WYSE, Robert

Few details of the career of the man who represented Plympton Erle in the Parliament of 1442 have come to light, but it seems likely that he was a member of the Wyse family of Sydenham Damarel, and – like his more prominent kinsman, the lawyer Thomas Wyse* – was in some way connected with the Courtenay earls of Devon, the lords of the borough of Plympton.2 Patronage, Crown and Provinces ed. Griffiths, 130; M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 272. It may have been the same man who was active in Cornw. in the mid 1420s, when he and an associate paid a fine in the stannary court of Blackmore for licence to conclude a settlement with Reynold St. Enoder, but this could also have been a namesake belonging to the branch of the family resident at Greystone in Lezant: SC2/157/3, rot. 6. Certainly, he had ties within Plympton Erle, and may perhaps even have resided there, for in the autumn of 1445 he was suing two local men for debts in the court of common pleas.3 CP40/739, rot. 148d. The date of Wyse’s death is not recorded, but it had evidently occurred by April 1483, by which date his former wife was married to another husband, one Gregory Strete.4 Modbury deeds, 294/3. A younger namesake, a ‘gentleman’ of Exeter, on being indicted of felony in the summer of 1506 fled from the grasp of the authorities and sheltered in a house provided by the cathedral chapter: KB9/446/16.