♀Isabel (surname unknown)

Isabel was the wife of John Ashe, an esquire of Tickenham, in Somerset, England, and was left a widow in 1540 with a son still under age, whose wardship she shared. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Jane Ashe.

Marriage

Isabel married John Ashe before 1526. He held lands at Tickenham, Burnham, Chelvey, Compton Bishop and Migill in Somerset, at Ashe next Ross in Herefordshire and at Welham in Leicestershire. They had one son, John, and three daughters, Margaret, Mary and Jane. Jane, who also appears as Joan, married William Basset of Uley, in Gloucestershire.

Widowhood

John Ashe died on 19 August 1540, while his son and heir was still under age. On 1 July 1541 his widow, Isabel, and John Mawdley were granted an annuity of £19 from his lands in Somerset and Herefordshire for the length of the boy’s minority, together with his wardship and the right to arrange his marriage.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s marriage, her children, her husband’s lands and death, and the 1541 grant are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 176, which cites the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire (Harleian Society vol. 21, pp. 204–207), Byrchmore’s Collections for a Parochial History of Tickenham (1895), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 16 (1898), p. 641, and the inquisition post mortem^W taken after her husband’s death (National Archives E 150/930/15).

Dates

Richardson gives no dates for Isabel’s birth or death. She was living on 1 July 1541.

Her surname

Richardson names her only as Isabel, “allegedly a Rudhale,” and does not name her parents. The Rudhales were a family of Rudhale, in Herefordshire. Among the sources for her father-in-law, Richard Ashe, Richardson cites a fine of 18 June 1503 in which William Rudhale and Richard Asshe were parties together. Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry gives the children of William Rudhale (died 1530) as three sons and one daughter, Joan, and names no Isabel.

The children

Richardson gives Margaret’s husband as John Goodwin. The line to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through Jane and her son Edward Bassett (1558–1602).