KAYLEWEY, William

We know from the MP’s will that his father was John Kayleway of Sherborne, probably the man who regularly served on juries at inquisitions post mortem held in the town in the 1420s, and who attested the Dorset elections of 1432.5 CIPM, xxii. nos. 24, 205, 249, 417, 490, 580, 767; C139/34/39. As a witness at a proof of age made in 1433, John said he was then 48 (and thus born in about 1385), so if this was accurate (and he was indeed William’s father), the MP must have been a young man, still in his twenties, when he was elected to the Commons.6 C139/67/54. He seems to have belonged to a junior branch of the Kayleway family, for although he often acted in association with another John Kayleway the latter was invariably named first in the records of these transactions.7 e.g. in a final concord of 1455 with regard to a messuage in Sherborne: Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 379. This John was the son of Thomas Kayleway (fl.1418) and Joan (d.1462/3), da. and h. of Thomas Bingham of Sutton Bingham, Som., and gdda. of Sir Walter Romsey (d.1403), of Rockbourne, Hants. His stepfa. was Roger Wyke† of Bindon, and his half-bro. John Wyke II*: The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 919-20; Reg. Bubwith, i (Som. Rec. Soc. xxix), 308; Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), pp. lii-vi. A coheir of the extensive Romsey estates, he was prob. the esquire who died in Mar. 1468: C140/27/13. Perhaps they were cousins. William trained to be a lawyer, and his returns to Parliament for the Dorset boroughs of Shaftesbury and Dorchester perhaps reflect recognition of early promise in his chosen career. Following his parliamentary service he was next recorded, in 1439, as a witness to a conveyance to the abbot of Sherborne of land in Devon, his fellow witnesses including the much more prominent lawyers John Copplestone* and Nicholas Radford*.8 CCR, 1435-41, p. 265. That he practised law in the central courts at Westminster is suggested by his appearance as a feoffee of property in Fulham, Middlesex, two years later, and by the recognizance (for £80) made to him in July 1442 by Richard Legget, a London esquire.9 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 438, 444; 1441-7, p. 77. The Joan ‘Withyford’, widow, associated with him in the recognizance, may have been his future wife. Before that date Kayleway had entered the circle of Sir Humphrey Stafford*, the wealthiest commoner in Dorset, and had begun a long association with the Stafford family, marked by his participation in a settlement of jointure on Sir Humphrey’s younger son, William Stafford*, and his wife, the heiress Katherine Chideock. As a feoffee for the Staffords, Kayleway came into contact with Sir Humphrey’s half-brother John Stafford, then bishop of Bath and Wells, who had been chancellor when he sat in Parliament.10 Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/940, 941; CCR, 1476-85, no. 491; CFR, xxi. no. 543. John Kayleway, his kinsman, was a juror at Sir Humphrey’s post mortem at Sherborne: C139/105/9. Kayleway attested the Dorset elections early in 1442, but there is no evidence that he himself ever entered the Commons again.

By then Kayleway may have contracted his potentially lucrative marriage to Joan Lederede, the widow of a former coroner of Somerset. In the assessments for the tax levied in 1436 he had been put down as receiving just £5 p.a. from his land in that county,11 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (vii). but Joan’s former husband had possessed extensive holdings to the north of Sherborne, at Weathergrove, South Cadbury, Horsington, Somerton and elsewhere, and these must have substantially increased his income. In November 1442, after Joan became Kayleway’s wife, these estates were settled on her for life, with remainder to her issue by Lederede, to any other children she might bear, and then to Lederede’s right heirs. Such was Kayleway’s standing that he could call upon prominent figures of the region to witness the transaction: (Sir) John Stourton II*, Sir John Chideock* and the latter’s son-in-law William Stafford were among them.12 CCR, 1441-7, p. 129. Further transactions relating to these holdings were completed in 1454, when William Strode, who had married Lederede’s daughter and heiress Alice, quitclaimed to the Kayleways’ feoffees land in Weathergrove, at the same time reaching other agreements with William’s kinsman John Kayleway regarding other former Lederede lands and the Somerset manor of Middlezoy.13 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 28-29; VCH Som. viii. 116. A final concord of three years later also concerned the Lederede estate, and in addition the manor of North Wyke in east Devon, along with land in Axminster and elsewhere. A partition of these estates between the Strodes and Kayleways ensured that the latter held for life North Wyke and 14 messuages, five tofts, four carucates and some 400 acres of land in the neighbourhood.14 CP25(1)/293/73/421. Kayleway had thus become a man of substance, and this is indicated too by his appointment to ad hoc commissions in the region from 1448 onwards, and his service as a member of the quorum on the Dorset bench from 1458 until his death 11 years later.

