♀Joan Brailsford

Joan Brailsford was an English heiress of the fourteenth century, the daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford of Brailsford in Derbyshire and the second wife of Sir John Basset of Cheadle in Staffordshire. She was the eighteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Thomas Basset. Through Thomas she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family

Joan’s family had held the manor of Brailsford for generations. Her father, Sir Henry Brailsford, was the son of Ralph, lord of Brailsford, and the line ran back through three earlier Henrys and a Robert to a Nicholas Brailsford, who died before 1166; the family is said to descend from Aelfwine, a landholder of 1086. Her mother, Joan Twyford, was a daughter and coheir of Sir Robert of Twyford, son of Sir John Twyford.

Marriage

Sir John Basset of Cheadle is said to have married twice. By his first wife, whose name the pedigrees do not give, he had a son and heir, Ralph Basset, and Cheadle stayed with Ralph’s line. His second wife was Joan Brailsford, daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford of Brailsford in Derbyshire. Their son, Thomas Basset, was heir to his mother: Brailsford came to him, while Cheadle went to his elder half-brother Ralph, and he was known as Thomas Basset of Brailsford.

Thomas married Margaret Mering, and their daughter, Joan Basset, was her father’s heir and became the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire. Joan Brailsford’s inheritance most likely went with her granddaughter to the Shirleys, and it stayed in that family for more than three centuries, until the Earls Ferrers sold Brailsford in the 1760s and 1770s.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Thomas Basset, Thomas’s daughter Joan Basset and Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and on through Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Her family

The Shirley pedigree in the heralds’ visitations^W of Sussex (Harleian Society vol. 53, 1905, pp. 5–6) sets out the Brailsfords: Nicholas; his son Henry, “Lord of the manor of Brailleford in Darbyshire”; Sir Henry, “son & heire”; Ralph, “Lord of Braylesford”; and Sir Henry, who married Joan, daughter and coheir of Sir Robert of Twyford, son of Sir John Twyford. Their daughter Joan is the second wife of “Sr Jo Bassett of Chedle in com. Stafford Knight”, and her son Thomas is “heire to his mother”.

F. N. Craig, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 243, likewise makes Joan the daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford and the second wife of Sir John Basset of Cheadle. For the Brailsford descent he refers to an article by Statham (1938), which traces Sir Henry’s line back to Aelfwine, a landholder of 1086. These are compiled pedigrees, and none of them dates Joan; her era follows from her granddaughter’s husband, Sir Ralph Shirley, who served under Henry V at Agincourt in 1415.

Brailsford and the Shirleys

Burke’s Peerage (1869) and Maxwell Craven’s A Derbyshire Armory (p. 12) both have the heiress of the Bassets of Brailsford marrying a Shirley. The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), p. 336, lists Brailsford among “the ancient family estates” of the Shirleys, Earls Ferrers, sold under private Acts of 1766, 1768 and 1775. That the estate sold then was Joan’s inheritance is an inference from the heiress marriages, not a statement of either book.

Dates in online trees

One online family tree gives Joan a birth about 1304 and makes her the daughter of a Henry Brailsford who died in 1304, a generation above the Sussex pedigree’s Sir Henry, son of Ralph; others name her mother as Jane Audley. None of them gives a source, and they are not used here.