♀Joan de Percy

Joan de Percy (died 1369) was an English heiress whose father, Nicholas de Percy, was caught up in the barons’ rising against Edward II and was killed in 1324, and who brought the Devon manor of Whiteford to her husband, Sir Peter de Braose, a knight of Edward III’s household. She was the eighteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Beatrice de Braose.

Early life

Joan was the daughter of Nicholas de Percy and his wife, Joan Foliot. Her father served Henry Tyeys, who let him hold tenements at Burbach Savage in Wiltshire while he was in Tyeys’s service. In December 1321, before the Battle of Boroughbridge^W, Tyeys, Nicholas and the younger John Mautravers were ordered arrested; after the battle, in March 1321/22, Tyeys was hanged and Mautravers escaped, and on 1 August 1324 Nicholas was killed. Joan was his heir to Whiteford. Her mother married twice more, to John Mautravers, the father of the younger John, and then probably to Alexander Venables.

Marriage

Peter de Braose married Joan de Percy, daughter of Nicholas de Percy and heir of the manor of Whiteford in Devon, before 1342. In that year he was granted a weekly market and a yearly fair at Whiteford. On 2 July 1344 Peter and Joan granted Whiteford to the king, who granted it back to them on 16 August 1346, ten days before the Battle of Crécy^W, where Peter served in the king’s own division as a newly made knight. In November 1357 Peter and Joan bought the manor of Wiston, with Heene and other lands, from the king for 1,000 marks.

Death and family

Joan died in 1369–70, and Peter died in 1377 or 1378. Their children were John, who held Wiston until his death in 1426, Beatrice, who married Sir Hugh Shirley, and Richard, Thomas and Philippa, who were living at Wiston. When John died without children, Wiston came to Beatrice and through her to the Shirleys.

Lines of descent

Through Beatrice, Peter and Joan were ancestors of Thomas Dudley (1576–1653), who came to Boston in 1630 as deputy governor to John Winthrop. Both lines run through Beatrice’s son Ralph Shirley and his daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and from Beatrix through the Bromes, Dentons, Purefoys and Thornes to Thomas Dudley and his 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

Her parents

F. N. Craig, “Whose Son was Peter de Braose?”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (July 1996), pp. 315–324, opens: “Peter de Braose and Joan his wife, daughter of Nicholas de Percy, were ancestors of Thomas Dudley”, and notes that Joan’s parentage had been found only recently, in Craig’s earlier paper in the Register, vol. 142 (1988), pp. 227–244. That paper (p. 242) names “Ada Sanford, Joan’s grandmother” in the Close Roll of 1344, and the 1996 table (p. 324) shows Nicholas de Percy (died 1324) married to Joan Foliot (died 1348–9), daughter of Walter Foliot and Ada de Sanford. The table also shows another daughter, Isabel de Percy, living in 1327. Craig’s article (p. 318) names John Mautravers as Joan Foliot’s second husband; her third, Alexander Venables, is shown only in the table.

Her death

The table gives her death as 1369–70.

Beatrice’s mother

Another compiled genealogy names Beatrice’s mother as Peter’s second wife, Joan Howard, and Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011) indexes a Joan Howard as wife of “Peter de Brewes, Knt., of Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire”. The Register’s table shows Joan de Percy as Peter’s only wife, with John, Richard, Beatrice, Thomas and Philippa beneath them, and Craig’s 1988 paper (p. 242) says that “Peter and Joan had a son John and a daughter Beatrix”; this page follows the Register.