In the 1450s and 1460s William was engaged in private legal work. He and John Kayleway had been associated with the influential lawyer John Newburgh II* in a suit in 1454 against William Ludlowe II* of Ludgershall, Wiltshire, and his future wife Margaret Warmwell, a widow from Salisbury, for a breach of the statute of Westminster regarding illegal entry into land in Charleton by Knowlton. This they successfully recovered in the following year.15 CP40/773, rot. 187d; Dorset Feet of Fines, 380. More important, his links with the Staffords had continued in the years since William Stafford’s death in 1450. In 1455 he and the other surviving trustees of the Stafford estates were being sued by William’s widow Katherine, for her dower portion;16 CP40/779, rot. 450d. and in the late 1450s he was as a feoffee to the use of their son and heir Humphrey Stafford IV*, Lord Stafford of Southwick.17 C140/32/30; Reg. Stillington (Som. Rec. Soc. lii), 431. Kayleway’s reappointments as a j.p. throughout the civil war years of 1459-61 indicate that he was not considered to be partisan to either Lancaster or York, and it is difficult to attach political significance to his appearance, after a long absence, at the Dorset elections of 1460, or to his purchase of a pardon on 12 Jan. 1466.18 C67/45, m. 4. In it he was described as ‘of Sherborne, otherwise formerly of London, gentleman’. Yet in the 1460s he acted as a feoffee for John Stork†, a leading Dorset lawyer who had been a councillor to the duke of York,19 CPR, 1461-7, p. 423; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 486. and Lord Stafford of Southwick was a particular favourite of Edward IV, who elevated him to the earldom of Devon. It was not until after Kayleway’s death that more is revealed about his service to Stafford. It was later alleged that Stafford, ‘of his grete and inordinat covetise and yvell disposicion’ towards Glastonbury abbey, had caused three special assizes to be taken in the name of Kayleway with regard to manors near Compton Dundon, Somerset, which Kayleway held to his use, thereby extorting £600 from the abbot. On the day of his execution following the battle of Edgcote on 26 July 1469 Stafford exhorted his surviving feoffees to make recompense for these and other wrongs he had done. Kayleway, as one of Stafford’s legal advisors, must hold some responsibility for his actions.20 C1/38/214. Justices of assize had been commissioned to hear Kayleway’s plea on 3 Feb. that year: C66/523, m. 13d.

Kayleway died just a few weeks before the earl, although there is nothing to indicate that he accompanied Stafford’s army on its way north to confront Edward IV’s rebels. In his will made on 21 May 1469 he left the parish church at Sherborne his new missal, which was to be well and suitably illuminated and bound at his expense, and small bequests to Sherborne abbey, the important almshouse there, Henton priory, and the white friars at Bristol. To his son William (one of his executors) he left his two best horses, and a silver-gilt chalice, his second missal, his breviary and all the other contents of his oratory in his house at Sherborne, as well as a silver cup which the mother of his first wife had given him, and a ‘Bollecupe’, which items were to remain as family heirlooms. Other bequests favoured William junior’s young children: John was to have his grandfather’s lands in Bristol and in Yeovil, Somerset, entailed on his male issue, with remainder to his brother William in tail-male, their father William in tail-male, and finally to the testator’s right heirs, while Kayleway’s two grand-daughters were each to have £40. As his seal was not well known, he procured that of Tarrant abbey to be fixed to the will. This was proved on 1 July,21 PCC 27 Godyn. shortly after Kayleway’s death on 20 June. The inquisition post mortem referred only to his two burgages in Sherborne, worth £2, and lands in Somerset at Weathergrove, Sparkford, and Tickenham, worth just under £10 p.a. Presumably, this was not the full extent of his holdings, for although his first wife was dead he should have kept for life the property settled on them both under the entail of 1457. His son and heir was said to be aged 28.22 C140/31/9. The MP’s widow, Alice, brought an action in the court of common pleas in Easter term 1470 against her stepson for her dower portion of four messuages, four curtilages and four gardens in Sherborne and of eight tofts and 640 acres of land in Somerset.23 CP40/835, rots. 303, 303d.