♀Joan de Aldham

Joan de Aldham was an Englishwoman of a landholding family with manors in Kent, Sussex, Somerset and Northamptonshire. When her brothers’ lines died out, the Aldham family’s manors passed through her to her son and to the Saint Clairs, who held them for three more generations. She was the twentieth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son John Saint Clair (1301–1335).

Family

Joan was the daughter of Thomas de Aldham and his wife, Isabel, and the granddaughter of a man named Sayer. Isabel, a Montague by birth, had been married before, to Ralph de la Haye, and was an heiress in her own right: she held Chiselborough in Somerset of the king as a tenant-in-chief^W by barony, with lands at Little Preston in Northamptonshire and manors in Sussex. Thomas died in 1275, before 11 December, when the writ for the inquiry into his lands was issued. The jurors named Joan’s brother Baldwin, aged 16, as heir, with a younger brother, William, aged 14, sharing the family’s socage land at Aldham in Kent.

Marriage and the Aldham inheritance

Joan married John Saint Clair, and their son, John, was born about 1301. Joan’s brothers, Baldwin and William, stood before her as heirs to their parents’ lands, but William died without an heir, and when Baldwin’s son, Francis de Aldham, died in or before February 1327 with none of his own, the inheritance came to Joan’s son.

The inquisitions post mortem^W into Francis’s lands named “John son of John Seyntcler, his kinsman, aged 26 years on the feast of the Purification last past” as his next heir, and in Somerset the jurors called him the son of “Joan late the wife of John de Sencler, the elder, aunt (amite) of the said Francis”. Joan had evidently died by then, since the lands passed to her son rather than to her. The return carried the family’s pedigree on its back, ending “and Joan, who married John Seyncler (and had issue) John, who now claims”; beside it stood a second line from Sayer, ending in a rival claimant, John de Lynam.

A memorandum with the return sorted the lands by where they had come from: Exceat and Lavertye in Sussex, with Aldham and Romsehede in Kent, had been her father’s right, and Jevington, Tarring and Brambletye in Sussex, Chiselborough in Somerset and Woodpreston in Northamptonshire her mother’s. Her son died holding Chiselborough, Jevington, Tarring, Exceat and Brambletye in 1335, and her grandson John held them still when he died in 1387.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son John, John’s son John Saint Clair (1332–1387), that John’s son Philip Saint Clair (1365–1408), Philip’s son Thomas St. Clair (1401–1435), Thomas’s daughter Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423), Edith’s daughter Alice Harcourt (died 1526), Alice’s daughter Elizabeth Bessiles, Elizabeth’s daughter Anne Fettiplace, Anne’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley (1654–1735) 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

Sources for her life

Her parents, her brothers and her mother’s lands come from the inquisitions taken after the death of her father, “Thomas de Audeham alias de Waudeham, de Aldeham” (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 2, Edward I, no. 193; writ of 11 December 1275), which found Chiselborough “held through Isabel his wife of the inheritance of the said Isabel, who now holds the same of the king in chief by barony”, and noted that Isabel “had not any land of the gift of Ralph de la Haye her first husband”. Her marriage, her son, the pedigree and the memorandum come from the inquisitions taken after the death of her nephew Francis de Aldham (vol. 7, Edward III, no. 5; writ of 12 February 1327). Her son’s and grandson’s holdings are in vol. 7, no. 686 (1335) and vol. 16, nos. 458–459 (1387).

Her death

No record gives the date of her death. In February 1327 the jurors called her “late the wife of John de Sencler, the elder”, and the lands went to her son as Francis’s heir; had she been living, she, as Francis’s aunt, would have stood before her son.

Her mother’s family

The 1327 memorandum calls her mother “Isabel de la Haye”. That was the surname of Isabel’s first husband, Ralph de la Haye, not her own. Her own was de Monte Acuto, or Montague: in 1277 the king granted his queen, Eleanor, the right to the marriage of “Isabella de Monte Acuto, late the wife of Thomas de Audeham, tenant in chief” (Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward I, vol. 1, p. 197).

She was most likely the younger daughter of William de Montague, a Sussex landholder who died about 1238, and his wife, Agnes. In 1248 the king gave the wardship of “Isabel one of the heirs, of William de Monte Acuto”, with the right to name the priest to a vacant half of the church of Jevington, to Stephen de Salinis, who sold the wardship in 1249 to Agnes de Monte Acuto (Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry III, vol. 4, pp. 21, 41). When Isabel died in 1285 she held Jevington, Brambletye and the other Sussex fees that William had defended in a suit of 1234 (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 2, no. 571). L. F. Salzmann, in Sussex Archaeological Collections vol. 57 (1915), pp. 173–176, names Isabel as William’s daughter and Agnes as her mother.

A different account

Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage (1869), in its account of the Gage family, says the manor of Heighton St. Clere came to the family “by the marriage of John de St. Clere (who d. 1327) with Isolda, sole heir of Thomas de Aldham”. The inquisitions of 1327 name his wife Joan, and her son, not she, as the heir; the inquisition of 1275 after Thomas de Aldham’s death names Thomas’s sons Baldwin and William as his heirs.

Her name

The family name is written Aldham, Aldeham, Audeham and Waudeham in the inquisitions.