Draft:John Walcote

Sir John Walcote Jr., also spelled Johan Walcot, John Walcot or Walkot (died 1407/08) was an English politician, businessman and Sheriff of the City of London who served as Lord Mayor of London from 1402 to 1403.

Origins
Although his date of birth seems to be unknown, it is presumed that his father was John Walcote of London. Walcote, Draper of London, had served on a jury at Candlewick Street Ward. Walcote's date of death remains to be unknown, and as a result some contemporary documents cannot be distinguished as referring to him or his son. In December 1369, the mayor's (presumably of London) court ordered a Walcote (either John Walcote of London or his son) without a sufficient title surrender his tenement. The Walcotes were among the residents of Candlewick Street Ward who complained of a plumber's furnace producing "noxious fumes" in June 1371. Walcote of London most likely joined with fellow London merchants offering a £200 bail for a man imprisoned for "riotous behaviour" in the city.

Career
The first reference to this Walcote that can be distinguished from his father with some certainty is a summons to attendance at the Court of Husting as a juror for Candlewick Street Ward in November 1364. Walcote had established himself by 1377, when he became legal guardian to the two children of a dead man named Richard Scutt from the city's chamberlain in the July of that year. The two children's combined inheritance totaled £200 which Walcote is said to have withheld from the surviving child, Thomas, when he came of age. In January 1379 he contributed five marks to a sum raised by the Londoners to persuade London's "Great Lords of the Realm" to return to the city. Walcote was one of the wealthier citizens called on to donate to the cause.

In spite of his at the time questionable record for financial probity he gained custody of another ward named Joan in 1382. Joan brought Walcote an inheritance of £106.

Properties
Walcote is notable for, even in a time when affluent Londoners invested their large trade profits in property, the sheer scale of his purchases out in the surrounding countryside and inside the city. At the end of their lives, he and his wife owned four shops, at least one tenement, and several dwelling-houses in the parish of St Nicholas Acons. They also possessed another pair of tenements in the neighbouring parish of St Martin Orgar, and in several other London parishes they held a brewery and five more tenements and rents worth over £6 a year.

In the Walbrook area he leased a shop from the wardens of London Bridge, and was able to dramatically increase his rent-roll via an extremely lucrative transaction in August 1390. Skinner and former alderman of Walbrook John Sely granted Walcote and John Leicester (Walcote's associate) complete possession of all of his property until a £170 debt had been paid off. One of Sely's tenements still belonged to Walcote when Sely died, while he seems to have bought the others outright, and in September 1401 transferred to an Northamptonshire esquire named Thomas Wyssenden.

Walcote had a joint title to several acres of royal forest in Barking, Essex. He also owned several other properties in Holborn and Middlesex. Between 1388 and 1392, he participated in buying farmland, buildings and rents in and around Barking with Leicester, almost certainly as a feoffee rather than as the owner of the estates. Walcote's connection with Leicester had, at that point already been a long one, beginning in August 1376 when he had offered sureties for his friend's good conduct as the King's changer and assayer in the Tower of London. The pair were in business together by June 1387, owing a joint debt of £80 to a London ironmonger.