| Notes |
- From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
Wode, Sir Thomas (d. 1502), judge, was perhaps the most obscure chief justice of the Tudor period. Although some of the heralds placed his origins in Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, and others have placed him in Cheshire and Suffolk, the armorial evidence shows all those families to have been different; the lawyer's distinctive arms, granted in the reign of Edward IV, included three demi-woodmen carrying clubs, in allusion to his name. Sir Thomas seems rather to have originated in the south of England, since he mentions Salisbury in his will as his mother church, and his first known retainer was as counsel to Winchester College in Hampshire from 1475 to 1485. He is mentioned as a gentleman of London in 1473, suggesting that he was born in the 1450s or earlier, and the inn of court to which he belonged by the 1470s may be supposed (by elimination) to have been the Middle Temple, for which there is no list of benchers from this period. Wode's name occurs as counsel in the year-books for 1477, and the following year he became a justice of the peace for Berkshire and member of parliament for Wallingford. By then he had acquired an estate at Childrey in the same county, and he later married Margaret, née Delamare (d. 1499), widow of Robert Leynham (d. 1491) of Tidmarsh. She had a young son, Henry, from her first marriage, who was still a minor when Wode died and whom he treated generously in his will.
In 1486 Wode was called to the degree of the coif, and two years later made one of the king's serjeants; many of his arguments are reported in the year-books and in Caryll's reports. It may be supposed that he became a member of Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street, next to the Whitefriars (Carmelites) because he made a bequest to keep a white friar of London a scholar for seven years. On 24 November 1495 he was appointed one of the puisne justices of the common pleas, and on 28 October 1500 was advanced to the chief justiceship of the same court, with a knighthood the next year. As an assize judge he went on the western circuit from 1487 to 1500, but as chief justice he took the home circuit. Wode's presidency of the common pleas was short and unremarkable, ending with his death on 31 August 1502. In accordance with his last will, made three days earlier, he was buried near the lady chapel of Reading Abbey, which was demolished in the sixteenth century. He left a gold ring with a ruby and two books to Thomas Frowyk, serjeant-at-law, who succeeded him as chief justice before the following term. His sole daughter and heir, Elizabeth, married Sir Thomas Stukeley of Affeton in Devon.
|
Nielsen Hayden genealogy
- 1502
[2]