♀Agnes Isted

Agnes Isted (living 1585) was the wife of John Porter of Bayham, on the Sussex–Kent border, and the mother of a family whose children were baptized at Frant between 1557 and 1564. Three of her sons named her in the wills they made between 1581 and 1585, one of them as his executrix. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Richard Porter (died 1584).

Family

She is known as Agnes Porter, her married name. Her maiden name was probably Isted: the Visitation of Kent, a heraldic pedigree compiled in 1619, names the wife of John Porter of Bayham as Anna, daughter of an Isted, and gives no first name for her father. The Frant parish register, in its typed transcription, records the baptisms of five children of John Porter “of Begham”, as it spells Bayham, between 29 March 1557 and 2 September 1564. The wills of three of her sons together name six brothers, Richard, Robert, John, Thomas, Stephen and George, and two sisters, one of whom, Mary, married Thomas Aynscombe at Frant on 2 July 1571.

Her sons’ wills

Her son Stephen Porter of Wadhurst, who named no wife or child, made his will in March 1581: “I make Agnes Porter my mother my executrixe”, leaving her “all my goodes and cattells” once his debts and legacies were paid. The will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W on 6 May 1581, with Agnes Porter as executrix. Her husband is not named in it, nor in the later wills of her sons, and appears to have died before 1581. In August 1584 her son Richard, an ironmaster at Bayham, left “to my mother … Twentie shillinges to buy her a ringe”, and on 21 December 1585 her son George, who likewise named no wife or child, left “my Mother” ten pounds. No later record of her has been found, and no burial for her appears among the Porter entries of the Frant register.

Notes

The Visitation of Kent, 1619

The Visitation of Kent 1619-1621 (Harleian Society vol. 42, 1898), p. 155, prints the Porter pedigree: “Joh’es Porter de Bayham in co. Sussexiae = Anna filia .... Isted” (its footnote cites Harl. 6138). The pedigree is compiled from the family’s own report, so it is a secondary record, not a parish or probate record, and it gives the father’s surname but no first name.

Agnes, Stephen’s will and Richard’s will

Stephen Porter’s will of 1581 calls her “my mother”, and her son Richard’s will of August 1584 names as overseers “my brother Thomas Whitefielde and my Uncle Isted”. If Agnes was born an Isted, that uncle was her brother, which fits the pedigree’s Isted wife. That the Anna of the pedigree and the Agnes of the wills are the same woman is an inference from that fit, not a statement in any one record.