WOOD, Sylvanus (c.1604-75), of Brookthorpe, Glos.

The Wood family could be traced at Brookthorpe, three miles from Gloucester, for six generations before Sylvanus Wood.15T.D. Fosbrooke, Abstracts of Records and MSS respecting the county of Gloucester (2 vols. Gloucester 1807), i. 270. The manor was granted to the bishop of Gloucester at the Reformation, and the Wood family were lessees of the lands of the manor, the manor house and in Sylvanus Wood’s day, held 278 acres as their demesne. In the reign of Mary Tudor, Wood’s ancestor had held the tithes of Brookthorpe parish, too, and these were let to his father, Richard, in 1633 on a 90-year lease. The manor house itself was described by the parliamentary surveyors in 1647 as a ‘fair stone house with two large barns’.16Glos. RO, GDR/G3/19, pp. 14-22; D936/Y10. Richard Wood, a county magistrate, left many bequests in his will of 1636, including one to his ‘ancient friend’, Thomas Iles, minister of Tetbury and prebendary of Gloucester, who later suffered for his loyalty to the episcopal church and Prayer Book. A further bequest was to the poor of Gloucester: located in the ‘Inshire’, Brookthorpe was subject to the civil government of the city.17PROB11/171/167; Glos. RO, GDR/G3/19, pp. 14-22; Al. Ox.; J. Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), ii. 104. Eldest son though he was, Sylvanus Wood enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn not merely for the usual finishing course followed by gentry, but to study law seriously enough to be called to the bar in 1633. He was probably mindful of his family’s continuing dependence on a lease from the bishop of Gloucester: there was no freehold patrimony to speak of.

Wood took his father’s place in the county commission of the peace in July 1640. Despite his tenancy of episcopal property, or perhaps even because of it, he supported Parliament during the civil war. In doing so, he was following the lead of the corporation of Gloucester, to whose authority Brookthorpe was subject in civil administration. It was alleged that Wood was among the first to consult at Gloucester in the summer of 1642 about the threat from the king’s commissioners of array, and he was certainly appointed to be a deputy lieutenant of the city at that time.18Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and Mems. of the Fam. of Guise of Elmore, Glos. ed. G. Davies (Camden Soc. ser. 3, xxviii), 167; LJ v. 291b. First appointed as a captain of the Gloucester trained bands in several parishes of the Inshire in December 1642, he took civilian office as a commissioner for raising taxes and rates for Parliament in June 1643. By March 1644 he was noted by the committee for Gloucester as having been active in the service, and as having sustained many personal losses, probably not least at the time of the skirmish in August 1643 on Brookthorpe hill.19Glos. RO, GBR/G3/SO2, f. 26; A. and O.; SP28/228/970. As a former magistrate, he was a natural choice for membership of the committee for the county and the city on 10 May 1644, and was signing warrants on the committee's behalf in September 1645.20SP28/228/761. To judge from the surviving warrants he signed, Wood was most active in the county committee during 1646 and 1647.21A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire 1640-1672 (Woodbridge, 1997), 92.

When Brookthorpe was put up for sale by Parliament as a parcel of confiscated episcopal land, as sitting tenant Wood had first refusal on the property. He did not buy the estate; it was bought instead for £817 by two apparent outsiders, Arthur Creswell and John Watson.22Bodl. Rawl. B.239, p. 20. Watson was of a family from Aldington, near Evesham, the home of Serjeant Richard Cresheld*, Wood’s father-in-law. ‘Creswell’ was a common variant of Cresheld, and so it is highly likely that Arthur Creswell was Richard Cresheld’s younger brother or another close relation.23Vis. Worcs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 28; Vis. Glos. 1623 (Harl. Soc. xxi), 266. This, in other words, was a purchase of Brookthorpe in trust for the Woods. In the light of later events, the formulation of the device by which Wood retained his property, but yet could not later be accused of profiting from the ill times on which the episcopal church had fallen, was fortunate. Despite the apparent prudence of this move, Wood accepted the execution of the king and the establishment of the commonwealth. In December 1649, he was one of three justices of the peace, former committeemen, whom the Tewkesbury corporation recommended to Parliament as arbitrators in their dispute with some of the town's leading citizens.24Glos. RO, TBR/A1/1, p. 153. In 1650 he was asked by the council of state to report on whether or not Sudeley castle should be made untenable, on a petition of George Brydges, 6th Baron Chandos. A few months later, the council wrote to another select group of Gloucestershire justices, including Wood, requiring them to examine allegations of malpractice in enclosures.25CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 53, 218.

In October 1653, Wood was named as a judge of poor prisoners under the legislation of the Nominated Assembly, and he was included in the local assessment commission a month later; but he proved as open to the Cromwellian protectorate as he had been to the commonwealth, and was appointed a commissioner for scandalous ministers in August 1654.26A. and O.; An Act for an Assessment. He sat as a justice at quarter sessions throughout the 1650s, which must have enhanced his credibility when he was put forward as a candidate in the 1654 general election. He was named only to one committee in the first protectorate Parliament, albeit the important one of privileges, along with fellow Gloucestershire and Gloucester Members, Matthew Hale and Thomas Pury I.27CJ vii. 366b. This was his only involvement in Parliament, and Wood is not known to have stood again. He continued as an active local magistrate, but was not named as a commissioner under Major-general John Disbrowe* in 1655. Wood stuck, in other words, to the same traditional pattern of involvement in local government as his father. He survived the Restoration of the monarchy, retaining his place on the bench of magistrates until the harsher climate of 1662 against former parliamentarians, and his deft footwork when Brookthorpe came up for sale now saw him in good stead. His lease was renewed by the bishop of Gloucester in 1675 on even better terms than the very favourable pre-war ones: now for four lives instead of three, and at the same rent as the last renewal in 1641.28Glos. RO, GDR/G2/3/15810, 15811; G3/19. Wood died probably at Brookthorpe, and was buried there on 27 November 1675. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.29Brookthorpe bishops’ transcripts.