WYTHIGG, Thomas

Probably either a younger brother or son of Richard Wythigg*, Thomas was a brewer, general merchant and ‘woolman’. Perhaps through his involvement in the wool trade, he became associated with the tailors’ craft at Oxford, for which he provided generously in his will, although it was as a brewer that he usually features in surviving records. At Oxford, the chancellor of the university exercised the local assize of bread and ale and regulated brewing in the town. According to an inquest held before the chancellor in March 1450, Wythigg, Robert Wood II* and other brewers had breached the assize by making beer that was both weak and unfit for human consumption (corpori humano insalubrem). Furthermore, they had responded to a previous attempt to bring them to book, by refusing to supply the university’s halls with beer.7 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciii), 8-10, 63-64, 148-9, 179-80; E159/217, recogniciones Hil.

Wythigg’s brewery lay at Grandpont on the southern outskirts of the town.8 Bodl. Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 277. He was a parishioner of St. Michael at the South Gate and it appears that most of his real property lay in south Oxford. He held some of it in the right of his first wife Margaret, the widow of a local butcher, Walter Ashbury.9 Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, 207-8; Cart. Oseney Abbey, ii. 185-6; iii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xci), 241; Cat. Archs. All Souls Coll. 159; Liber Albus Oxoniensis ed. Ellis, nos. 217, 241. She also possessed lands and tenements elsewhere in the town, including a tenement with shops in the High Street where she and Wythigg probably took up residence after their marriage.10 PCC 9 Luffenham; Surv. Oxf. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. n.s. xiv), 169. A little further afield, Wythigg appears at one time to have had an interest in a small plot of copyhold land in Barton to the east of Oxford.11 Oriel Coll. Recs. (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxxxv), 330-1. To the west, his activities as a woolman and merchant extended into Wiltshire, but there is no evidence that he held any land in that county.12 E159/217, recogniciones Hil.; CP40/745, rot. 216. In the mid 1440s, he was obliged to surrender his claim to a couple of tenements in the parish of St. Aldate’s, the ownership of which he had disputed with the clerk, John Arundell.13 Surv. Oxf., ii (Oxf. Historical Soc. n.s. xx), 78; C1/39/71. A decade later, he sold a messuage in his home parish of St. Michael to Isabel Mersshefelde who, like Wythigg’s first wife, was the widow of an Oxford butcher.14 Med. Archs. Christ Church (Oxf. Historical Soc. xcii), 46-47; Wood’s Surv. Antiqs. Oxf. i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xv), 614.

When she made her will, dated 2 Nov. 1427,15 PCC 9 Luffenham. Margaret Wythigg sought burial in the parish church of All Saints, rather than that of St. Michael. Among those to whom she bequeathed robes, bedding and other household items were William and John, the ‘sons of her husband’. This wording raises the possibility that they were not her children, although there is no evidence that she was not Wythigg’s first wife. In her will, Margaret left Wythigg various lands and tenements. First, she directed that he and his heirs were to succeed to her holdings in St. Edward’s parish (a gift in fee simple indicating that she must have inherited these properties), although she expected him to pay her son Hugh (presumably one of her sons by Ashbury) a lump sum of ten marks in return. Secondly, she awarded Wythigg for life the tenement and shops in All Saints’ parish in which she resided, while directing her executors to sell the reversion in the meantime. She did however offer him the opportunity to acquire a permanent interest in these properties by awarding him first option of purchasing the reversion. Finally, she left him two tenements in south Oxford, also for life, with reversion to her sons John and Edmund (again, probably her sons by Ashbury). Margaret appointed three executors, her husband, his relative Richard Wythigg and the butcher John Waryn. She died before May 1428, when her will was proved. Following her death Wythigg took a second wife, another Margaret.

