♀Joan de Eyton

Joan de Eyton (living in 1377) was the daughter and heiress of John de Eyton and twice a Staffordshire widow, first of Sir Henry de Cresswell and then of Adam de Peshale of Horsley, who was outlawed and put to death. She was the seventeenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Adam Peshale (died 1419).

Two marriages

By Sir Henry de Cresswell, Joan had two daughters, Joan and Elizabeth. After Henry’s death her father took possession of the manor of Cresswell until the girls came of age and let it to Joan to hold while they were growing up. She then married Adam de Peshale of Horsley, as his second wife. Joan’s father allowed Adam to hold the manor of Bishop’s Offley for the support of Joan and her two daughters.

Widowhood

Adam was outlawed, and his lands, the Cresswell manor among them, passed into the king’s hands. A history of the county records that he was seized and beheaded at Kaynton in Shropshire. In 1360–61 Joan’s eldest daughter, Joan, and her husband, John de Legh, sued her for land at Bishop’s Offley. She answered that Sir Henry’s bequest was for a term that had not yet run out, that she held the land in dower^W and by assignment of Richard de Peshale, to whom the reversion belonged (the right to the land once her own interest ended), and that she could not answer without him. She was still living in 1377.

Lines of descent

The line runs from Joan through her son Adam Peshale (died 1419) to his daughter Margaret Peshale (1393–1420), to Margaret’s son William Mitton, and to William’s daughter Joan Mitton. Joan Mitton’s son, probably John Washburn (died 1547), begins the Washburn generations that carry the line down to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Notes

Sources

Joan’s parentage and her marriage to Adam de Peshale as his second wife are given by Douglas Richardson in Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 116, and Plantagenet Ancestry (2011), p. 348, which call her son Sir Adam “younger and only surviving son of Adam de Peshale, of Horsley, Staffordshire, by his 2nd wife, Joan, daughter and heiress of John de Eyton”. Her first marriage, her daughters, Cresswell and Bishop’s Offley, the beheading, the lawsuit of 34 Edward III (1360–61) and the year 1377 are from the annotated edition of Walter Chetwynd’s history of Pirehill Hundred in Collections for a History of Staffordshire (1914), which cites Canon Bridgeman’s history of Weston-under-Lizard and a plea roll printed in volume 13 of the Collections.

Her father’s name

A WikiTree profile names her father as Peter Eyton. Richardson and the Staffordshire history both name him John de Eyton.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joan Mitton, Joan de Eyton’s great-great-granddaughter, was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is given here as probable.