♀Joan Basset

Joan Basset was an English heiress of the late fourteenth century, the daughter and heiress of Andrew Basset of Tickenham, in Somerset. She was the nineteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Thomas Seymour (died before 1422).

Joan Basset, the daughter and heiress of Andrew Basset of Tickenham, is said to have been the first wife of Sir Edmund Seymour of Chelvey, Migill and Tickenham, in Somerset, and of Welham, in Leicestershire, and the mother of his son and heir apparent, Thomas. Sir Edmund married a second time, to another Joan. Thomas died before 1422, leaving one daughter, Elizabeth, born about 1406. Sir Edmund died in 1422, the year Elizabeth was about sixteen, and Tickenham passed on through heiresses: Elizabeth’s husband, Thomas Berkeley, held it in her right, and her daughter, Cecily Berkeley, brought it to James Ashe.

Notes

Sources

Joan’s father, her marriage and her son are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 175, a compiled genealogy, in the entry for her son’s wife, Margaret Farway. Richardson cites the Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, vol. 3 (1835), pp. 588–594; the Benolte visitation of Somerset (printed 1885), p. 108; Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, vol. 16 (1920), pp. 281–285; the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 23 (2004), p. 57; and Foundations 2(6) (2008), pp. 390–422. Richardson gives no dates for Joan herself.

Which wife was Thomas’s mother

Foundations (2008) makes Thomas the son of Sir Edmund’s second wife, also named Joan. Richardson states that this is an error and gives his mother as the first wife, Joan Basset.

Another Joan Basset

She is a different woman from Joan Basset, the daughter of Thomas Basset of Brailsford, in Derbyshire, who married Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington.