LYSTER, Gilbert

Like many of Northampton’s MPs in this period. Lyster was involved in the cloth trade, being generally described as either hosier or draper. Although very little can be discovered about his career, his two terms as mayor show that he was one of the leading townsmen. He first appears in the records in 1434 when he and his wife sued her mother or stepmother, Isabel, and Isabel’s husband, John Haywode, a husbandman of Daventry, for a debt of £18.2 CP40/693, rots. 158d, 243; 699, rots. 372, 421. The fact that his wife came from Banbury implies that Lyster may not have been a native of Northampton, but, if this was the case, he was quick to establish himself there. On 1 Mar. 1435 an elderly draper of the town, Henry Caysho, nominated him as one of the executors of his will, and he was elected as bailiff in the following Michaelmas.3 Add. Ch. 735. Nothing more is known of him until his election as MP in January 1447 and as mayor in the next year. In 1450 he offered mainprise on the return of a mercer, William Meye*, to Parliament, and three years later he joined with other former mayors in petitioning the fraternity of the guild of the Holy Trinity in Coventry to extend its charity to John Church II*, a guildsman from Northampton who had fallen on hard times.4. C219/16/1; Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry (Dugdale Soc. xix), 47-48. He last appears in May 1461 when he made a conveyance of property in Yelvertoft, some miles to the north-west of Northampton, as a feoffee of Alice, widow of Thomas Piddington. He was certainly dead by Trinity term 1470 when his widow, as his executrix, and her husband, Robert Adderton, sued a clerk and yeoman of Maidwell for debts of 40s. each.5 CAD, iv. A6222, 8392; CP40/836, rot. 220d; 838, rot. 244d.