♀Isabel Meade

Isabel Meade (about 1444 – after 29 May 1514) was the daughter and heiress of a Bristol merchant and mayor, Philip Meade^W, and married Sir Maurice Berkeley, a disinherited younger son of James, Lord Berkeley^W. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Anne Berkeley.

Family and marriage

Isabel’s father, Philip Meade, was a merchant of Bristol and London who was mayor of Bristol in 1458–59, 1461–62 and 1468–69, served as sheriff of the town and sat for it in Parliament; her mother was also named Isabel. Isabel was born about or after 1444.

In 1465 she married Maurice Berkeley, the second son of James, Lord Berkeley, by his third wife, Isabel Mowbray. Isabel is said to have been a widow already, with three children from her first marriage who all died young. It has been suggested that the match offended Maurice’s elder brother, William; John Smyth, the Berkeleys’ steward and historian, wrote that William “had little cause to complain of the obscure parentage of the Lady Isable which he vainly called base.” In 1474 Philip Meade and his son and heir, Richard, conveyed to Maurice and Isabel a tenement in Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, called Marshallis place, with its close and garden. The couple had three sons, Maurice, Thomas and James, and one daughter, Anne.

The heiress

William^W settled Berkeley Castle and most of the family lands on King Henry VII, and Maurice was totally disinherited. Between 1486 and 1492 Maurice and Isabel, described as “daughter and heiress of Philip Mede,” sued Nicholas Pitts, vicar of Ratclyff (Redcliffe) in Bristol, and Thomas Cokkis in Chancery^W over the manor of Tickenham, in Somerset, and houses and lands in Wraxall, Bedminster and Bristol.

When William died in 1492, Maurice was his heir all the same, and within seven years he recovered more than fifty manors and other lands that his brother had disposed of illegally. In 1495 Isabel became the heir of her brother, Richard Meade of Bristol, and inherited lands at Thornbury and at Wraxall, Ashton and elsewhere in Somerset.

Widowhood

Maurice died in September 1506 and was buried at Austin Friars^W, in London. Isabel outlived him by at least eight years. She died at Coventry, in Warwickshire, after 29 May 1514, aged about seventy, and was buried with him.

The family

Their son Maurice, born in 1467, was made a Knight of the Bath^W at the coronation of King Henry VIII on 23 June 1509, served as sheriff of Gloucestershire and as lieutenant of Calais, and is said to have been summoned to Parliament as Lord Berkeley in 1523; he died at Calais on 12 September that year without legitimate children. His younger brother, Thomas^W, born in 1472, was knighted by the Earl of Surrey on the field of the Battle of Flodden^W on 9 September 1513. Thomas was Maurice’s heir in 1523 and was summoned to Parliament from 1529.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s parents, birth, marriage, children, the conveyance of 1474, the Chancery suit, her inheritance of 1495, her death at Coventry and her burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 259–260. The Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (1912), p. 135, gives the same account and adds that she was “a widow with 3 children who all d. young” when she married, that she died “at the same age of 70” as her husband, the remark about her parentage (which it takes from Smyth’s history of the Berkeleys, and which it introduces by saying that “it has been conjectured” the match offended William), and the career of her son Maurice. The 1st edition, vol. 1 (1887), p. 331, describes William’s settlement of his lands on the king. The 1623 visitation of Shropshire, as Richardson quotes it, names her “Isabell da. & heir to Phillip Meade of Bristow.” Her name is also written Mede, Mead and Isable.

Dates

Richardson gives her birth as “about or after 1444” and her death as after 29 May 1514. The Complete Peerage’s statement that she died aged seventy agrees with a birth about 1444.

Her brother

Richardson names the brother from whom Isabel inherited in 1495 as Richard Meade of Bristol, the same Richard who joined his father in the conveyance of 1474. The Complete Peerage calls him Thomas Mead.