WILCOTES, Oliver

Given the influence that the lords of Chippenham, the Hungerfords, appear to have wielded over the parliamentary representation of the borough in the decades immediately prior to Wilcotes’s election, it is possible that this otherwise unidentified MP was one of their servants or retainers. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 692. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 949, speculates that he was a son of John Wilcotes† of Great Tew, Oxon. and therefore the brother of John’s (probably illegitimate) son Thomas Wilcotes*, but the biography of John in the far more thoroughly researched The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 860-3, makes no such connexion.