♀Anne Giffard

Anne Giffard was the daughter and heiress of Nicholas Giffard of Matson and Cromhall Lygon, in Gloucestershire, who married Thomas Lygon of Great Malvern and Madresfield, in Worcestershire, in the fifteenth century. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Richard Lygon (died 1512).

Her husband is said to have sat for Worcestershire in Parliament as a knight of the shire^W. Their son Richard was born between 1467 and 1477. He later held Madresfield and Little Mitton, in Worcestershire, and Matson and Giffardes (in Broadwell), in Gloucestershire, and he died at Madresfield on 1 May 1512.

Notes

Sources

Anne’s father, her marriage and her son are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 510, where she appears in the account of her son Richard. No dates are given for Anne herself; the fifteenth century follows from Richard’s birth between 1467 and 1477, which Richardson works out from Richard’s age in 1507.

The Giffard marriage in older pedigrees

Older accounts set out the family differently. Burke’s Peerage (1869) makes the husband of Anne Beauchamp, Richard’s wife, the grandson of the Thomas Lygon “who acquired the estate of Madresfield with the heiress of Bracy”. A Lygon pedigree in James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family (1907), drawn from Grazebrook and the heralds’ visitation^W of Worcestershire of 1569, begins with Thomas Lygon and Joan Bracey, whose marriage it places in the early fifteenth century, and shows a Richard Lygon as the husband of the Giffard heiress, with the Lygon who married Anne Beauchamp in the generation after. Richardson names the Giffard heiress’s husband Thomas, and this account follows Richardson.