WYTHOM, Hugh

Wythom was from a wealthy dynasty of Boston merchants. His pedigree is imprecise in its details, but there can be no doubt that he was the son of one namesake, who died in about 1426, and the grandson of another, who died only a few years before.3 CP40/643, rot. 82d; 667, rot. 28d; 669, rot. 67; 702, rot. 355d. His grandfather was prominent enough to serve as mayor of the Boston staple in 1418 and as a royal loan commissioner in Holland a year later.4 C67/24; CPR, 1416-22, p. 252. For the gdfa.’s trading interests in Prussia: CPR, 1416-22, p. 205; SC8/164/8169. But our MP was to enjoy a much more successful career than any of his ancestors. He was a minor at his father’s death, and the family’s affairs appear to have fallen to the charge of his mother Margaret. It was she who, ‘duryng his yonge age’, delivered 500 marks, devised to him by his father, to William English, the Wythoms’ attorney in the Calais staple, with the intention that he should trade with the same to her son’s profit. The attorney’s failure to give proper account led to litigation in Chancery in the early 1440s, by which time our MP was comfortably of age. Indeed, he may have been of age as early as 1430 when admitted to the prestigious Boston guild of Corpus Christi, in which his family had long played a prominent role.5 C1/11/205; Harl. 4795, f. 35.

The inheritance Wythom entered on his majority included not only substantial moveable wealth, but also a country estate, albeit one burdened by his mother’s interest until at least 1436. In the subsidy returns of that year she – described as ‘of Algarkirk’, a few miles to the south of Boston – was assessed on an income of as much as £20 p.a. (and it may be that she was an heiress, although there is nothing to identify her family), and incidental references show that the family also had property in several Holland vills, including Kirton-in-Holland, Moulton and Holbeach.6 E179/136/198; C1/29/72; CP40/749, rot. 209d; 750, rot. 252.

There is indirect but cumulatively compelling evidence to connect Wythom with the service of John, Lord (and, from 1440, Viscount) Beaumont. In the early 1430s his putative kinsman, Robert Wythom, served under Beaumont in France and later numbered among his feoffees; and Beaumont was lord of Boston, where our MP’s principal interests lay. Further, in 1453 Hugh was joint-plaintiff in an action of debt with Beaumont’s steward at Boston, Thomas Kyme.7 E101/52/10; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25769/599; CPR, 1436-41, p. 35; CP40/769, rot. 275d. Such a connexion is also the most likely explanation for the course taken by Wythom’s short career. Beaumont probably found him a place in the royal household, where he first appears in 1443, and from that service flowed a series of minor grants of royal patronage. As early as July 1443 he secured an exemption from taking up knighthood or appointment to local office, a protection, in his case, against nomination to the particularly burdensome shrievalty of his native county. That office itself was not unwelcome to him was soon made very clear: in the following February he was named to the bench in Holland and proved immediately active, sitting on four occasions in the first few months as a j.p. Of greater importance to him, in view of his trading interests, was his nomination in May 1444 as searcher of ships in Boston and, nine months later, as tronager and pesager in the same port.8 E101/409/11, f. 38v; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 182, 326; CFR, xvi. 278. In the spring of 1448, the government’s confidence him was further demonstrated by his addition to the benches in Kesteven and Lindsey.

The year 1448 was an eventful one for Wythom. In a letter dated 21 Aug. his fellow Lincolnshire household man, William Tailboys*, applied for protection to Beaumont from what he saw as our MP’s harassment. Tailboys complained that ‘Hugh Wythom hath said he wold be in rest and peese with me, and not to maligne agayn otherwise than lawe and right wold’, and yet he had wounded and imprisoned one of his servants at Boston.9 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner (Lib. edn.), ii. 100. The letter is undated by year, but since it refers to the indictment of Tailboys’s servant, William Sheriff, as recent it must date from 1448: KB9/260/93. The violent activities of Tailboys and his associates makes it difficult to take this complaint at face value. Wythom was probably acting here alongside Richard, Lord Willoughby, Lionel, Lord Welles, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell, whose supposed oppressions were also cited in the letter, in a concerted effort to terminate these depredations. In a session of the peace held at Boston on the following 2 Oct., Wythom was one of three Holland j.p.s. who took a series of indictments against Tailboys and his men to match those already taken in the other parts of the county.10 KB27/766, rex rot. 34; KB9/260/96.

