The Wydeslades took their name from the place in north Devon originally known as ‘the wide slæd, where they had been resident for generations.
No details of Wydeslade’s early education have come to light, but it evidently entailed some training in the law, and by the beginning of Henry V’s reign he had embarked on a professional career in the ranks of the clerical staff of the law courts at Westminster. He owed his initial advancement to the patronage of a fellow west-countryman, the chief justice Sir William Hankford, who shortly after his appointment in 1413 made Wydeslade clerk of the warrants of the court of King’s bench.
Within a few years, Wydeslade moved from the King’s bench to the other common law court housed in Westminster Hall, the common pleas. From the summer of 1423 he occasionally performed the duties associated with the office of filacer, without, however, being assigned one of the formal portfolios associated with specific counties.
Throughout the 1420s Wydeslade’s professional activities kept him on the move between Westminster and the south-west, and his increasing experience led to his appointment as an associate assize justice in the region in 1430. A familiar figure in Devon, in 1431 he was a natural choice as a parliamentary representative for the burgesses of Barnstaple who often returned outsiders to Parliament. Further duties as a justice of oyer and terminer and a series of royal commissions in the south-west throughout the 1430s and early 1440s were to follow, forcing Wydeslade to continue his peripatetic lifestyle. In particular, in 1439 he was appointed to a series of commissions of oyer and terminer to settle several violent disputes between the leading members of the Devon gentry which were seriously disturbing the peace. It was, however, in that autumn, that he achieved sudden and dramatic advancement in his profession. In September Sir Richard Newton was appointed chief justice of common pleas, and within weeks of taking office he appointed Wydeslade chief prothonotary of the court, in succession to the ageing Thomas Heuster*. His new responsibilities demanded that he should spend the legal terms at Westminster, while during the vacations he was with increasing regularity employed as an associate justice of assize.
Yet Wydeslade still found time to conduct an extensive private legal practice. Soon some of the greatest men of the south-west, both laymen and clergy, came to be numbered among his clients, who included Bishop Edmund Lacy of Exeter, the abbot of Tavistock, the prior of Launceston, William, Lord Botreaux, Sir William Bonville and Sir Robert Chalons†. The corporation of Plymouth engaged his services,
The sheer extent of Wydeslade’s activities in these years could on occasion lead to problems, as in the case of debt litigation brought by Henry Webber, dean of Exeter cathedral, in his capacity as executor of Bishop Lacy. Webber had placed the obligation on which the suit was based in the chief prothonotary’s keeping, but within a short time the document went missing from the court records, and Webber was left to assert in Chancery that it had been ‘privily taken’ from Wydeslade’s custody.
Wydeslade does not, on balance, appear to have been a litigious man, and only a few examples of suits brought on his own account can be found.
It is not clear what expressly motivated Wydeslade in the summer of 1451, when he settled his Devon estates on feoffees and provided for their disposition in the event of his death, but he may have fallen ill and felt the need to put his house in order. He stipulated that when he died his widow should keep the lands on condition that she did not remarry, but failing that they were subsequently to pass to his son Richard and his heirs, with remainder to his younger son, John. Only if the issue of both sons failed were his holdings to be sold to provide for masses for his soul and those of family members and his principal patrons, Sir William Hankford and Sir Richard Newton.