♀Isabel Lygon

Isabel Lygon (about 1555 – 1615) was a daughter of Henry Ligon of Upton St Leonards, in Gloucestershire, England, and the wife first of Edward Bassett, a gentleman of Uley, and then of Rice Davis of Tickenham, in Somerset. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Jane Bassett (1585–1631).

Family

Isabel was a daughter of Henry Ligon and his wife, Elizabeth Berkeley, and was probably born in Gloucestershire about 1555. Her father made his will on 30 July 1577, the day before he died, and she was among those he remembered in it. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces her ancestry, through both the Ligons and the Berkeleys, until it reaches King Edward I.

Two marriages

Isabel married Edward Bassett, a gentleman of Uley and the son and heir of William Basset of Uley and Highfield. The couple had four sons, William, Barnaby, Edward and Giles, and four daughters, Elizabeth, Margery, Susanna and Jane. Edward made his will on 3 June 1601, asking to be buried in the chapel of Uley, and he died before 5 November 1602, when the will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W.

As a widow, Isabel became the second wife of Rice Davis. They had no children together. At some point the two of them conveyed a ninth share of the manor of Furnax, in the parish of Warminster in Wiltshire, to Simon Sloper of Warminster.

Death

Isabel is said to have died in 1615. Rice married a third time after her death, and when he made his will on 28 August 1638 he asked to be buried in the chapel of Backwell, in Somerset, between his first wife, Dorothy Rodney, and his second, Isabel.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s parents, her father’s will, both marriages, her children, the sale at Furnax and Rice Davis’s will are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 634–635, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 264. Richardson cites articles in The American Genealogist (vols. 9 and 10, 1932–1934), John Smyth’s Berkeley manuscripts, the heralds’ Visitation of Gloucestershire^W of 1623, and an abstract of Rice Davis’s will (proved 23 April 1639, P.C.C. 41 Fairfax) in Brown’s Abstracts of Somersetshire Wills. Edward Bassett’s will is P.C.C. 77 Montague.

Dates

Richardson gives no birth or death date for Isabel. Her birth about 1555 in Gloucestershire and her death in 1615 come from an online family tree. Richardson says only that she outlived Edward and died before Rice Davis’s third marriage; his will of 1638 asks for burial beside her. For Edward, the online tree gives a death date of 5 November 1602, the day Richardson gives for the proving of his will.

Her name

Richardson calls her “Isabel (or Elizabeth)” Ligon in Plantagenet Ancestry and “Elizabeth (or Isabel)” in Magna Carta Ancestry; the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire names her Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Lygon, and Rice Davis’s will, as Richardson abstracts it, calls her Isabel Ligon. The daughters’ husbands, as Richardson gives them, were William Clayfield and Thomas Poyntz (Elizabeth), Samuel Shellom (Margery, also called Margaret) and Michael Dorney (Susanna).

Rice Davis

Richardson calls him Rice (or Rees) Davis (or Davies), Esq., of Tickenham. His third wife was Mary Pitt, the widow of Robert Owen, a Bristol merchant.