♂James Ashe

James Ashe (died before 1514) was a Somerset landholder who held Tickenham and Britton in right of his wife, Cecily Berkeley, the heiress of the Berkeleys of Tickenham. He was the sixteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Richard Ashe.

Cecily Berkeley and James Ashe married before 1479, and they had one son, Richard. When her brother, John Berkeley, died shortly before 11 May 1479, Cecily, said then to be thirty years old and more, became his heir, and James held Tickenham and Britton, in Somerset, in her right. Through that inheritance Tickenham passed to the Ashes, and their son and grandson after them were known as of Tickenham. James died before his wife. She married again, to Robert Forthey, a Bristol merchant, and in a Chancery^W suit of between 1504 and 1515 she was still described as “late the wife of James Asshe.” Cecily died in 1514.

Notes

Sources

James’s marriage, his tenure of Tickenham and Britton and his son are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 175, in his account of Cecily Berkeley. For Cecily, Richardson cites Byrchmore’s Collections for a Parochial History of Tickenham (1895), pp. 9–11, the Chancery suit (National Archives C 1/310/69), the inquisition post mortem^W taken after her brother’s death in 1479 (C 140/70/40) and the one taken after her own death (C 142/29/105). The suit spells his name Asshe.

Dates

Richardson gives no birth or death date for James. He was dead before Cecily’s second marriage, which Richardson places before 1514.

His parents

Richardson does not name James’s parents.