♂Humphrey Forster

Humphrey Forster is said to have been an esquire of Harpsden in Oxfordshire, England, who lived in the fifteenth century and married one of the daughters and heirs of Sir Stephen Popham, a Hampshire knight. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son George Forster.

Humphrey was the eldest son and heir of Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, by Alice, a daughter of Thomas Stonor of Stonor, also in Oxfordshire, and like his father he was styled of Harpsden. He married the fourth daughter and one of the heirs of Sir Stephen Popham. Through her the Popham arms, two gold bucks’ heads shown face-on on a red band across the top of a silver shield, came into the Forster shield, where the heralds still showed them, quartered^W, at their visitation^W of Berkshire in 1566. The heralds named only one of the couple’s children: their eldest son and heir, George Forster, who married Elizabeth Delamere, the heiress of the Delamere family, and was seated at Aldermaston in Berkshire.

Notes

The heralds’ pedigree

Almost everything known of Humphrey comes from the pedigree of the Forsters of Aldermaston in the 1566 heralds’ visitation of Berkshire, as printed by W. C. Metcalfe in 1885 (page 12). It gives his father as Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, esquire, who “mar. Alice, da. to Thomas Stoner” of Stonor, and Humphrey himself as “eldest son and heir to Humfrey”, who “mar. the fourth da. and one of the heirs of” Sir Stephen Popham and by her had George, “his eldest son”. It names no other child of the couple, gives no given name for his wife and prints no dates. The quartered arms it prints put the Popham coat second, after Forster.

Three Humphreys

Three men of the name stand in four generations of this pedigree: Humphrey’s father, Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, who married Alice Stonor; Humphrey himself; and his grandson Sir Humphrey Forster of Aldermaston, who married Elizabeth Sandys and died in 1556, a different man with his own page. The heralds style the two Harpsden men esquires. Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005, pages 672–673) calls the husband of Sir Stephen Popham’s daughter “Humphrey Forster, Knt.”, a knight.

When he lived

The pedigree gives no dates. Richardson’s account of the Popham family places him: Sir Stephen Popham died on 14 November 1444, when one of his daughters was six. A son-in-law of his belongs to the middle and later fifteenth century.

Ravensbury

Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (page 461) records that in 1472–73 Sir John Arundell and his wife Katherine conveyed the manor of Ravensbury, Surrey, to “Thomas Stonor, Esq., Humphrey Forster, Thomas Hampden” and others. Richardson does not say which Humphrey Forster this was. The Stonors of Stonor were his mother’s family, and Thomas Hampden of Great Hampden was the husband of Margery Popham, a sister of his wife (Magna Carta Ancestry, page 673).