KESTON, Richard

Keston’s will shows that he came from Leicestershire, where, at least by his death, he held property at Laughton in the south of the county. His place of birth, however, was probably Leicester, if one may judge from his bequests to churches there and his provision for prayers for the soul of a former burgess, William Grantham*.2 PCC 8 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 60v-61v). Yet it was in London that he made his career. He first appears in the records in the autumn of 1447, when a London draper, William Snell, named him as the sole trustee of his goods. Not long afterwards, in the early 1450s, he married the widow of another draper: in 1453 the couple, with his wife described as the executrix of John Brykelesworth, were defendants in an action of debt.3 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 380-1; 1447-54, pp. 20-21; CP40/771, rot. 56d.

Against this meagre background, it is difficult to explain Keston’s election for the Wiltshire borough of Heytesbury. Some impropriety appears to have attached to the return. On 24 Feb. 1453 the sheriff of Wiltshire, Edward Stradling, drew up an indenture with the burgesses of the borough, but there can be no doubt that this indenture was subsequently amended. The names of the MPs originally elected have been erased, and those of Keston and Thomas Cross* have been added over the erasure.4 C219/16/2. Neither had any connexion with Heytesbury, and it is likely that the indenture was amended after its return into Chancery, perhaps on information that those originally elected were not going to attend. If this is correct, it is easy to see why Cross, a servant of the Exchequer official, Thomas Thorpe* (who was to be Speaker in the Parliament), should have been selected to sit in an assembly in which there was a strong contingent of royal servants. For Keston, however, no such ready explanation presents itself. The best guess is that he too had some small place in the royal administration or household, but the evidence for this is indirect. The most that can be said is that he had connexions with royal servants. In 1448 he and the royal esquire John Gargrave*, marshal of the Marshalsea, who was also to sit in the Parliament of 1453, were the joint-grantees of the goods of Edward Grayson. By 1459 he numbered among the feoffees of George Ashby*, clerk of the signet to Queen Margaret; and on 21 Sept. of the same year the notorious household esquire, William Tailboys*, granted all his goods in Middlesex to Keston and a prominent London grocer, John Young*.5 CCR, 1447-54, p. 104; London Metropolitan Archs., Tarleton mss, ACC/0312/86; Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, p. 153. At an unknown date he was a feoffee for Tailboys in a London messuage: C1/56/251.

If Keston did have a place in the royal household at the time of his election, it was one he was able to maintain and enlarge after the change of regime in 1461. On the first day of the new reign he was appointed as one of the new King’s serjeants-at-arms, a post which involved periods of attendance about the King’s person and had a generous daily wage 12d. This appointment was confirmed on the following 18 July when, described as a King’s esquire, he was granted the office for life.6 E159/238, brevia Mich. rots. 1, 32d; CPR, 1461-7, p. 21; CCR, 1461-8, p. 47. In company with his fellow serjeants-at-arms he was exempted from the Act of Resumption of 1467: E404/74/1/28; PROME, xiii. 303, 323. Further reward soon followed: on 10 Apr. 1462, in recompense of money owed to him by the attainted Tailboys, he had a duchy of Lancaster grant of a horse mill and three shops, not exceeding the yearly value of £8 16s. 8d., in Leicester.7 DL29/199/3134, m. 1d; DL37/31/16. This grant was also exempted from resumption: DL37/34/93. Nothing in his later career identifies a Yorkist patron who might have secured for him this position and its contingent rewards; and the most likely supposition is that he was adopted by the new regime as part of the existing Household. But, however his promotion came about, it did not make him, as far as the surviving records permit a judgement, a more active man. A Chancery petition, however, hints at his influence. Two Bretons complained to the chancellor that since 5 Aug. 1471 they had been wrongfully imprisoned in the Counter of London by virtue of an action of trespass sued in Keston’s name by one of his servants, William Haynes, a porter of the Counter. Haynes had made the false allegation that the Bretons had facilitated the escape from that prison of three mariners, their compatriots, on 3 Aug. and then Keston had used his influence to keep them in prison despite an order from the mayor and recorder of London to proceed with the action expeditiously. Further, when a London scrivener, John Morecok, sought to find counsel for them, Keston sued the scrivener for maintenance and had him arrested.8 C1/45/142.

The obscurity surrounding Keston’s career lifts only with his death. He left a long and revealing will, drawn up on 26 Nov. 1472 when the testator was ‘visited with sikenesse’.9 PCC 8 Wattys. This shows him to have been resident in the parish of St. Mildred Warbrook, near the Counter – an additional explanation for his influence there. He wanted to be buried next to his second wife, Joan, in the fashionable location of the Greyfriars, where a lost memorial once remembered him as an esquire and serjeant-at-arms.10 Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 395. Despite his three marriages, he left no legitimate issue, so he bequeathed to his brother, Henry Keston, his property at Laughton, on condition that Henry spent £3 on the repair of the Leicester churches of St. Mary and of the Holy Rood and prayers for William Grantham’s soul. His other modest property holdings were used to provide for his third wife. She was to have his messuage in Aldersgate Street in fee simple together with the remaining years of his lease of a tenement within the precinct of the monastery of Stratford Langthorne in Essex. His other property, a tenement in the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate, was to be sold for the implementation of his will. Further funding for this implementation was to be raised from the sale of his plate, a substantial part of which had been pledged to a London surgeon, Thomas Ashwell, for a loan of £10. The will also provides details of his family. Besides Henry, he had another brother, William, a canon in the priory of Kirby Bellars (Leicestershire), who was to have ten marks, the largest bequest of cash in the will, to pray for his soul. He also had son, who, it can be reasonably inferred from the will’s terms, was illegitimate: ‘Litill Nichol’, described as ‘my child’, was to have, among other things, a small white horse and the riding accoutrements that his father used. Keston also possessed armour and more than one battle axe, probably needed to discharge the royal guard duties that fell to serjeants-at-arms, and these he left to his third wife’s brother, Christopher Seliok.11 It may have been this Christopher, confusingly described as ‘Christopher Keston’, who acted to prevent the remarriage of Keston’s widow to one William Young: C1/66/308. For his executors he looked to his wife and brother, Henry, with the aid of Richard Portington, an Exchequer official.

Keston was dead by 26 Mar. 1473, when his will was proved, and on the following 7 Apr. William Cheyne was appointed to his place among the royal serjeants-at-arms. His widow was still alive in 1475, when, in company with Thomas Ashwell, she was summoned into Chancery to answer Robert Tailboys†, son and heir of (Sir) William Tailboys, concerning a London tenement that our MP had allegedly held to William’s use.12 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 392-3; C1/56/251.