John Walwayn

John Walwayn (died between 1324 and 1326) was an English royal official and scholar, and a proposed author of the chronicle known as Vita Edwardi Secundi a partial record of the reign of Edward II.

Career Walwayn was a "clerk" (which, in medieval England, meant a scholar or administrator) and civil lawyer who entered the service of the Earl of Hereford and became his protégé. He subsequently became a canon of Hereford Cathedral, and of St Paul's Cathedral in London. By 1311, he was employed as a royal clerk and held the office of escheator "south of Trent", that is for the southern half of the country.

Walwayn was a candidate in the hotly contested election for Bishop of Durham in 1316, but lost despite the support of the Earl of Hereford. In June 1318, he was appointed the king's Treasurer of the Exchequer, but was removed the following November as part of the purge of "corrupt officials" initiated by the York parliament of that year. In 1324, he made a bid to become Bishop of Hereford, but failed. He retired as escheator in January 1324 and had died by July 1326.

Authorship of Vita Edwardi Secundi

Noël Denholm-Young put forward the view that Walwayn was the author of the anonymous chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi ("Life of Edward II"), a contemporaneous account of the reign of Edward II which ends abruptly in 1326 shortly before Edward's deposition. Denholm-Young's conclusions are based on the known facts about Walwayn—such as being a king's clerk whose career reached its peak between 1315 and 1323, and who was dead by 1326—matching the interests, knowledge and timeline of the author of the chronicle.

However, Antonia Gransden has cast doubt on Denholm-Young's theory and has said that "the evidence seems insufficient to warrant more than a very tentative conclusion, especially as the Vita has nothing about St Paul's and practically nothing on London".