On 16 July 1449 Wythom secured further influence over trade regulation in his native port when he was granted the office of gauger there. It is unfortunate that more evidence of his own trading interests does not survive. Suggestive, however, is his appearance alongside two Boston merchants, William Hugon and Robert Derby, as a defendant in actions of debt for sizeable sums. For example, in 1446 Thomas Palmer* had a plea pending against all three of them for £72 each, and soon after Lord Cromwell claimed £40 against our MP and Hugon. Such actions, and others like them, probably concern disputes over their purchase of wool from the growers. An incidental reference shows that Wythom, on 18 Sept. 1450, shipped two sacks and a clove of wool from Boston on a ship called Petre de Cales, which was then lost at sea ‘per horribilem tempestatem’. Fuller records would reveal many similar shipments.11 CPR, 1446-52, p. 283; CP40/740, rot. 146; 744, rot. 161; 745, rot. 96d; E159/232, brevia Mich. rot. 46.

None the less, Wythom’s career was more political than mercantile. His election for Taunton in the Parliament of November 1449 was another aspect of his Household service. The lord of the borough, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, a native of the parts of Holland, probably chose him as a suitable candidate at the recommendation of Viscount Beaumont. In the following May, during the last session of Parliament, he was appointed to a commission to investigate recent spoliations of foreign merchants.12 C219/15/7; CPR, 1446-52, p. 384. Later he rendered service of another sort: in the autumn of 1452 he played an active part in royal investigations into treasons in his native county. Before a powerful royal commission at Grantham and Stamford, he headed a jury which returned true bills against those who had risen in favour of the duke of York in the previous February.13 KB9/65A/3d, 8d, 21d.

Clearly Wythom was a well-connected and valuable royal servant, but even so it is surprising to find him as a knight when he next appears in the records as a commissioner for sewers in the following February.14 CPR, 1452-61, p. 56. Proof is lacking but it is very likely that the occasion of his promotion was the knighting of the King’s half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, at the Tower of London on 5 Jan. 1453. His career looked set to make further advance, only to be cut short by death. He last appears in an active role on the following 31 Apr., when he sat as a j.p. at Kirton-in-Holland, and he was probably still alive in July, when he was among the merchants allowed to export wool free of customs to the value of the cargo lost with the Petre de Cales. On 11 Aug., however, his office of tronager and pesager was granted to George Heton*, and he was not thereafter appointed to the new Lincolnshire commissions of the peace.15 KB27/769, rex rot. 36d; E159/232, brevia Mich. rot. 46; CPR, 1452-61, p. 106.

Wythom was probably buried in the church of the Greyfriars at Boston, where several tombs of the family survived in the early sixteenth century.16 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 115. His will does not survive, but a Chancery petition names his executors as his widow, Katherine, and two of his gentry neighbours, John Pynchbeck and William Orme, a servant of Lord Cromwell. If another petition in Chancery, dating from about 1460, is to be believed, our MP charged them and his feoffees with the sale of his manor at Kirton-in-Holland should his moveable goods prove insufficient to discharge his debts. The executors duly sold the manor to a local esquire, Richard Walcote of Walcot by Folkingham, but Hugh’s feoffees refused to convey.17 C1/28/471; 29/72. Although he was ready to sell land, Wythom left a son and heir, also named Hugh, who died while yet a minor but not before himself having a son of the same name. The latter, on coming of age, sued a petition in Chancery against his grandfather’s last surviving feoffee, David Olton, the elderly vicar of Kirton-in-Holland, claiming that the feoffee had refused to convey the remaining family lands to him.18 C1/181/32. It has the same pledges to prosecute as Walcote’s petition, namely John Baker and William Brond, two yeomen of Whaplode in Holland.

A further Chancery petition provides a revealing insight into Wythom’s career. A Lincolnshire gentleman, Richard Halmer of Weston near Spalding, complained that in about 1443, as an eight-year-old boy, he had been forcibly abducted from his mother by our MP. He had then been taken into Nottinghamshire, where he was sold to Henry Boson*, an esquire of the royal household. Boson mistreated him, putting him to the plough and other servile occupations, while his mother laboured against both abductor and purchaser for his return. Although she spent 40 marks, which she raised through the sale of part of her son’s landed inheritance, the defendants ‘were of suche myght and power and gat them suche assistence’ that she could not prevail, and hence he remained in custody until Boson’s death in 1451. The first part – that our MP had wrongfully obtained the wardship – receives independent confirmation from an action pending in the court of common pleas in 1448: Sir William Bonville*, father-in-law of Wythom’s enemy, Tailboys, sued him for wrongfully abducting Halmer from his wardship at Spalding.19 C1/28/471; CP40/749, rot. 378. If, as seems probable, the rest is also substantially true then it suggests that the misdeeds of Household men in the localities in the 1440s was not confined to the servants of William, duke of Suffolk, and James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele.