KEMELL, William, of Widhill in Cricklade, Wilts.

It is difficult to identify William with absolute certainty, for there were numerous variations in the spelling of his surname, but it is likely that he was William Kemell of Widhill in Cricklade. Although sometimes recognized as a ‘gentleman’, William of Widhill was also referred to as ‘yeoman’ or ‘franklin’, CP40/780, rots. 151d, 259; 789, rot. 35; KB27/782, rot. 83; 784, rot. 31d. and he was assessed at £3 p.a. in lands for the purposes of the subsidy granted by the Parliament of 1450, to which he had been returned. E179/196/118. He owed his landed interests – and perhaps his connexion with Wiltshire in the first place – to his wife Alice, yet his origins may have lain in neighbouring Gloucestershire, where one or more men named Richard Kemell served as a coroner for several decades in the middle part of the century, and attested several elections of that county’s knights of the shire. CCR, 1429-35, p. 265; 1461-8, p. 43; KB9/237/14; 247/13; CPR, 1441-6, p. 241; C1/22/186; C219/14/1; 15/4, 7; 16/2; 17/2. William’s wife was one of the heirs of her late father, John Wydyhill, but she and William had trouble in securing her share of Wydyhill’s lands, which lay in Widhill, Cricklade, Haydon Wick, Rodbourne Cheney and Blunsdon St. Andrew. By 1436, the couple were quarrelling with one of her coheirs, her niece Joan Tame, who sued them in the court of common pleas at Westminster over the partition of the inheritance. CP40/700, rot. 358d; 701, rot. 147; 702, rot. 256. Presumably, the parties resolved their differences before the end of the decade, since the Kemells were associated with a John Tame in a conveyance of 1439. Through this transaction, in which John Blount and his wife Joan were also co-parties, they relinquished holdings in Rodbourne Cheney and Moredon (evidently part of the Wydyhill inheritance) to Thomas Rodbourne, bishop of St. David’s. In the following year, William and Alice quitclaimed other lands, situated in Haydon and Haydon Wick, to the lawyer Thomas Cricklade*. Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 518, 534.

The quarrel with Joan Tame was not the only dispute in which Kemell was involved. Later in his career, he was a defendant in further suits at Westminster, at least three in the main central common law courts and one in the Chancery. All the actions at law occurred in the later 1450s, and two of them concerned debts he allegedly owed. One of the plaintiffs in these suits for debt was Sir Edmund Hungerford*, who sued Kemell for £5; the other was Gilbert Kymer, dean of Salisbury and chancellor of Oxford university, who sought ten marks each from him and a co-defendant, Richard Hayne II*, of Salisbury. In the third suit, Kemell was associated with 11 co-defendants, also from Wiltshire and including Walter Sambourn, Walter’s relative John Cricklade* and Thomas Hasard*. They were called upon to answer the King and Elizabeth Russell for forging deeds, in breach of statute and with the intention of defrauding her of holdings at Cockleborough in Chippenham. In August 1450, or so Elizabeth alleged, the defendants had gathered at Down Hatherley in Gloucestershire to make false deeds showing that the lands in question belonged to Sambourn’s family. Although referred to a jury, the matter appears never to have come to trial. CP40/780, rots. 151d, 259; KB27/782, rot. 83; 784, rot. 31d; C1/160/1. Perhaps Elizabeth was the wid. of the Robert Russell who held lands at Cockleborough in 1428 (Feudal Aids, v. 253), but it has not been possible to identify her with Elizabeth, 1st. da. of John Throckmorton I* and w. of Robert Russell II*. In the Chancery suit, dating from the first half of the 1460s, the plaintiff was Richard Herman, parson of Castle Eaton, Wiltshire. According to Herman, during the previous Shrovetide Kemell, along with Thomas, Robert and Richard Kemell (presumably William’s kinsmen) and others from Cricklade and its vicinity, had entered his parsonage (having taken his keys to gain entry) and carried away over £100 worth in money and goods. Herman also alleged that his opponents had subsequently prepared an ambush for him and put it about that he had uttered disloyal words against the King (either the soon to be ousted Henry VI or the newly but insecurely enthroned Edward IV), in order to thwart his attempts to go to law against them. Herman’s bill is the only surviving evidence of this Chancery case, the outcome of which is unrecorded. The suit provides the last known reference to William Kemell who may have died soon afterwards. In early 1489, Richard Kemell of Groundwell in Wiltshire was appointed a tax collector in the county but the family relationship (if any) between him and William is not known. C1/28/44; CFR, xxii. no. 228.