This eminent London merchant, whose career in civic government was both long and distinguished, came originally from Sussex, although he served his apprenticeship in the capital. He is first mentioned in 1388 when, as an agent for his master, John Frosh, he helped to sell a cargo of wool confiscated at Middleburg from the late Sir Nicholas Brembre. Waldern ceased to be an apprentice in 1395, and three years later, immediately after becoming a full member of the Mercers’ Company, was elected to serve a term as warden. His former master evidently held him in considerable esteem, and, on drawing up his will in September 1397, left the young man a legacy of £40. By March 1398 Waldern had established himself sufficiently well to be granted a papal indult for a portable altar.
Information about Waldern’s commercial activities and financial affairs is fragmentary, but none the less creates an impression of great wealth. He made at least four loans to Henry IV between November 1402 and December 1403, recovering the first and largest, a sum of £200 advanced on the security of the customs at Southampton, with very little trouble thanks to his appointment as collector there. The King borrowed a further £333 (but not all at once) from Waldern during the early years of the century, and repaid him partly in cash and partly in assignments on forthcoming taxation. Waldern evidently found it harder to recover debts from private individuals. At various times he attempted to collect over £210 due to him on bonds which, for the most part, had not been honoured for several years; and he was owed other, not inconsiderable sums by customers and tradesmen.
Always anxious to build up his fortune and extend his connexions abroad, Waldern became one of the leading members of a consortium of English merchants intent on opening up English trade in the Mediterranean. So alarmed were the Genoese by the threat which this posed to their own mercantile supremacy, that they confiscated a large shipment of cloth and wool allegedly worth £24,000 and imprisoned the factors who sold these goods in Genoa. The English merchants clamoured for reprisals, and in the spring of 1413 obtained letters of marque permitting them to recover the value of their lost goods, together with £10,000 costs, from the ships and merchandise of any Genoese trading in England. Predictably, they experienced major difficulties in giving effect to these letters and were driven to petition Parliament for redress in November 1414. No doubt their cause was greatly assisted by Waldern’s presence in the Commons, but despite the various assurances which they received, many of the merchants, including Waldern himself, were dead before the final £1,000 of a greatly reduced sum was handed over by the Genoese 13 years later. In October 1422 Waldern was still exporting wool (albeit through the more regular channel of the Calais Staple), and one year later he made his last known shipment of cloth into the port of London.
Much of Waldern’s wealth was invested in property, both in London and elsewhere. His first recorded purchase took place in February 1401 when he bought the leasehold of a tenement called ‘Le Sterre’ with extensive appurtenances in the parish of All Hallows, Dowgate. He and his first wife also owned a tenement in St. Anthony’s parish at this time, although no mention of it is made in his will. In all, Waldern’s holdings in the City were worth an estimated £5 a year in 1412: his annual income from this quarter may well have trebled by 1414, however, since his second wife had then entered the inheritance left to her by her father, John Clerk. This comprised at least seven tenements and II shops, as well as land and rents in three London parishes, and remained in Waldern’s hands until his death. Over the next five years he purchased an inn and an adjacent dwelling in the parish of St. Benedict Shorhog, besides becoming involved in other, less straightforward transactions. There is a possibility that the holdings which he and an associate recovered from Alice and Edmund Salle in 1406 were held by them simply as feoffees; but, if the indentures whereby they agreed to pay £40 a year for the couple’s estate in the parishes of Holy Trinity the Less and St. Botolph without Aldgate were in no way collusive, Waldern must have held property in no less than eight city parishes by 1420.
Inevitably, a man of Waldern’s wealth and position came to play a significant part in the affairs of others. He acted as a mainpernor on several occasions between September 1400 and July 1417: once, with Thomas Fauconer, for a group of Florentine merchants trading in England, and once for the Coventry mercer, Ralph Garton, who was brought before the King’s bench in February 1414 on suspicion of lollardy.
Waldern was present at the Guildhall for elections to the Parliaments of 1413 (May), 1419, 1420, 1421 (Dec.) and 1423. On the first and last of these occasions he attended officially as mayor of London, being one of the few eminent citizens considered sufficiently rich and successful to hold this post twice during the period under review. Such was his standing in the City that in May 1415 the royal council ordered the then mayor not to demolish any buildings without first consulting Waldern and three other senior aldermen, again including Whittington and Cromer. Yet his second mayoralty was marked by a disagreement with the Brewers, who seem to have annoyed him in some way. He allowed himself to be placated by the gift of a boar (worth 20s.) and an ox (worth 17s.), thus retaining his reputation as a true friend of their company.
Walden made his will on 22 May 1424 and died within five days. He was buried in the church of St. Benedict Shorhog, leaving behind five children, all of whom were under age. They evidently shared one-third (given in different sources as either £645 or £775) of the cash profits raised on the sale of his moveable goods, as well as £133 due to their father from various debtors; their widowed mother received a similar sum; and the remaining third was set aside for pious works. Waldern’s executors were subsequently obliged to honour an old debt of £217 due from the deceased to John Victor, so the three portions may well have been reduced to allow for this. Margaret Waldern married the Norfolk landowner John Roys within a few months of her first husband’s death, and with him gave securities of £1,000 to the city chamberlain on obtaining custody of her children’s inheritance in September 1425. After her death, one year later, the wardship of Waldern’s Middlesex property, together with the marriage of Richard, his elder son, passed through various hands, including those of Thomas Hoo and Sir Thomas Tuddenham, but in May 1438 it was finally granted to Thomas Bateman, esquire, at an annual farm of £40.