| Notes |
- Also called Wodehyll. Sheriff of Wiltshire 1381-82.
Richardson's Royal Ancestry, following various earlier sources, gives him as a son of a Thomas de Wodhull (d. ~1376), himself a son of John de Wodhull (1302-1336) and his wife Isabel (d. 1340). But in an SGM post on 18 Aug 2020, Richardson repudiated that model, based on a lack of contemporary evidence that this Thomas de Wodhull ever existed. Richardson argued that, to the contrary, the Nicholas de Wodhull who died in 1410 was the same man as the Nicholas de Wodhull who was a son of John de Wodhull who died in 1336, this Nicholas having been executor for his brother John in 1349.
Writing on Wikitree, Andrew Lancaster was concerned with some chronological problems with Richardson's solution: "The most direct evidence of his identity comes from IPMs of Eleanor and Elizabeth in 1376. Three different juries in three different counties all name the heir as Nicholas Wodhull, brother of their grandfather John de Wodhull (d. 1348). This would seem straightforward, however, there is a problem. The IPMs also give the age of Nicholas as variously aged 24 and aged 30 and more. These ages are impossible for Nicholas to be the son of a man who died in 1336. So either the birth dates are wrong, or the identification of the heir as a son of John de Wahull (d. 1336) is wrong. […] In a completely separate IPM he was said to be aged 50 and more in 1403 (b. ~1353). These ages are impossible for Nicholas to be the son of a man who died in 1336. Nicholas Wodhull was sheriff when he died in 1410; no one in their 80s would ever be appointed sheriff."
Lancaster's solution was to postulate that the Nicholas de Wodhull who died in 1410 was a son of the Nicholas de Wodhull who is known to have been a younger son of the John de Wodhull who died in 1336. As Lancaster observes, this solution "has the advantage of relieving the chronological difficulties—a birth date of c. 1350 for Nicholas Woodhull now fits perfectly for him to be the son of someone born in the late 1320s. It no longer means his son and heir was born while he was in his 60s. He was no longer too old to hold the position of sheriff in 1381 [sic—Lancaster presumably meant 1410, as he asserted earlier]. This solution does mean that the IPMs were wrong in saying that the heir of Elizabeth and Eleanor Wodhull was their great-uncle Nicholas Wodhull; it should have said the heir was the son of the their great-uncle Nicholas Wodhull."
To our mind it long seemed like the choice was between believing that several IPMs misstated the age of the Nicholas de Wodhull, or that several IPMs misstated his relationship to the recently-deceased Eleanor and Elizabeth Wodhull, heiresses to the barony. It's worth noting that IPMs, including these, did not usually give precise ages; they simply stated a person's age as X number of years "or more", because the concern was simply to establish that they were old enough to inherit, or to do some other thing that carried a minimum age requirement. Whereas IPMs were generally quite fastidious about establishing exact genealogical relationships, because the whole point of the exercise was to determine who inherited what. For this reason, we were inclined to go with Richardson's model, in which the Nicholas de Wodhull who died in 1410 was the Nicholas de Wodhull known to have been a son of John who died in 1336, and that this Nicholas simply lived a very, but not impossibly, long life.
However, in 2023, Charles M. Hansen (citation details below) pointed out in The Genealogist that while no precisely-contemporary evidence can be found for the existence of Thomas de Wodhull or for him as the father of Nicholas de Wodhull who died in 1410, multiple records from a legal dispute in the 1470s clearly say that Thomas existed and was the father of Nicholas -- and Hansen further showed that there is no particular reason to disbelieve these records, because no possible outcome to this legal dispute would have been altered by the existence or nonexistence of Thomas de Wodhull. In the course of the dispute, multiple pedigrees were entered into evidence showing Thomas as father of Nicholas and son of John who died in 1336, and no party to the dispute challenged this detail. Additionally, a son of our Nicholas de Wodhull who died in 1410, Richard Wodhull (d. 1470), called by a contemporary "the best man of lawe in Wilteshire", appears to have considered his paternal grandfather to have been Thomas de Wodhull, through whom he inherited the manor of Little Durnford. Finally, Hansen pointed out, in regard to the lack of contemporary evidence for Thomas de Wodhull, that "it should be noted that he was not a tenant-in-chief, as he would have initially held the manor of Little Durnford from his older brother, Sir John Wodhull (d. 1348) and then from Sir John's heirs. As he was not a tenant-in-chief, no inquitision post mortem (IPM) would have been held upon his death, a frequent source for names during this period."
So at the risk of seeming irresolute, we're currently persuaded by Hansen that Thomas de Wodhull existed after all and was the father of Nicholas (d. 1410) and a son of John (d. 1336).
(As a footnote, we've been, so far, unable to verify that this Nicholas de Wodhull was, as Andrew Lancaster asserted, a sheriff in 1410. The 1898 List of Sheriffs for England and Wales from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1831 (Public Records Offices Lists and Indexes 9) lists Nicholas de Wodehull only once, as sheriff of Wiltshire from 13 Oct 1381 to 24 Nov 1382. Searching on all the variant spellings of Wodhull has yielded us nothing else.)
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1353 - 1410 (~ 58 years)
[1, 2, 3]