WILDE, Robert

Of unknown antecedents, Wilde moved to Sandwich at some point after his first marriage to Margery, the widow of a leading local merchant, Henry Cacherell. Possibly he should be identified with the Robert Wilde who was associated with the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, in the 1420s. Appointed as an attorney in Ireland by the prior of Christ Church in 1422, this Robert may have acted as a factor for the priory, shipping goods from Sandwich where the monks owned a quay. By 1429, he was a tenant on the archbishop of Canterbury’s manor at Knowlton: CPR, 1422-9, p. 7; Boys, 666, 671; E. Kent Recs. (Kent Rec. Ser. vii), 86-88. There is no evidence for any property in Sandwich that Margery may have brought to him in marriage, although in 1428 the couple purchased a tenement in St. Peter’s parish there from Peter Vyncent for £53 6s. 8d. Canterbury Cath. Archs., Dean and chapter mss, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/S/258.

The course of Wilde’s early career in town government is unknown, owing to the lack of municipal records before 1430. Shortly after becoming mayor of Sandwich in December that year, he gained election to his first Parliament, in which he sat alongside Henry Brice*. By the following December, he was a jurat (although he had almost certainly held that office during the 1420s), and on 10 Apr. 1432 he was returned to his second Parliament, on this occasion alongside the mayor John Green I*. Eighteen days later, he and Green were empowered, while at Westminster, to represent their town in negotiations between the Cinque Ports and Great Yarmouth. ‘Old Black Bk.’, ff. 2v, 3v. As an MP, Wilde was also no doubt involved in obtaining a confirmation, dated 3 June 1432, of Sandwich’s charter of 1421. CPR, 1422-9, p. 194. In December 1432 his fellow townsmen recognized a debt of £25 9s. owed to him for the period of his first mayoralty, a sum probably incorporating parliamentary wages. Wilde was elected to his third Parliament on 9 June 1433, and on the following 7 Dec. he was chosen as mayor for a second time. On this occasion he accepted the mayoralty on the proviso that he was freed of all actions against him in the local courts and that he was satisfied of his expenses, presumably a reference to arrears of his wages as an MP. Already, however, his other interests took him away from Sandwich for lengthy periods, prompting the appointment of John Shelley* as deputy mayor in April 1434. In the following December Wilde was elected a jurat of the town for the last time. ‘Old Black Bk.’, ff. 7v, 12v, 14v, 16v, 20.

It would appear that the death of his first wife and his remarriage to Thomasina, the widow of the west Kent gentleman, Henry Aucher, was what drew Wilde away from Sandwich. This was a prestigious match for a merchant and brought him into kinship with other landed families from that part of the county, among them the Ellises of Kennington and the St. Legers of Ulcombe. While the date of Margery Wilde’s death is unknown, she was certainly no longer alive in December 1432 when he was discharged of all debts she had owed to the executors of her previous husband, Henry Cacherell. Wilde had married Thomasina by Easter term 1437, when they brought a plea of debt in the court of common pleas in the capacity of executors of Henry Aucher, who in turn had been executor of Thomas Ellis† of Kennington. Ibid. f. 8; CP40/705, rot. 203d; Archaeologia Cantiana, xv. 5, 15, 28. Affairs relating to his own first marriage also demanded Wilde’s attention in this period, for in the following year he sued John Green I, again in the common pleas, in connexion with debts arising from the execution of Henry Cacherell’s will. Evidently the quarrel was a prolonged one, since a decade later he sued the Sandwich draper, John Boteler III*, for maintaining Green in the same dispute. CP40/711, rot. 108d; 742, rot. 309; 753, rot. 258.

Following his second marriage, Wilde continued, for some years at least, to maintain business contacts in the Kentish ports, for he and William Brewes* of Dover shipped 13½ sacks of wool from Sandwich in 1440. (He must have formed a good relationship with Brewes, whom he served as an executor after the latter’s death a decade or so later). E122/127/18; C1/27/304; Egerton 2090, f. 3v. By the mid 1440s, however, his most important mercantile connexions were with London and beyond. In the latter part of his career, he appears to have bought wool from growers in the Midlands and sold it to London merchants for export. Suits his widow pursued in Chancery in the early 1460s reveal the extent, if not the precise nature, of these contacts, for she spoke of Wilde’s ‘dayly conversacion with many marchauntes of London’ in London, Westminster and ‘other places’. C4/6/14. She also described her late husband as ‘a worshipful Esqwier’, a status earlier acknowledged in a royal pardon that he had received in January 1455, and that had further referred to him as lately of Kent, Middlesex and London, and as lately as a merchant of the Calais staple. C67/41, m. 10. Wilde’s associates in the City included the mercers, John Abbot II*, Geoffrey Boleyn* (whose sister, Isabel, had married his stepson, Henry Aucher) and John Tate, and the grocers, John Hardman and William Lemyng. C1/10/65; CCR, 1454-61, p. 249. The connexion with Lemyng proved the most important. He and William were together involved in various business transactions during the 1450s, and in January 1458 they brought a bill in King’s bench against the London scrivener, William Styfford, over a debt of £100. KB27/787, rot. 30d. Furthermore, when Wilde acquired the lease of a tenement in the precinct of St. Katherine’s hospital by the Tower of London in August 1455, it was apparently on the recommendation of Lemyng who had identified it as somewhere ‘convenient for a man of worchipe to dwelle inne’. CCR, 1461-7, p. 264; C1/41/249-50.

After Wilde’s death (‘in hys bedde in a night sodenly’) in 1461, however, his widow and friend fell out with each other over debts that Lemyng had contracted with her late husband. The MP had died intestate and Thomasina, Lemyng and Robert Ellis took on the administration of his goods, a task that did not run smoothly because she claimed that Lemyng was one of Wilde’s largest debtors, owing £420 for 90 sacks of Lindsey wool as well as 600 marks in repayment of a loan. They were still at odds when Lemyng himself died, probably in the early 1470s, after which Thomasina pursued his executors, principally Thomas Pomeray, prior of Christ Church, London, in the Chancery. Pomeray disputed the amounts she claimed and asserted that, having settled Lemyng’s debts to the value of 1,500 marks, he had ‘ryght little’ with which to make restitution to her. C1/41/249-50; C4/6/14. Wilde appears to have died childless, and in November 1464 Thomasina, and her then husband, John Santon, demised their interest in the tenement in St. Katherine’s precinct to Robert Portington. CP40/803, rot. 403d; CCR, 1461-7, p. 264.