♂Eudes la Zouche

Eudes la Zouche was an English lord of the thirteenth century who held the manor of Bingley in Yorkshire through his wife, Millicent de Cantilupe. A royal inquiry of 1276 found that the king’s officers had not been allowed into Bingley for thirty years. He was the twentieth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Ellen la Zouche.

Bingley

Millicent de Cantilupe and Eudes la Zouche were married by November 1273, when the inquest^W on the lands of her brother, George de Cantilupe, named “Milisanda the wife of Eudo la Zuche, of full age” and her young nephew John de Hastings as his next heirs. Bingley was among George’s lands, and it came to Millicent. Later accounts make Eudes a knight, of Harringworth in Northamptonshire.

In 1276 the jurors of the Hundred Rolls^W, Edward I’s great inquiry into the rights that local lords had taken from the crown, found that Eudes held pleas of unlawful distress at Bingley and held the sheriff’s tourn there, the sheriff’s own court for the district. He and the Archbishop of York, they said, had not let the king’s officers into Bingley for thirty years, nor into Otley for four. With Millicent’s consent, Eudes gave three clearings, or assarts^W, in the fee of Bingley to the canons of Drax Priory^W, who already held Bingley’s church.

Family

Millicent’s daughter Ellen la Zouche was most likely Eudes’s child too, and so was her son and heir, William la Zouche, born about 1276; later accounts add daughters named Eve and Elizabeth. Eudes died before Millicent, most likely by 1284: in her widowhood she gave Bingley to Ellen and the heirs of her body, and Kirkby’s Inquest^W of that year found Ellen holding the manor of her mother. The records give no date or place for his death.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Ellen la Zouche and her son William Harcourt (1300–1349) and, much further down, through Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). From Samuel one line comes down to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Name and standing

The records of his time write him Eudo la Zuche or la Zouch; the extent of Bingley in George de Cantilupe’s inquisition (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 2, no. 17; writ of 4 November 1273) calls him “Ivo la Suche”. The compiled accounts call him Eudes or Eudo. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (p. 249) gives “Eudes la Zouche, Knt., of Harringworth, Northamptonshire, Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire, Totnes, Devon, Braunstone and Lubbesthorpe, Leicestershire, Calstone (in Calstone Wellington) and Calne, Wiltshire, etc.”; J. Horsfall Turner’s Ancient Bingley (1897) calls him “Eudo la Zouch of Ashby-de-la-Zouch” (p. 98) and says he “sat in Parliament as Lord Zouch” (p. 67). No record gives his parents, and the compiled pedigrees disagree about them.

The 1276 inquiry and the Drax gift

Turner (p. 67) translates the Hundred Rolls return for Bingley: “the Jury found that Eudo la Zouch held pleas of illegal distress at Bingley. Also Eudo and the Archbishop of York have not permitted the officers of our Lord the King to enter Bingley for thirty years, nor Otley for four years, and Eudo holds the Sheriff’s tourn”. The thirty years reach back well before Bingley came to Millicent in 1273. The gift to Drax is in Turner’s abstract of the priory’s Bingley charters (p. 119): “Eudo de la Zouch, with the consent of his wife Milisant … gave three assarts (clearings or rodes) at the Rodes of the fee of Bingley, called Lillemandrode, Emmotrode, and Cotecroft”. George’s inquisition, as Turner prints it, notes that “the Prior of Drax hath the Church in his p’per use”.

His children

Millicent’s charter names “Alianore la Zuche my daughter”, and her own inquisition (vol. 3, no. 539; writ of 7 January 1299) names “William la Zouche, her son, aged 22 and more” as her heir. Neither record names their father; the surname la Zouche and Millicent’s marriage to Eudes by 1273 make him the likely father of both. The Harcourt Papers, vol. 1 (1880), pp. 63–64, call Ellen “daughter of Eudo la Zouch, and Milicent his wife”. The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 129) makes Eve, wife of Maurice de Berkeley, the “da. of Eudes la Zouche, by Milicent, da. of William de Cantelou”, and the first edition (vol. 6, p. 301) makes Elizabeth, wife of Nicholas Poyntz, the “da. of Eudo La Zouche by Milicent Montalt his wife”. Turner (p. 67) calls Ellen their “only daughter”, which these accounts contradict.

His death

Millicent’s grant of Bingley to Ellen is undated, but she made it “in my pure and legitimate widowhood”, and Kirkby’s Inquest of 1284 already finds Ellen holding Bingley of her mother; a fine of 13 Edward I (1284–5) settled the manor on Ellen and the heirs of her body. Turner’s dates for the Zouche years at Bingley (“Zouch, 1280” and “the mother died about 1280”, p. 67; Milisant “who died c. 1281”, p. 119) do not fit Millicent, who lived until 1298 or 1299.