John’s family background is obscure, as is his relationship to Nicholas Wotton II* of Ramsbury, for whom he was acting as a feoffee at the time of his election to Parliament. Nicholas came from Wootton Bassett, to the south of Cricklade, and his acquisitions of substantial landed holdings there and elsewhere in Wiltshire are well documented, but little is recorded about the property of his putative kinsman. What is known is that John’s wife inherited from her uncle Thomas Weston a messuage, a moiety of a similar building, five acres of land and annual rents of 3s. in Chelworth near Cricklade, of which the couple took possession in the spring of 1424.
Wotton’s occupation is not known, but he may have been the ‘clerk’ who was a feoffee for Robert atte More† and his wife Joan in the manors the latter had inherited in Wiltshire and Hampshire, during the years from 1419 to 1430; and who, as a trustee, in July 1425 conveyed Joan’s inheritance of an acre of land in Cricklade, the advowson of the church of St. Sampson there, and, in a separate transaction, the manor of Cricklade itself, to Sir Walter Hungerford†, a prominent member of the Council of Henry VI’s minority and shortly to become treasurer of England.