♀Elizabeth Knivton

Elizabeth Knivton was a daughter of Henry Knivton of Bradley, near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and the wife of Norman Washbourne of Wichenford in Worcestershire, whose family’s alabaster tomb in Wichenford church bore her name. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Washbourne (died 1517) and, probably, his son John Washburn (died 1547).

Bradley and Wichenford

The Knivtons were long settled at Bradley, which was the chief seat of the elder branch of the family from the reign of Edward I to that of Charles I. Elizabeth married Norman Washbourne, the son and heir of John Washbourne and Margaret Poher. Norman made his home at Wichenford, his mother’s inheritance, and was for years at law with his Salwey cousins over the manors of Stanford and Knight’s Washbourne, a quarrel not settled until after his death. Their son and heir was John Washbourne, who died in 1517. Norman also had daughters: Eleanor married first Sir Richard Scrope, a younger son of Henry, fourth Lord Scrope of Bolton, and then Sir John Wyndham of Crownthorpe in Norfolk, and others married into the Gower, Vampage and Hugford families.

Death and burial

Elizabeth probably died on 13 May 1454. Her name was carved on the alabaster tomb of Norman’s parents in the chancel at Wichenford church. It lay on the north side and bore the figures of an armed man and his wife, with a little dog at her feet; its worn inscription named Elizabeth as of Bradley in the county of Derby. A huge alabaster slab that served as a seat in the arbor of Wichenford vicarage until 1892, and was afterwards built into the north wall of the church’s sanctuary as a credence table^W, may be what is left of it.

Notes

Sources

Elizabeth is known from James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907). The Washbourne and Pakington pedigrees in the Visitation of Worcestershire of 1569, as Davenport prints them, marry Norman to Elizabeth, a daughter of Henry Kinaston or Kynaston, and the family tomb at Wichenford, as the antiquary Thomas Habington copied its inscription about 1640, names her as “de Bradeley in C[om.] Derbiae”. Davenport gives her flatly as “the daughter of Henry Knivton, of Bradley”, and his index treats Kinaston as a spelling of the same name.

Her name

Davenport spells the name Knivton. It is more usually written Kniveton, the name of the parish beside Bradley, which a correspondent told Davenport in 1903 was “pronounced in two syllables” as Knivton. The Worcester antiquary Dr William Thomas, filling the gaps in the worn inscription, made her a daughter of a Henry Walton; Davenport called that “erroneous”.

Her death

Habington took the date on the tomb, 13 May 1454, for the death of Norman’s father, John. Davenport thought that unlikely, since John’s own father had married in 1355, and “inclines to the belief that the person who died in 1454 was Elizabeth the wife of Norman”. Dr Thomas’s fuller reading of the inscription gives the feminine quae in place of qui, and also reads Norman’s name into the gap after his father’s. The suggestion that the slab in the vicarage arbor came from the tomb is Davenport’s; a note in the Prattinton manuscripts had already doubted that Habington meant more than a slab by the word “tomb”.

Her mother

Davenport names only her father. Online family trees make her mother Elizabeth Bagot, a daughter of John Bagot of Blithfield in Staffordshire and Beatrice Mallory, citing the heralds’ visitations of Derbyshire and Staffordshire; that marriage is given here only on their word.

Norman’s daughters

Eleanor’s marriages are from Burke’s Landed Gentry (1906), which Davenport quotes, and the Complete Peerage. The other daughters are from the pedigrees of the families they married into, in the visitations of Worcestershire (1569) and Gloucestershire (1623). None of these names the daughters’ mother.

Her grandson John of Bengeworth

That the John named in the heralds’ pedigrees as a younger son of Elizabeth’s son John Washbourne of Wichenford is John Washburn of Bengeworth, beside Evesham, who died in 1547, is Davenport’s identification, not a record’s; the 1517 will of John of Wichenford does not name him. In 1914 Barnard judged the identification “a reasonable probability” but “by no means a certainty”. The descent from Elizabeth is therefore given here as probable below her son John.