WYLLY, John

Of obscure background, He is not known to have been related to a namesake, the John Wyly† (d.1400), who represented Marlborough in two Parliaments of the 1380s and served as dep. warden of Savernake forest for over 30 years: The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 924-5. Wylly took up residence in Salisbury in about 1419, after his marriage to Margaret atte Lee, who had inherited property in Castle Street and Winchester Street from her father. Salisbury Domesday bk. 2, f. 44v. From then on for 47 years he took an active part in the administration of the city, by regularly attending the convocations of citizens. There was another John Wylly who attended convocations, but always as one of the 48: Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, ff. 4-56v. Possibly a kinsman of the MP, he may have predeceased him, being last recorded in Sept. 1462: ibid. f. 56v. Notably, he was often present when civic officials were elected, First General Entry Bk. 231, 234-5. and participated in the elections of Salisbury’s MPs to the Parliaments of 1433, 1449, 1450, 1455, 1459, 1460, 1461, 1463 and 1467. Ibid. 289, 425, 434, 438; Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, ff. 12, 38, 41, 51v, 59v, 82. Furthermore, his name was listed on the only electoral indenture for the city to survive from this period, which was returned to the Chancery in 1455. C219/16/3. Even so, promotion to the council of 24 and ultimately as mayor of Salisbury did not happen until late in Wylly’s life, and it is worthy of remark that even though he sat in four Parliaments it was never as a representative of his home city.

A merchant, Wylly specialized in the cloth trade, sometimes being described as a mercer, and in his later years as a draper. Evidence of his commercial activities may be derived from suits in the court of common pleas in which he figured both as creditor and debtor. For example, in 1423 he alleged that two men from Cirencester owed him £23 for merchandise he had sold them, while eight years later he brought actions against a wide range of people, including mariners from Portsmouth, a notary from Exeter and a wool-packer from the Isle of Wight, for failing to render account as receivers of his money. Dyers from Dorset and fellow merchants of Salisbury were also alleged to be in his debt following commercial transactions. In the same period, however, Wylly himself figured as a defendant, notably in pleas resulting from his failure to pay £26 18s. 8d. for various types of cloth he had bought in London and £31 for the purchase of 21 bales of woad, another brought by the abbess of Wilton for a debt of £30, and a fourth begun by a clerk named Peter Fader, for detinue of £28. C241/217/33; CP40/669, rot. 311d; 675, rot. 319d; 680, rots. 18, 52, 238d, 255. More seriously, in 1432 the abbot of Hyde abbey, near Winchester, sued him for defaulting on a bond for £195 he had contracted at the staple at Salisbury. A writ for Wylly’s arrest, sent to the sheriff of Wiltshire, Walter Strickland I*, resulted in the latter being fined for making an insufficient return, and the case continued unresolved until Michaelmas term 1436. C241/225/44; CP40/688, rot. 107.

It may have been lawsuits such as these which prompted Wylly to seek election to the Parliament due to assemble at Westminster in the following January, his aim perhaps being to secure the parliamentary privilege of freedom from arrest. He was returned for the deserted borough of Old Sarum, close to his home at Salisbury. His disputes with Peter Fader continued throughout 1437, until in November he agreed to accept the arbitration of John Giles* and Gilbert Marchall regarding all debts, trespasses and demands between them. In the event, the arbiters’ award, made before 2 Feb. 1438, did not favour Wylly, for eight days later he was bound in £20 to Fader and the Chancery clerk Nicholas Wymbssh to ensure that he would pay them £13 6s. 8d. in instalments before Michaelmas 1440, or else content them with wares to the same value. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 162, 171-3. In another lawsuit he failed to answer two men for an alleged trespass: one of his bailsmen, a Salisbury chapman, was fined for failing to bring him to court. CPR, 1436-41, p. 323.

After first entering the Commons in 1437, Wylly does not seem to have sat in Parliament again for ten years. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 953, and Reg. 19, identified the Wilton MP of 1439 as John Wylly, but this identification was based on a misreading (as John Wylys) of the name John Gylys (John Giles*) in the Wilton records: Wilts. Hist. Centre, Wilton bor. recs., stewards’ accts. G25/1/88. When he did so, in the Parliament summoned to Bury St. Edmunds, it was as a representative for Marlborough. He is not known to have owned property in the town, or to have been well-acquainted with its burgesses, and his motives for seeking election on this occasion cannot be guessed. In the two Parliaments summoned in 1449 he again sat for Old Sarum, although in many respects he should be seen as an additional representative for the city of Salisbury, for over the years he had continued his close involvement in its affairs and the doings of his fellows on the councils of 48 and 24. In 1426 he had been named as an arbiter in disputes between the mayor, William Warwick*, and the outspoken mercer Thomas Freeman*, and he acted likewise in 1455 when the then mayor, William Swayn*, fell out with Edmund Penston*, a member of the 24. First General Entry Bk. 256; Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, f. 13v. He was prepared to take on such tasks as collecting money to repair Salisbury’s bridges (in 1444), to assess contributions to the subsidies granted by the Commons in the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), of which he had been a Member, and to levy the expenses of the city’s MPs at the Parliament of 1450. First General Entry Bk. 392, 451. As a citizen, he himself regularly contributed to such levies, helping, for example, to raise sums needed for repairs to the ‘great ditch’. His contributions towards loans demanded from Salisbury by the Crown increased in size over the years, from an initial 6s. 8d. to 10s. and then (from the 1450s) to 20s. Ibid. 213, 224A, 254, 262, 273, 364, 431; Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, ff. 10, 56, 61. Yet, reluctant to take up a place in the civic hierarchy, on 2 Nov. 1449 he paid as much as £4 to be excused from the offices of alderman and reeve; and when, a year later, he was elected chamberlain, he seems to have refused to serve, for his name was subsequently crossed out of the record. First General Entry Bk. 436, 439; Salisbury acct. rolls, G23/1/44, no. 2.

