TAYLARD, Walter

A lawyer, Taylard is said to have attended the Inner Temple in the early 1430s. The date of his father’s death is unknown so it is possible that the elder Walter, rather than the MP, served on some of the commissions listed in the cursus honorum above. It is also not clear which of them served as clerk of the justices of the peace in Cambridgeshire between 1414 and 1428.9 E. Stephens, Clerks of Counties, 63. Baker, 1510, assumes that the clerk was the MP. The Walter Taylard who served as clerk of the j.p.s in Notts. between 1415 and 1418 (ibid. 143), is unidentified. Two deeds of February 1429 cause further uncertainty: the first, dated the 12th of that month, refers to a Walter Taylard ‘of Cambridgeshire’; the other, of the 20th, features a namesake ‘of Huntingdonshire’.10 CCR, 1422-9, p. 455; CFR, xv. 257. Yet it is quite probable that they feature one and the same man, most likely the subject of this biography who, while retaining links with his father’s county of Bedfordshire, took up residence in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire.

While the MP appears not to have held any manorial property at Waresley, he certainly possessed manors at Diddington and Buckden in Huntingdonshire and at Wrastlingworth and Potton in Bedfordshire. He also held lands at Hail Weston, Paxton, Gransden and Abbotsley in the former county and – in the right of his wife – at Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire.11 Harl. 2044, f. 89. It appears that Diddington was an acquisition of the early 1440s, making it likely that it was one of his, rather than his father’s, purchases.12 Although Harl. 2044 and VCH Hunts. ii. 270 state that the er. Walter, rather than his son, acquired Diddington, probably the manor which Robert Stretton conveyed to feoffees in mid 1441. If Stretton was the vendor, the acquisition was probably not a smooth one, since Taylard (whether father or son) sued him for breach of contract with regard to £200 worth of lands in Hunts.: CP25(1)/94/36/29; C1/10/323. If only temporarily, Taylard supplemented his landed income when he and a fellow lawyer, Ralph Gray I*, successfully applied to the Crown for the keeping of the estates of the late Richard Rede (d.1432) in the autumn of 1433. Although ‘of Ireland’, Rede held three small manors in Essex, and presumably it was these English properties that came into the hands of Taylard and his associate. In February 1434, he and Gray agreed to pay the Exchequer an annual farm of 20 marks for their grant, which they were to hold until Richard’s son and heir, John, came of age. In the event, John died, still a minor, in August 1436, leaving as his heir his adult uncle Philip Rede.13 CFR, xvi. 173, 196-7; CIPM, xxiv. 29-33, 629.

Resident at Waresley in the earlier part of his career, Taylard was one of the gentry of Huntingdonshire called upon to swear the general oath to keep the peace in 1434.14 CPR, 1429-36, p. 375. By now involved in local government there and in Cambridgeshire, he was returned to his only known Parliament in late 1436. It is likely that Thomas Wesenham*, the other knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire in the Parliament of 1437, owed his seat to his membership of the King’s Household but it is not known whether any outside influence played a part in the election of Taylard. As his cursus honorum indicates, Walter was a mainstay of local administration and there is evidence that he regularly attended sessions of the peace in his capacity as a j.p.15 JUST3/210/26; 212/15; 220/3.

Alongside his work for the Crown, Taylard served various private clients. Among those for whom he acted as a surety were a fellow lawyer, Richard Forster I*, and the King’s carver Sir William Beauchamp*.16 CFR, xvi. 230, 265. He enjoyed a longstanding association with the latter (created Lord St. Amand in 1449), for whom he was also a feoffee,17 Harl. Ch. 45 I. 28. and took advantage of the connexion in the later 1450s when he, Roger Tocotes† and another lawyer, Henry Long*, purchased the wardship and marriage of Beauchamp’s heir, Richard Beauchamp†, for the sizeable sum of 600 marks.18 CFR, xix. 206. Taylard was also a feoffee for Laurence Cheyne*, Robert Stonham* and Nicholas Caldecote*, all leading members of the gentry of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In 1454 one of Nicholas’s sons, Richard, sued him and other feoffees in Chancery. Richard complained that they had refused to allow him possession of a manor at Bassingbourne, Cambridgeshire, to which (according to his father’s will) he was entitled following the death of his younger brother, Thomas. Taylard and the other feoffees accepted Richard’s claims but said they had failed to act because John Caldecote, Nicholas’s eldest son, had stolen the will. They therefore sought a ruling from the court before carrying out the desired conveyance.19 CPR, 1436-41, p. 51; 1446-52, pp. 258-9; C1/22/50; 24/139-44. Taylard was also a feoffee of the manor of Latton in Essex on behalf of the Tyrell family, being party to a settlement of this property in 1439.20 CPR, 1436-41, p. 348.

