WYOT, Richard

More may be added to the earlier biography.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 931-3..

A lawsuit that Wyot pursued in the court of common pleas in the early 1400s reveals that he was the son of John Wyot of Colnbrook (situated on the Middlesex-Buckinghamshire boundary and lying partly in Stanwell) and not of Thomas Wyot (fl. 1371) as suggested by the previous biography. He brought the suit as John’s executor, claiming in pleadings of Trinity term 1404 that the defendant, William Pountfreyt, a clerk of the common pleas, owed £40 to his late father’s estate, by reason of a bond given to John Wyot in July 1389.6 CP40/574, rot. 370.

It was perhaps through his influential friend Thomas Chaucer* that Wyot came into contact with the prominent Lancastrian courtier and parliamentarian Sir Walter Hungerford†. He stood surety for Hungerford in October 1407, upon Sir Walter’s election as a knight of the shire for Wiltshire to the Parliament of that year, the first in which he himself sat.7 C219/10/4.

A few months after Henry V’s accession, Wyot obtained two royal pardons. The first, issued on 18 Oct. 1413 and granted to him alone, was for any offence committed before the previous 9 Apr.; the second, dated a day later, was for all conveyances which he, Edmund Hampden†, William Whaplode* and others had made without royal licence before 15 May of the same year.8 C67/36, mm. 3, 9.

In August 1417 Wyot’s patron, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, granted him an annuity of £20 p.a. for life from the episcopal manors at West Wycombe and Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire in reward for his services. By Henry V’s reign, Wyot also enjoyed a retainer of 20s. p.a. from Winchester College, an institution founded by Beaufort’s immediate predecessor as bishop and to which he provided counsel from 1413 to at least 1419.9 Hants. RO, bp. of Winchester’s pipe rolls, 11M59/B1/163 (formerly 159419); N.and Q. ser. 12, i. 362. Later, in May 1428, Beaufort would nominate Wyot and John Ash I* to act as his attorneys in the English courts for one year during his absence overseas.10 E159/204, recorda Easter rot. 2d.

Also during Henry V’s reign, Wyot was a creditor of the spendthrift John Chichele, the son of the London grocer William Chichele† and a nephew of Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury. In September 1418 he appeared before the common council of London to acknowledge having received a payment of no less than £438 34s. 4d. from William Oliver†: Oliver had agreed to settle with John’s creditors in return for a promise of reimbursement in the near future.11 Corp. London RO, London jnl. 1, f. 48v; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 872-3.

The connexion between Wyot and the Moleyns family was more extensive than previously noticed, for the MP was an executor of Margery (d.1399), widow of Sir William Moleyns† (d.1381). As such, his responsibilities became intertwined with his duties as executor of Sir Philip de la Vache† (d.1408) and administrator of the goods of de la Vache’s intestate wife Elizabeth (d.1414), since Margery had awarded the de la Vaches a temporary interest in her manor of Gresham, Norfolk. After Elizabeth’s death, Margery’s grandson Sir William Moleyns† (d.1425) agreed to pay 920 marks for Gresham, but Wyot, in his capacity as her executor, re-entered the property after he failed to hand over more than 20 marks of this sum. To resolve this unsatisfactory situation, it was agreed that Wyot should sell Gresham to the wealthy London mercer Thomas Fauconer*; that Fauconer would settle it on his daughter Katherine for her marriage portion; and that Katherine would marry Moleyns’s son and namesake. In due course a settlement for the marriage (to take place when the couple were older) was drawn up, but in May 1423 Moleyns reneged on the agreement by marrying his son William to Anne, a daughter of the late Cornish esquire John Whalesborough†. Fauconer reacted by entering Gresham, as he was entitled to do under the terms of the settlement, and he was in possession when Moleyns died in June 1425. At this stage Wyot, who had still to fulfil Margery Moleyns’s will, was helped by the intervention of Thomas Chaucer, a kinsman of Margery and the farmer of the Moleyns lands during the minority of the younger William. After lengthy negotiations Fauconer agreed to relinquish the manor to Chaucer, Wyot and others, in return for a sum of money ‘within the value’. In January 1427 the 14 year old Katherine appeared before a church court to renounce her match with Moleyns, and soon afterwards Gresham was sold to Judge William Paston. The sale to Paston was a necessary expedient for providing Wyot, who had appeared before the same court to give his version of events, with the financial wherewithal to fulfil his obligations as the long dead Margery Moleyns’s executor.12 C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 47-52.

The records of the common pleas suggest that Cardinal Beaufort and William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, were not the only great men whom Wyot served in the latter part of his life. In the mid 1420s, Philippa, dowager duchess of the late Edward of Langley, duke of York (d.1415), sued her former receiver Richard Clyvedon, a yeoman from Brookley, Hampshire. She alleged that he was found to owe her a still outstanding debt of just over £70 when her auditors, Richard Wyot (presumably the MP) and John Somer, heard his account in London in February 1423. Asserting that he owed her nothing, Clyvedon denied that the duchess had appointed Wyot and Somer to audit his account, and the jury found for him when the case was tried in late 1425.13 CP40/658, rot. 104d.

In the later 1420s Wyot was associated with William Flete*, who had also sat in both Parliaments of 1414, in litigation over a tenement at Watford, possibly in the capacity of a feoffee for Flete, who possessed landholdings there and elsewhere in Hertfordshire.14 C66/423, m. 7d.

While noting that Wyot’s widow retained possession of the bulk of the MP’s own estates until she died in 1444, the previous biography is silent about his heirs. These were the descendants of his sister, Elizabeth, who had married into the obscure Knyfe family. Her grandson, Richard Knyfe, was succeeded by a daughter, Alice, who married Richard Bulstrode*, apparently in 1455. Alice brought Bulstrode in marriage a claim to a number of properties once held by Wyot, a claim that the couple were able to make good with respect to a fourth part of the manor of Horton and land elsewhere in Buckinghamshire and Middlesex.15 C140/16/15; VCH Bucks. iii. 283; Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. lvii), 79-80; CCR, 1461-8, p. 367; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 16; ii. 627. Alice was also the heir of her great-aunt Joan Knyfe, daughter of Elizabeth Wyot and niece of the MP. Joan, who died in 1455, married at least twice, first to Thomas atte Water and afterwards to Simon Ralegh of Nettlecombe, Somerset. Wyot had acted as a feoffee for her and both these husbands in the early fifteenth century.16 CP25(1)/291/63/28; Berks. RO, Loveden mss, D/ELV/T73; Goring Chs. ii (Oxon. Rec. Soc. xiv), 214-15; Lincoln Diocese Docs. (EETS, cxlix), 66-69; C139/156/6; C140/16/15.