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FYLDE, John (d. ?c.1552).
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John Fylde, the second Member returned for Bramber on 12 Oct. 1547, has not been identified. The fact that on the indenture concerned his name, and (Sir) William Sharington’s, are written in a different hand from that of the document itself, suggests that both were nominated by Admiral Seymour, then lord of the barony of Bramber. Whether or for how long Fylde sat in the Commons is not known, but neither he nor Sharington was doing so for Bramber by the eve of the last session of the Parliament, when a revised list of Members gives the names of Chidiock Paulet and Richard Bunny for that borough. If Bunny was Fylde’s successor and Paulet Sharington’s, Bunny’s connexions and his endangerment in 1552 make it likely that he had entered the House before the fall of Seymour in January 1549. Save for the remote possibility that Fylde had been either declared ineligible or expelled, this implies that he died during the first year or so of the Parliament, but no one of his name, even in its more common form Field, is known to have done so. Its most famous bearer of the next generation, the Elizabethan preacher, was a child at the time.2
There remains the possibility that Fylde’s name was mis-spelled. He could have belonged to a minor Sussex family, the Felders of Midhurst, who were perhaps in the service of the neighbouring magnate and Privy Councillor Sir Anthony Browne: in 1547 Browne procured his own election as one of the knights of the shire for Surrey and his association with the Protector Somerset would have helped him to favour the return of his servants for Bramber. An equally modest family, the Fyllylodes of Mundham, near Chichester, also suggests itself: Thomas Carpenter, a servant of the 12th Earl of Arundel, came from this village, and in 1547 the earl could have done for a Fyllylode at Bramber what he did for Carpenter at Arundel.3
