invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1415.3 E404/31/410. Before October 1422, however, Wendover settled in Chichester, where to judge from his later description as an ‘ostler’ and his ownership of The Corone in North Street, he was an innkeeper. It was probably as one of the leading citizens that he attested the shire elections held there prior to Henry VI’s first Parliament, and he subsequently did likewise in March 1425 and April 1432.4 C219/13/1, 3; 14/3.

Meanwhile, Wyndover had appeared in person in the court of common pleas in the Michaelmas term of 1422 to sue two local mariners for a debt of six marks. By that date he had also acquired land beyond the walls of Chichester, for it was as ‘of Nyton, husbandman’ that in the following Hilary term he was accused of assaulting John Halle and taking his crops worth £5 outside the west gate of the city. Evidently, his quarrel with Halle was a serious one, for a year later he brought a plea against Halle and his wife in the King’s bench, alleging that in the autumn of 1422 they had broken into his closes at Aldingbourne (about four miles from Chichester), cut down trees and underwood and stolen his goods.5 CP40/647, rot. 83; 652, rot. 258; KB27/651, rot. 4. Wyndover again appeared personally in the central courts in Trinity term 1432 to bring suits against a Berkshire gentleman for £7, although it was by attorney that he prosecuted a husbandman from Oving for a debt of £2 and for stealing from him four bulls and two cows.6 CP40/686, rots. 304, 305.

Something of his standing in Sussex is suggested not only by his appearance on the list of those in the locality required to take the oath not to maintain law-breakers, as administered throughout England in 1434, but also by his service as a juror in a suit between Eleanor, widow of John, Lord Arundel and Mautravers (the de jure earl of Arundel), and Robert Mousehole* of Midhurst in the autumn of 1435.7 CPR, 1429-36, p. 372; CP40/699, rot. 128d. Then too, he had been appointed in February 1434 as a tax collector in the county. More unexpectedly, he was also named on the commission to collect the fifteenth and tenth granted by the Commons of which he himself was a Member in the spring of 1437. It rarely happened that MPs were so appointed, as they generally managed to avoid responsibility for collecting the taxes they had granted in their own constituencies, but it may be that Wyndover was not actually required to carry out the task in Chichester itself. Wyndover was again made a tax collector in 1440. He later quarreled with the mayor of Chichester, William Hore I*, who accused him of having placed ‘finos et alias seditates’ against the wall of a house of his so that the timbers of the building had been damaged by rainwater and had rotted, ruining the property. The offence occurred in November 1442, but Wyndover repeatedly failed to appear in the common pleas to make answer with the result that he was placed in exigents in Trinity term 1445.8 CP40/738, rot. 378d. In January 1450 writs were sent to the deputy sheriff of Sussex to take action against Wyndover and other jurors (42 in all) for their failure to come to Westminster to testify in a suit brought by a London armourer against the abbot of Durford, and in the following October he was to be distrained as a juror in a plea brought by John Pierrepoint esquire, customer of Chichester.9 CP40/756, rot. 109d; 759, rot. 264d. He is not recorded alive thereafter.

Wyndover’s widow, Agnes, married William Style, and at an unknown date between 1456 and 1460 they complained to the chancellor about the performance of her late husband’s will. They explained that Wyndover had made enfeoffments of his lands and tenements in the parish of Aldingbourne and elsewhere in Sussex, intending that the feoffees should make estate to Agnes if she survived him. Furthermore, on his deathbed he had devised by will that Agnes should have certain other properties for life, notably The Corone, which was to be sold after her death to provide prayers for his soul’s welfare. Three of the feoffees had refused to carry out his instructions.10 C1/26/440.