♀Elizabeth Seymour

Elizabeth Seymour (born about 1406) was a Somerset heiress whose marriage brought the manors of Tickenham, in Somerset, and Welham, in Leicestershire, to her husband, Thomas Berkeley. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Cecily Berkeley (about 1441 – 1514).

Early life and marriage

Elizabeth was the one daughter and heiress of Thomas Seymour and his wife, Margaret Farway. Her father was the son and heir apparent of Sir Edmund Seymour of Chelvey, Migill and Tickenham, in Somerset, but he did not live to inherit: Margaret died before 1421, and Thomas before 1422, the year Elizabeth was about sixteen.

Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Seymour married before 1421, when she was no more than about fifteen years old. Her husband held her lands jure uxoris^W, in his wife’s right. Elizabeth, or her mother, was one of the co-heirs of Elizabeth’s uncle, John Farway, some time between 1419 and 1421. In or after 1421 Thomas conveyed lands in Cornwall, probably Elizabeth’s share of the manor of Penhallam^W in Jacobstow, to Walter Stawell, the husband of her aunt Joan Farway, and took in exchange Joan’s share of the manor of Furnax, in Warminster, Wiltshire, which had come to Joan and Elizabeth as co-heirs of Lady Alice Stury.

Widowhood

The couple had a son, John, and a daughter, Cecily. Thomas died on 20 April 1443, and Elizabeth was still living, his widow, in 1445. John, their son and heir, held Tickenham after them and died shortly before 11 May 1479; Cecily, then the wife of James Ashe, was his heir, and through her Tickenham passed to the Ashes.

Notes

Sources

Elizabeth’s parents, birth, marriage, inheritance and widowhood are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 175, a compiled genealogy. Richardson cites the Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, vol. 3 (1835), pp. 588–594; the Benolte visitation of Somerset (printed 1885), p. 108; Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, vol. 16 (1920), pp. 281–285; the Victoria County History of Leicestershire, vol. 5 (1964), pp. 330–336, and of Wiltshire, vol. 8 (1965), pp. 96–103; the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 23 (2004), p. 57; and Foundations 2(6) (2008), pp. 390–422.

Dates

Richardson gives her birth as about 1406, from her age of sixteen in 1422. He gives no date of death; she was living in 1445.

Her father’s name

Richardson names her father “Thomas (or John, Edmund) Seymour.” A Furneaux family pedigree dated 1423/44 calls him John, son and heir of Sir Edmund Seymour, and the Furneaux pedigree in the Benolte visitation calls him “John, sonn and heire of Sr. Henery Semore.” The same 1423/44 pedigree names Elizabeth’s husband “Johanni de Bercley” (John de Berkeley).

The Cornwall lands

Richardson does not name the Cornish lands her husband gave up; he presumes they were Elizabeth’s share of Penhallam. The exchange is dated only “in or after 1421.”