Sir William Wadham (c.1386–1452) of Merryfield in the parish of Ilton, Somerset and Edge in the parish of Branscombe, Devon came from a West Country gentry family with a leaning towards the law, who originally took their name from the manor of Wadham in the parish of Knowstone, between South Molton and Exmoor, north Devon. His father, Sir John Wadham, was a Justice of the Common Pleas from 1389 to 1398, during the reign of King Richard II; one of many Devonians of the period described by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England as seemingly "innated with a genius to study law."