WOOTTON, Roger II

There seems no reason to doubt that Roger Wootton was the son of the man who represented Warwick in eight Parliaments between 1410 and 1425. He took over his father’s part in the borough’s affairs and was clearly one of its most important residents. The family’s holdings there must have been significant, although they are largely undocumented. It is known only that our MP leased a tenement and half an acre of meadow in St. Nicholas Street from Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Ministers’ Accts. Warws. Estates of Clarence 1479-80 (Dugdale Soc. xxi), 6, 13. His resources were clearly more substantial than this implies. In 1457, for example, he had pleas of debt totalling nearly £50 pending against nine minor individuals from Warwick and its environs. CP40/785, rots. 70d, 273d.

Wootton’s putative father had been a lawyer; and there can be no doubt that our MP was as well. In Michaelmas term 1443 he acted as attorney in the Exchequer for the sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, Sir William Birmingham, and a year later he did so for John Brome II*, as deputy sheriff of Worcestershire, and other local officers. E159/220, adventus Mich. rot. 1; 221, adventus rots. 1d, 3, 3d. Later he appears to have taken the office of under sheriff (which generally fell to men of law) under William Purefoy in 1448-50; His appointment has to be inferred from two actions in the ct. of c.p. In 1451 Thomas Staunton* sued Purefoy and Wootton (styled, as lawyers often were, ‘of London, gentleman’) for a debt of £7 18s. 4d. each, and soon after Purefoy, as former sheriff, claimed the sum of £40 against our MP. The most likely explanation for the first action is that Staunton was suing sheriff and under sheriff for failure to pay the annuity he enjoyed from the issues of Warws. and Leics.; the second action may have risen from some default in Wootton’s conduct as under sheriff for which Purefoy as sheriff had incurred a penalty: CP40/763, rot. 478; 771, rot. 268d. and in 1454-5 he served in the lesser office of under escheator (under Richard Clapham). C139/159/34. He combined the second of these offices with service as coroner. On 26 May 1455 he was present in the county court as one of the four Warwickshire coroners to hear the proclamation of an outlawry. How long he served in this role is not known, but it may have been because he was already coroner that he attested the Warwickshire election held on 5 Mar. 1453. KB9/290/7; C219/16/2 (his name appears immediately after those of Thomas Greswold and John Mayell, known from other sources to have been coroners at this date). He was not in office in Oct. 1450: CP40/742, rots. 314, 318. He also held a minor position in the administration of the short-lived Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick (d.1446), acting in the mid-1440s a one of the keepers of the duke’s park at Wedgnock. CIPM, xxvi. 592 (p. 376).

It is probably no more than coincidence that Wootton was returned to represent Warwick in both the Parliaments that met while he appears to have been under sheriff. Between 1410 and 1459 he and his putative father represented the borough on at least 13 occasions, and it is doubtful that either needed the influence of office to secure election. The frequency with which the younger Roger was elected makes it hazardous to infer anything about his political sympathies from the timing of his returns. His election to the Coventry Parliament of 1459, which saw the attainder of the Yorkist lords, may be taken to imply a sympathy with the Lancastrian cause and an alienation from the borough’s lord, the earl of Warwick. C216/16/5. There is, however, no direct evidence to back up such a supposition. Rather it seems that, in the late 1450s, he was on friendly terms with associates of the earl, of whom he was a tenant. He sided with Neville’s annuitant, Thomas Burdet*, in a dispute over the manor of Bramcote. In October 1457, styled as ‘of Warwick, gentleman’, he was joined with Burdet and others as defendants in a bill alleging maintenance brought by John Archer II*, a supporter of a rival claimant to the manor and a servant of the Lancastrian, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. The plaintiff claimed extravagant damages of £1,000, but the action never came to pleading: KB27/786, rot. 114d; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 477. Further, other evidence implies that Wootton was later on good terms with Neville. This can be the only explanation for a lease made by the Crown on 10 July 1465: with William Harewell, a loyal follower of the earl, he shared the lease of the keeping of a small property in Knole (Somerset) at an annual rent of 5s. 4d. His friendship with Harewell had also been manifest a few months earlier when the Neville man had employed him among his feoffees. CFR, xx. 173-4; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 477.

None the less, although Wootton does not appear to have been out of favour under the new Yorkist dispensation, he was seemingly much less active in the 1460s than he had been in the 1450s. This may be no more than a trick of the evidence, but it is possible that he laboured under a legal shadow. On 20 July 1461 at Warwick a bowyer of the town was indicted before the county j.p.s. for felonious theft, and a week later he was convicted before the gaol delivery jurors and hanged. Wootton must have viewed this with some trepidation for, at the same session of the peace, he had been indicted as an accessory to Bowyer’s crime. He was slow to free himself from the possible legal consequences of the indictment. Not until May 1466 did he secure the writ of terminari necessary to transfer the case to King’s bench; and he was not acquitted until Michaelmas term 1471, when, unusually, a Warwickshire jury came to King’s bench rather than appearing at the local assizes. KB9/313/59, 60; KB29/100, rot. 4; KB27/840, rex rot. 1. These atypical features imply that this process may not have been merely routine. However this may be, Wootton probably did not long survive his acquittal. He was still alive in Trinity term 1471 when plaintiff in several debt pleas in the court of common pleas, but has not been traced in the records thereafter. CP40/840, rot. 402.