♀Eme (surname unknown)

Eme (buried 13 May 1547) lived at Bengeworth, beside the town of Evesham in Worcestershire, where her husband John Washburn was a husbandman. She outlived him by four months, long enough to make a will of her own that shared out her gowns, cows and sheep among her children and grandchildren and paid for a yearly mass for her husband’s soul and hers. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Washburn (died before 12 July 1593).

Family

John and Eme had two sons, William and John, and two daughters, Alice, the wife of Robert Marten, and Katherine, the wife of Daniel Hide. By the end of 1546 all four were married, and there were eight grandchildren: two each from William and John, three from Alice and one from Katherine.

Her husband made his will on 27 December 1546, naming her his sole executrix and leaving her the houses, lands and grounds in the town and fields of Bengeworth for her life. He was buried at Bengeworth on 8 January 1546/47.

Her will

She made her will on 1 May 1547, “sike in body”, and asked to be buried in the churchyard of Bengeworth. Her daughter Katherine was to have a red kirtle^W, her best gown and cap, her featherbed and a coffer, and Alice a cow, her second gown and cap, her best petticoat and her mantle. Katherine’s husband Daniel Hide had her best cow, sheep and corn; Alice’s three children had sheep and pewter, and her son William a brown cow, with her best kirtle for his wife and gifts for his two daughters.

She gave barley to the church and to its young men’s light, and set the yearly income of a piece of land in the field towards a dirge and mass each year in Bengeworth church “for my husbands soule & myne”. Within the year, the Chantries Act^W of 1547 put an end to endowments of this kind. The rest of her goods went to “John Wasbord my sone”, her executor. She was buried at Bengeworth on 13 May 1547, and John proved the will at Evesham on 15 June; her goods were valued at £17 17s 10d. The house and lands then passed to their son John, most likely the John Washburn who farmed at Bengeworth until his death in 1593.

Notes

Sources

Her life rests on James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), which prints in full her will, in which she is “Emme Wasborn”, and her husband’s, both from the probate registry at Worcester, with the Washbourne entries of the Bengeworth register, among them “1547. 13 May Emme Wasborne Bur.” Her will is dated in the first year of Edward VI. Alice appears in it as “Alis Merton”.

Her surname

No record names her family before her marriage, so she is given here by her first name alone.

Her son John

Her will makes her son John her executor. That this son is the John Washburn of Bengeworth who died in 1593 is Davenport’s reading of the register and the wills, which he sets out as “four generations of Johns at Bengeworth”.