Wykes had a long career as a local lawyer. He came from a minor gentry family, established at Moreton Jefferies, a few miles to the north-east of Hereford and a little further to the south-east of Leominster. His father attested the Herefordshire parliamentary elections of 1429 and 1432, and gave testimony at a proof of age in 1430, when he gave his own age as 44.
Although there is no record of any prior association between Wykes and the borough of Leominster, he was returned by its electors there on 6 Feb. 1449, only six days before Parliament was due to assemble. His connexions in the county’s other borough constituency of Hereford perhaps made a seat there a more natural one for him to fill; his return for Leominster suggests that electoral competition was weaker there than in the county city. One can, however, speculate as to whether his election was a function of candidate looking for a seat or a borough looking for an MP. Whatever the case, it was an arrangement of mutual advantage: as a minor lawyer with business in the central courts, Membership of Parliament gave Wykes an additional status, and in return the borough found someone prepared to serve cheaply.
The arrangement proved satisfactory enough to be repeated at the next hustings, held on 30 Oct. 1449, again only a few days before the day appointed for Parliament’s assembly. Wykes was almost certainly elected in absentia, for, on the day of his election, he offered surety in the court of King’s bench for Richard Green, former mayor of Hereford.
By this time Wykes had probably entered into his patrimony in its modest entirety. Early in 1451 he was assessed on an income of £4 4s. from lands in the Herefordshire hundred of Broxash, suggesting that his mother was then dead.
Wykes’s labours on behalf of himself and his clients did not meet with universal approval. In August 1452, when royal commissioners of oyer and terminer came to Hereford to investigate recent Yorkist risings in the city and county, a curious bill was presented against him. It was very badly drafted in that the specific charge of extortion is incomprehensible, but it ends by accusing him of a readiness, ‘to sue all untrewe maters’. Despite its incoherence, a jury endorsed it as true, and, clearly, Wykes was the subject of some hostility. His legal work was probably the main factor here, although another may have been an association with Devereux, whose activities had been the principal cause of the disturbances in the county. Certainly, a few months after this inquiry, he is found acting for Sir Walter, offering surety for him as the lessee of the disputed Gloucestershire manor of Dymock.
Whatever the cause of the hostility to Wykes, his career continued to develop. In the mid 1450s he was very active as an attorney in King’s bench, conducting suits for the prior of St. Guthlac, Hereford, and other more obscure litigants. His seemingly near-continuous attendance at the court during term time made him an obvious choice to receive writs there on behalf of successive sheriffs of Herefordshire, and at least one such sheriff, William Lucy, in office in 1453-4, so nominated him.
Matters of greater import were soon to have an impact on Wykes. Richard, duke of York’s loss of the protectorate early in 1456 provoked a Yorkist rising in Herefordshire, led by Devereux and Sir William Herbert*. Judging from indictments laid against the rebels, Wykes played no active part, but he aided Devereux in the troubles that beset him in the wake of the rising. When Devereux had been pricked as sheriff of Gloucestershire in the previous November, he had nominated Wykes as his under sheriff, and at Michaelmas term 1456, when imprisoned in Windsor castle, he nominated him to account in the Exchequer for the issues of the shrievalty. Later, on 13 May 1457, Wykes was one of 15 Herefordshire men, headed by Devereux’s son, Walter II*, who entered into a massive bond in 5,000 marks to John Wingfield† and William Brandon*, marshal of the Marshalsea, that Devereux and six other rebels would be true prisoners in that prison; two months later, on 6 July, he stood mainprise for the good behaviour of two of Devereux’s servants, John Kene and a cleric, John ap Richard, who had been pardoned for their part in the rising; and in the following Michaelmas term he offered surety for another adherent of Devereux, John Chabbenore, a gentleman of Hereford.
Beyond this, almost nothing is known of Wykes’s part in the dramatic events that divided county and nation in the last years of Henry VI’s reign. Although he attested the Herefordshire election to the Lancastrian Parliament of 1459, his appearances in the records are otherwise the uncontentious ones of the minor local lawyer. In Trinity term 1459, for example, he appeared in the court of common pleas to sue his troublesome kinsman, John Wykes, for a debt of five marks.
The possibility cannot, however, be ruled out that Wykes served again in Parliament during this decade, for the names of the Leominster and Hereford MPs in the Parliaments of 1461 and 1463 are unknown. His election for Hereford to the Parliament of 1472, after an apparent break of more than 20 years since his last Parliament, adds to this possibility. This election may have been something of a mixed blessing for him, particularly if he had compounded with the city authorities to serve for a fixed fee rather than a daily rate. The Parliament met over a remarkable seven sessions between 6 Oct. 1472 and 14 Mar. 1475, more than enough to act as a disincentive to attendance. Interestingly, there is evidence that Wykes was among those who used the excuse of other business to indulge in at least the occasional absence. It is not known when he was first chosen as one of the county coroners, but he was in office by 27 Mar. 1473, when, at the county court held at Hereford castle, he took an appeal of murder. Since Parliament was then meeting – it was not prorogued until 8 Apr. – Wykes must have missed at least part of the second session.
In the 1470s there is evidence once more of a close relationship between Wykes and the Devereux family. At least as far as the surviving evidence goes, his service to that family lapsed with the death of Sir Walter Devereux in 1459, but it had been resumed by 1471. In Michaelmas term of that year the county sheriff, Richard Croft†, employed him to warn Walter Devereux II, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, to appear in the Exchequer; on 18 June 1475 he joined Ferrers’s brother, Sir John, and three other associates of the Devereux family in entering a statute staple to two London mercers for the payment of nearly £300 on that day a year later; in January 1481 he was one of the feoffees employed by Ferrers in the alienation of the advowson of the church of Sutton Courtenay (Berkshire) to the King’s free chapel of St. George’s, Windsor; and a year later, at the time of Ferrers’s marriage to the widow of a London alderman, he was one of his feoffees alongside several of the greater Herefordshire gentry.
No doubt his close connexion with Lord Ferrers added to his local standing, but, by the early 1480s, Wykes was already elderly and little is known of the last years of his long life. In 1477 he headed a group of five men who claimed £100 against the former Hereford MP, John Holland*; he attended the shire election at the end of that year, probably in his role as county coroner; and on 6 June 1480 he secured a pardon of the outlawry he had incurred, carelessly for a lawyer, for failure to answer (Sir) John Say II* for debt. During these years he was retained as their principal attorney by the dean and chapter of Hereford cathedral, and it is likely that this connexion was of long standing.