One of Taylard’s co-feoffees in the Latton settlement was John, Lord Tiptoft†, an important figure in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire as well as an influential member of the King’s Council. Any connexion with Tiptoft was potentially valuable, and it is quite possible that Walter owed his appointment in the same year as the duchy of Lancaster’s steward at Sutton and Potton to that peer’s influence. An association with Tiptoft might explain why Taylard featured in the deed by which John Bateman, rector of Borough Green, Cambridgeshire, founded a chantry in his church in 1446. In the deed Bateman named the MP as one of those whom he wished to benefit from prayers said in the chantry and assigned the right of presentation to his foundation to Tiptoft’s former ward, (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe*.21 Add. 5826, f. 10. Whatever his links with Tiptoft, Taylard had at least a passing association with another peer, Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, being nominated to arbitrate in a dispute between Grey and John Watkins* in 1435.22 CP40/701, rots. 308, 308d.

On several occasions Taylard played a role in endowments and grants made for religious and educational purposes. In the later 1450s, for example, he helped to found a chantry at Wimpole for the good of the soul of a former mayor of London, William Standon†.23 Cambridge Univ. Lib., Ely Diocesan recs., G1/5 (Reg. Grey), ff. 9-10. Earlier in the same decade, he had taken part in conveying a manor at Great Raveley, Huntingdonshire, to the abbey of Ramsey, in fulfilment of the will of the late Gilbert Hore*.24 CPR, 1452-61, p. 74. He must have enjoyed a good relationship with the abbey, for whose abbot he was a proxy in the Parliaments of 1435 and 1442. Taylard also had links with Thorney abbey in Cambridgeshire, for which he witnessed a memorandum when it granted an annuity of £20 for life to John de la Bere, bishop of St. David’s, in 1458.25 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 313-14. More prestigiously, from 1447 to 1454 Taylard was retained for his counsel by Westminster Abbey and by the royal foundation of King’s College, Cambridge. The college named him as a potential feoffee in the petitions seeking endowments of property that it submitted to the Parliaments of 1445, February 1449 and 1453, and it had awarded him an annual retainer of 20s. by 1448.26 PROME, xi. 454; RP, v. 162 (cf. PROME, xii. 70); Baker, 1510; SC8/105/5202. Taylard also had an association with Merton College, Oxford, in so far as he served as steward of its manor at Gamlingay, an office later held by his son William.27 VCH Cambs. v. 76. Taylard’s retainer with Westminster Abbey in particular bears testimony to his professional ability and to the time he spent at London and Westminster in pursuit of his legal duties, as does his association with the King’s attorney-general, John Vampage*, who appointed him an executor of his will of June 1452.28 Baker, 1510.

Over a decade later, Taylard drew up his own will in the presence of William Edmundessone, prior of the Dominican friary in Cambridge, perhaps his confessor. In the will, dated 12 Dec. 1464, he requested burial in Gamlingay parish church, within the chapel dedicated to St. Katherine which he had either built or remodelled. He made bequests to his poor tenants and various religious orders and set aside a sum of £37 to support a chantry priest for the chapel for seven years. He left all his household utensils to his wife, Margaret, whom he appointed one of his executors, along with the lawyer, John Battysford*, the vicar of Waresley and others. He survived until 18 Jan. 1467 and the will was proved two months later.29 Ibid.; PCC 17 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 130). Margaret Taylard died in the autumn of 1475, having made a will in which she asked to be buried beside her husband at Gamlingay, on 26 Sept. that year.30 CFR, xxi. no. 281; PCC 22 Wattys. The couple’s brass has now gone, although some fifteenth-century graffiti, ‘hic est sedes Margarete Tayl...d’, is still visible on a pier in the church’s north arcade.31 Baker, 1510; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Cambs. 391. Her inquisition post mortem indicates that she had held over 260 acres in the parish.32 C140/51/10.