♀Elizabeth de Segrave

Elizabeth de Segrave (born 25 October 1338) was an English noblewoman, the heiress of the Segrave lands, who was married as a child to John de Mowbray^W, Lord Mowbray, and died before him. She was the nineteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Thomas Mowbray.

Early life and marriage

Elizabeth was born on 25 October 1338 and was baptized the same day at Croxton Abbey^W. She was the daughter and heiress of John de Segrave, Lord Segrave, and his wife Margaret of Norfolk, Duchess and Countess of Norfolk. A papal dispensation^W dated 25 March 1349, needed because the two were related in the fourth degree of kindred, allowed John de Mowbray, then eight, to marry Elizabeth de Segrave, then ten.

Lady Segrave

In 1351, while she was living in the diocese of Norwich, Elizabeth received a papal indult for plenary remission. Her father died on 1 April 1353, and she is said to have become Lady Segrave in her own right, at fourteen. She died before her husband, who died overseas in June 1368. For the rest of his life he held her family’s manors, among them Kyngton Magna in Warwickshire and Lodden in Norfolk, by the courtesy of England, the right of a widower to his wife’s inheritance for his lifetime once a child of theirs had been born.

The family

The couple had two sons, John and Thomas, and three daughters, Eleanor, Margaret and Joan. Their elder son, John, later Earl of Nottingham, died in 1383, and his brother Thomas became his heir; Thomas was created Duke of Norfolk in 1397.

Notes

Sources

Elizabeth’s birth and baptism, her parents, the dispensation for her marriage, the papal indult, her succession to the Segrave title and the names of her children are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 601, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility; Richardson gives the succession with “is said to have”. The Complete Peerage (1st edition, vol. 6, 1895, p. 41) calls her “suo jure Baroness Segrave”, daughter and heir of John, Lord Segrave. The inquisitions taken after her husband’s death are printed in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 12 (1938), no. 397, pp. 380–383. Her son John’s earldom and death, and Thomas’s dukedom, are from Magna Carta Ancestry, pp. 602–603.

Date of death

No date of death is known. The Complete Peerage gives “d. in or before 1376”, and Richardson says that she predeceased her husband. The inquisitions of early 1369 settle it: the Warwickshire jury found her husband holding Kyngton Magna “by the courtesy of England of the inheritance of Elizabeth his wife”, and the Huntingdonshire jury found Alconbury held “in right of his wife, now deceased”. So she died before her husband, in or before 1368.

Her name

One Norfolk inquisition calls her “Alice (sic) daughter of John Segrave”; every other one names her Elizabeth.