KEIGHLEY, Henry (c.1392-c.1458), of Inskip, Lancs.

The Keighleys, originally from Keighley in the West Riding, made the manor of Inskip near Garstang in Lancashire their principal home after acquiring it by marriage in 1285. The first Keighley lord of Inskip, Sir Henry†, represented Lancashire in the Parliaments of 1297, 1298 and 1301. Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxvii, 1, 11-21. They were a family with a strong military tradition. Keighley’s father was one of the few English knights to be slain at Agincourt on 25 Oct. 1415, and two of Henry’s cousins, the brothers Sir Gilbert Keighley of Cawood (Yorkshire) and Sir John Keighley of Walton (Surrey), had notable military careers. Although Henry was, in about January 1420, included in a Lancashire list of those suitable for military service, he did not follow this family example, perhaps deterred by his father’s death and the very heavy casualties suffered by his father’s retinue during the Agincourt campaign. Ibid. 58; E28/97/16B. His inheritance, comprising the manors at Inskip, Eccleston, Bedford and Lightshaw (in Golborne) in south Lancashire together with the family’s ancestral lands at Keighley, was sizeable enough to support a place among the second rank of the local gentry. Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxvii. 25-26; Lancs. Inqs. i (Chetham Soc. xcv), 116; VCH Lancs. vii. 280n. When, in 1434, a list was certified into Chancery of those Lancashire gentry of sufficient standing to qualify to take the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace breakers, he was named only 53rd of 68. CPR, 1429-36, p. 379. Lancashire was a county with many significant gentry – at least 21 knights were resident there in that year – and our MP was in a broad group below this knightly elite. In a damaged tax return probably relating to the 1436 subsidy, he was assessed at only £20 p.a., but his liability to distraint gives a better guide to his real wealth. PL14/155/7. It is not known when his stepmother died but her interest may have diminished his income in the earlier years of his career. He was distrained to take up knighthood in both 1430 and 1439, implying that his income was above £40 p.a. On 22 Feb. 1431 he personally appeared in the Exchequer and paid a distraint fine in the standard sum of four marks: E159/207, Mich. fine rot. 2d.

There can be no doubt that Keighley had a legal training. In April 1418 he was chosen by the chancellor, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, to help resolve a minor Lancashire dispute, and from the mid 1430s he often acted at the Lancashire assizes for those required to find surety of the peace. Chetham’s Lib., Manchester, Blackburn deeds, 3/107. He first appeared as a surety in 1436: PL15/12, rot. 32. In 1438 he acted as one of the arbiters in the intractable dispute between John Talbot and Richard Houghton over the manor of Salesbury: Add. 32108, f. 2v; VCH Lancs. vi. 254. His legal credentials are further implied by the place he found, in the second part of his career, in the service of (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, the dominant figure in his native county. Until that connexion was made, he was a fairly obscure figure and little is known of him in the 1420s. In 1422 he accounted in the Exchequer for the money his father had received for wages advanced for the Agincourt campaign. In July 1424 he was named as a feoffee by his cousin Sir John Keighley in a failed attempt to secure title to the disputed Lincolnshire manor of Theddlethorpe. This became something of a cause célèbre – the subject of two petitions in the Parliament of 1429 – but our MP’s involvement was peripheral. In February 1427 he secured a pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for failure to answer a Middlesex plea of debt sued by Richard Rishton of Ponthalgh (Lancashire). E101/44/29; CCR, 1422-9, p. 267; CPR, 1422-9, p. 372.

In the next decade Keighley appears more frequently in the records. On 14 Jan. 1430 he witnessed an award made at Warrington by Alice, wife of John Gerard I* of Bryn, in a long-running dispute over the advowson of the Wigan church between the Standishes and the Langtons of Hindley. He was here acting for the Langtons as, when the settlement was finalized by a final concord levied in August 1432, he was one of those to whom the Standishes remitted their right to the advowson. Wigan Archives Service, Standish deeds, D/D St 140; Lancs. Final Concords (Lancs. And Cheshire Rec. Soc. l), 99. For the earlier hist. of the dispute: M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 25. The award did not end the dispute. In Mar. 1443 our MP stood surety that James Langton, parson of Wigan, would behave well to Alexander Standish: PL15/5, rot. 25. More interestingly, on 21 Mar. 1435 he was required to find surety of the peace to his neighbour, Nicholas Boteler* of Out Rawcliffe. Their quarrel was probably over the ownership of the manor of Inskip, to which the Botelers had long advanced a claim. If so, that claim was defeated as it had been before, but there may have been some lingering resentment on our MP’s part. Boteler was nominated as a collector for the taxes granted by both the Parliaments in which Keighley represented the county. PL25/1, rot. 22d; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxvii. 19-20.

The first evidence of Keighley’s association with Stanley is very indirect. On 24 June 1433 he was at Lancaster to attest Stanley’s election to Parliament. Lancs. Knights of the Shire (Chetham Soc. xcvi), 218. If, however, their close connexion was not established by then, it was by February 1438 when Sir John Holand, in dispute with Keighley over lands at Golborne, petitioned the Crown complaining that his tenants were in fear of their lives and unable to live on their lands. He asserted that nothing could be done by the authorities in Lancashire as ‘ye said harry ys of so grete alyaunce withyn ye said countee yat no remedy be ye lawe may be hadde ageyns hym’. E28/59/19. Such overstatement was the common currency of petitioners, yet in this case it gains currency from the first direct evidence of our MP’s connexion with Stanley, dating from only shortly afterwards. On 12 Feb. 1440, while sitting with Stanley as a Lancashire MP, he stood surety when Stanley was granted the keeping of a third of the manors of Hawarden and Mold (Flint). CFR, xvii. 131, 141.

