Sir Nicholas Haute

Sir Nicholas Haute (20 September 1357–c.1415), of Wadden Hall (Wadenhall) in Petham and Waltham, with manors extending into Lower Hardres, Elmsted and Bishopsbourne, in the county of Kent, was an English knight, landowner and politician.

The de Haute family were established at Wadenhall from the 13th century, when Sir William de Haute (died c. 1302) held office as lay steward to Christchurch Priory, Canterbury. He was perhaps briefly succeeded by his son Henry de Haute, who married Margery, an heiress of the de Marinis (Marignes) family, and then (after a period of wardship in his minority superintended by his uncle Richard de Haute) by Henry's son Sir Henry de Haute (c.1300-1370), who succeeded to Wadenhale in 1321. Henry de Haute the younger soon married Annabel atte Halle, of a Dover family to whose lands she became heir. Sir Henry had seisin of his share of the de Marinis patrimony, partible by gavelkind, in 1349. He had one son, (Sir) Edmund (before 1329-c.1360), who married Benedicta Shelving in around 1357 and was the father of Nicholas Haute.

The de Haut pedigree in the 1619 Visitation of Kent by the herald John Philipot, Rouge Dragon, and much of the research into the family's descent since that time, were dependent upon materials collected by Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644). Dering is now shown to have "improved" his own ancestral claims, which passed into the de Haute family, by the retrospective production of spurious or optative documents and monuments. Important documents for the de Haute descent are included among the Harleian collections and charters at the British Library, and it is known that Sir Robert Harley acquired substantial collections from Dering. The path through the sources for this family therefore has to be trodden very cautiously.

Nicholas Haute was the elder of two sons (the younger was Edward) of Sir Edmund de Haute and his wife Benedicta Shelving. Benedicta's father John de Shelving had died by 1331, when his inquisition showed that the manor of Bishopsbourne (Bourne Archiepiscopi), Kent, had come to him through the inheritance of his wife Benedicta. By Edmund's marriage Bishopsbourne passed to the Haute family and was sometimes known as Hautesbourne.

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