♂Henry Knivton

Henry Knivton was of Bradley, a village near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, where the Knivtons were long settled, and his daughter married into the Washbournes of Wichenford in Worcestershire. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Knivton and, probably, her grandson John Washburn (died 1547).

Bradley

Bradley was the chief seat of the elder branch of the family from the reign of Edward I to that of Charles I. The Knivtons had been sub-tenants of the Ferrers earls of Derby and had done well out of their overlord’s ruin, and the arms they came to bear, a red shield with a chevron of vair^W in silver and black, still echoed those of the Ferrers.

His daughter Elizabeth

Henry’s daughter 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 their son and heir was John Washbourne, who died in 1517. 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, and its worn inscription named her as of Bradley in the county of Derby.

Notes

Sources

Henry is known from James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), which gives Elizabeth as “the daughter of Henry Knivton, of Bradley, a village near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, where the Knivtons were long settled”. The Washbourne and Pakington pedigrees in the heralds’ visitation^W of Worcestershire in 1569, as Davenport prints them from Phillimore’s edition, give Norman’s wife as Elizabeth, a daughter of Henry Kinaston or Kynaston. None of these gives a date for Henry himself. Bradley as the family’s chief seat is from a letter written to Davenport in 1903, citing Cox’s Derbyshire Churches. The family’s tenure under the Ferrers and its arms are from Maxwell Craven’s A Derbyshire Armory (1991), which takes the arms from the visitations of Derbyshire in 1569 and 1611 and notes that they reached that form only after several stages.

His name

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

His wife

Davenport does not name Elizabeth’s mother. Online family trees make Henry’s wife 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.

His daughter’s death

The tomb records a death on 13 May 1454. The antiquary Thomas Habington, who copied the inscription about 1640, took it for the death of Norman’s father, John; Davenport “inclines to the belief that the person who died in 1454 was Elizabeth the wife of Norman”.

The line of descent

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 Henry is therefore given here as probable below Elizabeth’s son John.