Wylly fell into serious trouble in February 1451. The mayor of Salisbury and others were commissioned to arrest him and bring him to Chancery to answer the charge that without reasonable cause he had seized goods in the city belonging to John Peryn of Guernsey. Lying behind this charge appears to have been a quarrel over a commercial transaction, and a month later he contracted in the staple of Poole to pay Peryn £6 for merchandise bought from him. CPR, 1446-52, p. 442; C241/247/2. Once more he failed to pay on the appointed day, so a writ was issued for his arrest in June 1462. Wylly took out a royal pardon on 10 Sept. 1452, probably to protect himself from further litigation, and on the following 20 Feb. he obtained in Chancery a patent of exemption for life from service on juries and in municipal offices, and from being elected a representative in Parliament of any city or borough. Although his petition for exemption referred to his defective hearing and bodily weakness, C67/40, m. 20; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 44-45. neither disability or infirmity prevented him from accepting appointment to the Crown office of searcher in Poole the following year, or as mayor of Salisbury at the end of 1455. He also occasionally did service as a juror at inquisitions post mortem: C139/127/25; 161/8; 163/5.

Of Wylly’s personal affairs only a few glimpses survive. He held property in Salisbury, which he claimed in 1433 had been broken into by men from Fordingbridge (Hampshire) who stole goods worth 40 marks; and a messuage and two shops there were said to be ‘formerly’ his in 1448. CP40/688, rot. 405d; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 590-1. For the purposes of taxation he was assessed on land in Wiltshire worth £7 p.a. two years later. E179/196/118. Wylly’s closest associates in the city were a fellow mercer, Robert Warmwell (almost certainly a kinsman of himself or his wife), and William Ludlow II*, the yeoman of the King’s cellar who was clerk of the statute merchant in Salisbury. In 1441 Warmwell enfeoffed Wylly and Ludlow of his properties in Minster Street, Salisbury, and at Old Sarum, Fisherton Anger and Stratford sub Castle, to effect a settlement on him and his wife for life, with remainder to Ludlow’s daughter Margaret, shortly to marry John Erle*. (Wylly was to continue to act in Margaret’s interests for several years more, until after her second marriage to the lawyer Thomas Tropenell*.) Both Wylly and Ludlow were named in 1447 as executors of their friend Warmwell, who particularly favoured our MP and his family. Not only did Warmwell leave Wylly’s daughter Christine £5 towards her marriage and his son Robert woollen cloth worth £10, but to Wylly and his wife he bequeathed two cottages in Castle Street for their lives, with remainder to Robert; and he also gave Wylly two tenements next to the graveyard of St. Thomas’s church, on condition that he would pay a chaplain eight marks a year to pray for him over a period of ten years. Tropenell Cart. i. 151-2, 232-9. Wylly conveyed the two tenements to feoffees in 1455, in which year he was living in a house that had previously belonged to Warmwell, Ibid. i. 239-40; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxxvii. 71. One of the tenements still stands, as 15, Minster Street: Wilts. Arch. Mag. lxxvi. 104. and having granted one of the tenements to the vicars of Salisbury cathedral, he arranged for the settlement of the other along with a building in Chipper Lane on himself and his wife for life, in 1465. Tropenell Cart. i. 240-3, 249-54; Salisbury Domesday bk. 3, f. 5. Meanwhile, the administration of Warmwell’s will had caused him much trouble with the litigious Thomas Freeman, when he sought to realize funds from obligations given by Freeman to his deceased friend. In the late 1450s Freeman sued him in Chancery claiming that although they had both ‘sworn on a book’ to obey the award of Bishop Beauchamp of Salisbury to end their disputes, Wylly had failed to abide by the bishop’s ruling. Wylly countered that, on the contrary, Freeman had ignored an earlier award made orally by the bishop in 1456, to provide sureties for payment to him of £2 p.a. until he had received the sum of £30 in dispute. C1/26/497-8. As Warmwell’s executor he handed over £20 to the city for making ‘barres’ for its defence: Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, f. 23.

For several years Wylly had belonged to the fraternity of the hospital of the Holy Trinity in Salisbury, to which he contributed 8d. a year to support the poor and debilitated inmates, and in 1456, during his mayoralty and when he himself was ex officio warden of the hospital, he donated to it a messuage in Cordwainer Row. Nevertheless, he later fell out with John Wheeler, one of his successors; in March 1458 he released Wheeler from all legal actions. First General Entry Bk. 247; Trin. Hosp. Salisbury mss, 1446/67, 69. Wylly lent support to the civic authorities through the troubled civil war years and until his death: in January 1461 he dispatched one of his servants to join Salisbury’s armed contingent sent north to aid the King; in August he was an assessor of donations given to Edward IV on his visit to the city; and two years later he once more assessed the parliamentary subsidies collected in New Street. In January 1465 he was entrusted with one of the keys to the common chest to keep safe while the mayor John Hall II* was in London for negotiations with the bishop of Salisbury and the King’s Council. Salisbury ledger bk. 2, G23/1/2, ff. 43v-44, 52v, 66, 69v, 70v, 73v. Last recorded alive in June 1467, he died before 23 Sept. that year, when the key he had safeguarded was entrusted to another man. Ibid. f. 82v; Salisbury Domesday bk. 3, f. 8v. In 1472 Wylly’s widow conveyed to another merchant, Nicholas Martyn, the messuage in Bridge Street, next to the higher Fisherton Anger bridge, which she had received by her late husband’s will. This has not survived. Salisbury Domesday bk. 3, ff. 13, 23.