Keighley was again elected to Parliament in 1445. On this occasion Stanley, who had an effective monopoly of one of the county’s seats, was then absent abroad, and it is likely that he and the other MP, Peter Gerard*, also closely connected with Stanley, were returned as the absentee’s representatives. CFR, xvii. 326. Keighley forwarded two matters of his own. On 16 Mar. 1446, during the fourth and last session of the assembly, he was appointed to the bench in his native shire, perhaps taking advantage of his presence at Westminster to lobby for appointment. More significant is the petition he presented to his fellow Commons which can be, with a fair degree of certainty, dated to the same session. He had, for some 14 years, been pursuing a claim to six messuages and 350 acres of land in Astley (near Manchester) against his kinsman, Thurstan Gelibrond, but his suit had been repeatedly deferred as the defendant pleaded a series of protections. In his petition Keighley asked for remedy, namely that the King decree that any protection pleaded by Thurstan be disallowed if it could be shown that the defendant was still in England. The Parliament ended on 9 Apr. 1446, shortly after Gelibrond had again successfully pleaded a protection (as in the retinue of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, at Calais) at the Lancashire assizes. SC8/198/9894; PL15/9, rot. 6d. Gelibrond had a long military career stretching back to 1417: E101/51/2, m. 27; 54/5, m. 1; DKR, xlviii. 315, 354. The suit was still pending in 1456: PL15/13, rots. 4d, 15d; 19, rot. 22. Just as Keighley was pursuing this matter of his own he was also acting for Stanley in a matter of greater moment. Sir Thomas was in dispute with Gilibrond’s temporary master, Buckingham, over the valuable manor of Bosley in Cheshire. In June 1446 our MP joined him in quitclaiming the manor to Buckingham as part of a settlement in which Stanley agreed to pay the duke 1,000 marks for the manor and concede to him an interest in reversion. No doubt Keighley was one of those responsible for negotiating these by no means favourable terms. CHES2/119, rot. 3, 3d; 151, rot. 24; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 48, 157-8.

Later references to Keighley are routine. He made the most of his new status as a j.p. Over the next ten years he averaged around six appearances a year not, as other j.p.s. did, confining his attendance to sittings near his home. DKR, xl. 538; DL29/117/1936-45. In May 1447, over seven days, he sat at Lancaster, Clitheroe and Preston, and he again did so in the following July over only four days. DL29/117/1936. He may even have extended his duties as a magistrate further afield: his legal qualifications and landed interests in the West Riding were recognized by John Kemp, archbishop of York, who, in November 1447, appointed him as a j.p. in his lordship of Ripon. C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), 27n. In his last years, as he had done through much of his career, he also continued to attend the Lancashire assize sessions held at Lent and in August each year. On 4 Mar. 1448, for example, he offered surety of the peace for Sir Edmund Trafford and Thomas Halsall. PL15/11, rots. 32d, 33d. More significantly, he remained active in Stanley’s concerns. On 23 Nov. 1450, more than two weeks after Parliament had assembled, he attested the election of Stanley and Sir Richard Haryngton* at Lancaster; and he again attested Stanley’s election in 1455, on this occasion at the head of the named attestors. In the meantime, when in March 1452 the Lancashire esquire Thomas Pilkington departed without licence from the royal council back to his own ‘country’, it was Stanley and our MP who were instructed to bring him back. Lancs. Knights of the Shire, 224-5; E28/82, 16 Mar.

Some evidence of Keighley’s private affairs survives from the last years of his life. On 30 Sept. 1450 he contracted his daughter in marriage to Gilbert, son of his neighbour, Thomas Barton of Barton. Kay Shuttleworth mss, DDKs 1/18. Later he was involved in litigation relating to payments both due to and from him. In the summer assizes of 1451 Roger Dugdale of Catterall sued him for falsely taking eight of his oxen; our MP claimed them as a distraint for the non-payment over 35 years of an annuity of four marks assigned on the manor of Catterall and granted to his ancestor, Gilbert Keighley, in 1348. PL15/17, rot. 21. He was then on the receiving end of a similar claim: at the assizes at York in March 1456 the abbot of Kirkstall recovered an annual rent of 62s. owed by our MP for two carucates and a water mill in Keighley and unpaid for 17 years. CP40/779, rot. 32.

By this date Keighley was over 60 and he had not much longer to live. His last recorded appearance as a j.p. dates from 5 July 1456, and on the following 11 Aug. he again offered surety of the peace before the assize justices. This, however, is the last reference to him in an active role. He was dead by 25 Sept. 1458, by which date his widow Constance and son Ralph had taken over the farm of the tithes of the abbey of Vale Royal at Kirkham, near Inskip. DL29/117/1945; PL15/19, rot. 35; 29, rot. 11. Constance was alive as late as August 1473 when, as our MP’s executrix, she was still pursuing various of our MP’s creditors, most notable Sir Peter Leigh†, at the Lancashire assizes. PL15/40, rot. 15d. His grandson, another Henry, was knighted by Stanley’s son, Thomas, Lord Stanley, during the Scottish expedition of 1482. The family survived in the male line until another Henry died in 1567, leaving two infant daughters as his heirs. In 1582 one of these married William Cavendish†, later earl of Devonshire. Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxvii. 69, 74-76; VCH Lancs. vii. 280.