♀Jane Ashe

Jane Ashe was a daughter of John Ashe, a landowner of Tickenham, in Somerset, England, and the wife of William Basset, an esquire of Uley, in Gloucestershire. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Edward Bassett (1558–1602).

Early life

Jane, who also appears as Joan, was one of the four children of John Ashe and his wife, Isabel, who was probably a Rudhale. She had one brother, John, and two sisters, Margaret and Mary. Her father held lands at Tickenham, Burnham, Chelvey and Compton Bishop in Somerset, at Ashe next Ross in Herefordshire and at Welham in Leicestershire. Tickenham had come to the Ashes through her father’s grandmother, Cecily Berkeley, the heiress of the Berkeleys of Tickenham. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, a study of colonial families descended from the medieval kings of England, traces Jane’s ancestry, through her father, back to King John.

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.

Marriage

Jane married William Basset, the son and heir of Robert Basset of Uley and Upton Cheyney, in Gloucestershire. The couple had one son, Edward Bassett, and one daughter, Cecily. When the heralds recorded the family at the Visitation of Gloucestershire^W of 1623, they entered her in the Bassett pedigree as “Jane d. of John Ashe of Somersetshire.”

Notes

Sources

Jane’s parents, brother and sisters, her father’s lands, death and estate, her marriage and her children are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 175–176 and 634, and from the same author’s Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 264, which calls her “Jane, daughter of John Ashe, of Somerset.” Richardson cites the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire (Harleian Society vol. 21, pp. 204–207), Byrchmore’s Collections for a Parochial History of Tickenham (1895), The American Genealogist, vol. 10 (1933), Chancery suits against her father, and the inquisition post mortem^W taken after his death (National Archives E 150/930/15). Richardson calls him John Ashe (or Asshe, Ayshe), Esq., and says that her parents married before 1526.

Dates

Richardson gives no dates for Jane or for William. Her father died in August 1540, so she was born no later than the spring of 1541.

Her parents

Richardson names her mother only as Isabel, “allegedly a Rudhale.” An online family tree gives Jane different parents.

The children

Richardson gives Cecily’s husband as Sir Barnaby Sambourne.

The name

Richardson writes her name “Jane (or Joan)” and the surname Ashe or Asshe. The 1623 Visitation spells her husband’s name Bassett.