It was after his first wife’s death that Wythigg began his career as an office-holder at Oxford. His rise through the municipal hierarchy was typical, in as much as he served as a chamberlain and bailiff before becoming an alderman. The account covering his year as chamberlain has survived. It shows that he and his associate in that office, Robert Walford alias Sadeler*, had an eventful term, coinciding as it did with a dispute between the townsmen of Oxford and Thomas Chace, the chancellor of Oxford university. The dispute dominates the account, which records that he and Walford collected an aid of £12 6s. 8d. from their fellow townsmen in aid of the town’s legal expenses that year, although this was far from sufficient to cover those expenses, which amounted to £21 17s. 7d. Walford rode to London on errands related to the quarrel with Chace on several occasions, but it is unclear whether Wythigg likewise travelled to the city on the same business. The town also went to the trouble of consulting Domesday Book, an exercise costing 20s. ½d., and returning its mayor Thomas Coventre I* to the Parliament of 1429, to ensure that its claims were effectively represented there. The Parliament was in session at the time of Henry VI’s coronation on 6 Nov. that year, and the account shows that the town spent a further £4 15s. in upholding the traditional right of its mayor and other burgesses to assist the butler of England at the coronation feast.16 Munimenta Civitatis Oxonie, 284-6.

By the time of his own return to the Commons nearly two decades later, Wythigg was well respected as an alderman of several years’ standing. While he was an MP, the university chancellor’s court acknowledged him as ‘discretus et honestus vir’ when he appeared there to appoint proxies to act for him in his absence shortly before he departed for the second session of the Parliament of February 1449.17 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 183. Yet the university authorities may have ceased to hold him in such high regard upon hearing the previously mentioned complaints about the quality of his beer in the following year.

After leaving the Commons, Wythigg remained an alderman but appears not to have held any other office within Oxford. During the spring of 1451, he helped to arbitrate in a dispute that had come before the university chancellor’s court, where he again appeared a few years later, as a surety for other Oxford residents, both townsmen and members of the university.18 Ibid. 234, 363, 400. He received his only known appointment outside the town, as a tax collector in Oxfordshire, in the same decade. The commission that the Crown issued to him and his fellow collectors in mid 1453 was for the county only and excluded the town of Oxford, suggesting that the government was no longer prepared to entertain past claims that the burgesses should not have to serve as collectors outside their town.

Just over four years later, Wythigg conveyed all his personal property to Thomas Rede of London to hold in trust, but for what reason is unknown.19 CCR, 1454-61, p. 290. Rede was not the only Londoner with whom he had dealings; some seven years earlier, he and Nicholas Westwode, a pewterer from the City, had sued two other Londoners for debt in the court of common pleas.20 CP40/757, rot. 197.

Still alive in February 1459, when he conveyed a tenement and garden at Grandpont to the Oxford tailor John Lowe,21 Cart. Oseney Abbey, ii. 185-6; Bodl. Top. Oxon. c. 396, f. 277. Wythigg died before the end of the same year.22 The exact date of his death is unknown but he was not re-elected an alderman in the following autumn and he was certainly dead in 38 Hen. VI (1459-60): Surv. Oxf., ii. 14. Lowe probably received the conveyance in the capacity of a trustee, for he was a feoffee to the use of Wythigg’s will, which he also witnessed. The only surviving copy of the will, recorded in the ‘Liber Albus’ of Oxford, bears no date. It is possibly no more than an extract from a longer document since it is concerned with a single endowment and does not refer to his son, John Wythigg.23 Liber Albus Oxoniensis, no. 241. Made in the name of the MP and his second wife, it instructed Lowe and three other feoffees, Sir Richard Tunstall†, Richard Spragat* and Thomas Browne, to grant four tenements and a brewhouse to the tailors’ craft in Oxford. In return, the craft was to maintain a chaplain who would pray for the souls of the couple, their friends and the brethren of St. John the Baptist, probably the tailors’ fraternity at Oxford. The chaplain was to receive a stipend of at least four marks p.a. from the properties and the tailors were to provide sureties to guarantee that they would perform the will and keep the premises in good repair. How Wythigg had come to form a connexion with Tunstall, a leading member of the King’s household, is a mystery. Wythigg was survived by his son, John, who appears to have resided at Wolvercote, immediately to the north of Oxford.24 Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 178; ii (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciv), 121, 343; Cat. Archs. All Souls Coll. 159. A reference to the MP as ‘Thomas Wythigg senior’ in mid 1456 (Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i. 363) suggests that he had a younger namesake, possibly another son. His relationship (if any) with William Wythigg, who sued a former escheator of Oxon. in 1480, for trespassing on his property at Kingham in that county, is unknown: E13/164, rot. 135.