Wythom was from a wealthy dynasty of Boston merchants. His pedigree is imprecise in its details, but there can be no doubt that he was the son of one namesake, who died in about 1426, and the grandson of another, who died only a few years before.
The inheritance Wythom entered on his majority included not only substantial moveable wealth, but also a country estate, albeit one burdened by his mother’s interest until at least 1436. In the subsidy returns of that year she – described as ‘of Algarkirk’, a few miles to the south of Boston – was assessed on an income of as much as £20 p.a. (and it may be that she was an heiress, although there is nothing to identify her family), and incidental references show that the family also had property in several Holland vills, including Kirton-in-Holland, Moulton and Holbeach.
There is indirect but cumulatively compelling evidence to connect Wythom with the service of John, Lord (and, from 1440, Viscount) Beaumont. In the early 1430s his putative kinsman, Robert Wythom, served under Beaumont in France and later numbered among his feoffees; and Beaumont was lord of Boston, where our MP’s principal interests lay. Further, in 1453 Hugh was joint-plaintiff in an action of debt with Beaumont’s steward at Boston, Thomas Kyme.
The year 1448 was an eventful one for Wythom. In a letter dated 21 Aug. his fellow Lincolnshire household man, William Tailboys*, applied for protection to Beaumont from what he saw as our MP’s harassment. Tailboys complained that ‘Hugh Wythom hath said he wold be in rest and peese with me, and not to maligne agayn otherwise than lawe and right wold’, and yet he had wounded and imprisoned one of his servants at Boston.
On 16 July 1449 Wythom secured further influence over trade regulation in his native port when he was granted the office of gauger there. It is unfortunate that more evidence of his own trading interests does not survive. Suggestive, however, is his appearance alongside two Boston merchants, William Hugon and Robert Derby, as a defendant in actions of debt for sizeable sums. For example, in 1446 Thomas Palmer* had a plea pending against all three of them for £72 each, and soon after Lord Cromwell claimed £40 against our MP and Hugon. Such actions, and others like them, probably concern disputes over their purchase of wool from the growers. An incidental reference shows that Wythom, on 18 Sept. 1450, shipped two sacks and a clove of wool from Boston on a ship called Petre de Cales, which was then lost at sea ‘per horribilem tempestatem’. Fuller records would reveal many similar shipments.
None the less, Wythom’s career was more political than mercantile. His election for Taunton in the Parliament of November 1449 was another aspect of his Household service. The lord of the borough, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, a native of the parts of Holland, probably chose him as a suitable candidate at the recommendation of Viscount Beaumont. In the following May, during the last session of Parliament, he was appointed to a commission to investigate recent spoliations of foreign merchants.
Clearly Wythom was a well-connected and valuable royal servant, but even so it is surprising to find him as a knight when he next appears in the records as a commissioner for sewers in the following February.
Wythom was probably buried in the church of the Greyfriars at Boston, where several tombs of the family survived in the early sixteenth century.
A further Chancery petition provides a revealing insight into Wythom’s career. A Lincolnshire gentleman, Richard Halmer of Weston near Spalding, complained that in about 1443, as an eight-year-old boy, he had been forcibly abducted from his mother by our MP. He had then been taken into Nottinghamshire, where he was sold to Henry Boson*, an esquire of the royal household. Boson mistreated him, putting him to the plough and other servile occupations, while his mother laboured against both abductor and purchaser for his return. Although she spent 40 marks, which she raised through the sale of part of her son’s landed inheritance, the defendants ‘were of suche myght and power and gat them suche assistence’ that she could not prevail, and hence he remained in custody until Boson’s death in 1451. The first part – that our MP had wrongfully obtained the wardship – receives independent confirmation from an action pending in the court of common pleas in 1448: Sir William Bonville*, father-in-law of Wythom’s enemy, Tailboys, sued him for wrongfully abducting Halmer from his wardship at Spalding.