♀Cecily Berkeley

Cecily Berkeley (about 1441 – 1514) was the heiress of the Berkeleys of Tickenham, in Somerset, England, whose inheritance brought Tickenham to her first husband’s family, the Ashes. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Richard Ashe.

Family and inheritance

Cecily was the daughter of Elizabeth Seymour and her husband, Thomas Berkeley, who held Tickenham in Somerset and Welham in Leicestershire in his wife’s right. She had one brother, John, their son and heir. Her father died on 20 April 1443.

Cecily Berkeley and James Ashe married before 1479, and they had one son, Richard. When her brother, John Berkeley, died shortly before 11 May 1479, Cecily, said then to be thirty years old and more, became his heir, and James held Tickenham and Britton, in Somerset, in her right.

Widowhood and second marriage

James had died by the time Cecily married again, as his second wife, Robert Forthey (or Fortey), a Bristol merchant who served as sheriff or bailiff of Bristol in 1489–90. In a Chancery^W suit of between 1504 and 1515, Cecily, still described as “late the wife of James Asshe,” and Robert sued John Browne, the executor of Thomas Browne. The suit concerned a statute staple, a debt bond formally registered before the officials of a staple town, that had been sold to John Chester and Thomas Browne: the couple charged fraud in the wording of a release of it that Cecily had made, and complained that it was being withheld.

Cecily died in 1514, and an inquisition post mortem^W was taken on her lands under the name Cecily Forthey. Robert Forthey’s will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W on 28 October 1514.

Notes

Sources

Cecily’s parents, brother, birth, marriages, inheritance, the Chancery suit and her death are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 175. Richardson cites the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, vol. 8 (1883–1884), pp. 235–236, and vol. 26 (1903), p. 133; Byrchmore’s Collections for a Parochial History of Tickenham (1895), pp. 9–11; the Victoria County History of Wiltshire, vol. 8 (1965), pp. 96–103; Forrest, The Making of a Manor (1975), p. 93; the Chancery suit (National Archives C 1/310/69); the inquisition taken after her brother’s death in 1479 (C 140/70/40); and the one taken after her own, under the name Cecily Forthey, in the sixth year of Henry VIII (C 142/29/105). Robert Forthey’s will is registered as P.C.C. 29 Fetiplace.

Dates

Richardson gives her birth as about 1439–1443, from the age of “30 and more” given for her in 1479; the date of about 1441 is the middle of that range. He gives the year of her death, 1514, without a day.

Her two husbands

Richardson does not give the date of either marriage. She married James Ashe before 1479 and Robert Forthey before 1514. He gives Robert’s name as Forthey (or Fortey) and James’s as Asshe in the words of the Chancery suit.