♀Joan de Somery

Joan de Somery (about 1292 – 1338) was an English noblewoman, a daughter of Sir Roger de Somery of Dudley in Staffordshire and the wife of Sir Thomas Botetourt of Upton in Norfolk. Widowed in 1322, she inherited Weoley Castle in Worcestershire and a share of Dudley as co-heiress of her brother, John, Lord Somery, and spent much of her widowhood defending them in the courts and, by one complaint, by force. She was the eighteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Botetourt (died 1386).

Marriage

Joan was a daughter of Roger de Somery, a knight with lands at Dudley, Handsworth and King’s Swinford in Staffordshire and Weoley in Worcestershire, and of his wife, Agnes. Before 1318 Joan married Thomas Botetourt, the son and heir of John Botetourt, 1st Lord Botetourt^W. They had a son, John, born about 1317 or 1318, and a daughter, Maud. Thomas died shortly before 28 July 1322, when his son was four. When the old lord died on 25 November 1324, the boy became his grandfather’s heir.

Lady of Weoley

The same year that she lost her husband, Joan became co-heiress of her brother, John, Lord Somery. Her share brought her Weoley Castle in Northfield, with the manors of Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, Handsworth and West Bromwich in Staffordshire, Aston and Edgbaston in Warwickshire, and Cradley and Hagley in Worcestershire, among others, and a debtor of 1327 called her Joan Botetourt, lady of Weoley. In many of her affairs she acted together with Roger de Aylesbury and Roger Hillary. In 1327 John, son of Richard de Sutton, lord of Malpas in Cheshire, acknowledged a debt of £6,000 to the three of them.

In 1328 she was licensed to give the manor of Warley to Halesowen Abbey^W to support three canons as chaplains and to burn six wax candles a year, and, after her death, to pay a mark for her pittance and give 20 shillings to the poor on the anniversary of her death.

The fight for Dudley

Her share of Dudley brought Joan into a long quarrel with Sir John de Cherleton. In 1330 Joan and her partners complained that Cherleton, Sir John de Hynkeleye and others had broken into their parks at Sedgley, hunted and carried off the deer, grazed cattle on the grass, cut down trees, fished the ponds, and assaulted and imprisoned their servants. In 1331 Cherleton complained in his turn that Joan, with Geoffrey de Selleye and others, had besieged his castle at Dudley, broken its walls, carried off his goods and assaulted his servants. The same year an assize at Lichfield found that Cherleton, Hynkeleye and others had unjustly put Joan and her partners out of three houses, 1,080 acres of wood and half of Dudley Castle^W. The defendants did not appear, so Joan and her partners recovered the property, with damages of 1,000 marks. In 1332 she complained of fresh trespasses in the park at Sedgley.

Dudley was not her only quarrel. In 1330 the king had appointed justices to hear her complaint of a trespass at Northfield by Brother Wolstan, the Prior of Worcester, and then revoked their appointment, because the letters had been obtained from Chancery improperly. In 1331 she went to law against men who had taken her goods at Swinford, and in 1333 she complained that men had assaulted her servants as they collected the tolls at Newport Pagnell and driven the merchants away.

Last years

In 1332 Joan named the priests of the churches of Great Bradley in Suffolk and Clent in Worcestershire, and in 1334 she was granted free warren^W, the right to hunt small game, on her own lands at Linford, Handsworth, Great Bradley, Cradley and Old Swinford, among others. She died shortly before 12 February 1338. Her son John, though still under age, was given her lands on 16 July 1338.

Lines of descent

Her line to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through her son John, his daughter Joyce Botetourt, and Joyce’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton, and then, probably, to Joan’s son John Washburn (died 1547). That last step is the one link that rests on a historian’s identification rather than on a record; the Notes explain why.

Notes

Sources

Joan’s parents, her birth about 1292 (she was 30 in 1322), her marriage, her children, her inheritance and every event of her widowhood are given by Douglas Richardson in Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd edition), pp. 341-343, which abstracts the Patent and Close Rolls and the Staffordshire plea rolls; the 1327 debt is also in the National Archives (C 131/3/5), whose entry adds that property worth only £1,000 was to be seized in Worcestershire. Her marriage, her son’s ages and his livery of her lands while a minor are also in the Complete Peerage, vol. II (1912), p. 235, which calls her the sister and co-heiress “of the considerable estates” of John, Lord Somery. Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 116, names her as a daughter of Roger de Somery, Baron of Dudley.

Her partners

The records name Roger de Aylesbury and Roger Hillary beside Joan in the debts, the complaints and the Lichfield assize, but do not explain why they held the Somery lands with her.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joan Mitton, a great-granddaughter of Joan’s granddaughter Joyce Botetourt, 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.