♀Joan Foliot

Joan Foliot (died 1348) was an English heiress, the daughter of Walter Foliot and Ada de Sanford, whose parents held the manors of Melbury Sampford in Dorset and Whiteford in Devon. Her first husband, Nicholas de Percy, was killed in 1324, and her second, John Mautravers, was the father of the John Mautravers who had been ordered arrested alongside Nicholas in 1321. She was the nineteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Joan de Percy (died 1369).

First marriage

Joan’s mother, Ada, was the sister and heir of Thomas de Sanford, and Joan in turn was her mother’s heir. By 1312–13 she had married Nicholas de Percy. In that year a final concord^W settled the manors of Melbury Sampford in Dorset and Whiteford in Devon on Walter and Ada for their lives, and after them on Nicholas and Joan and the children Nicholas would have by her.

Nicholas was in the service of Henry, Lord Tyeys. In December 1321, during the Despenser War^W, Tyeys, Nicholas and the younger John Mautravers were ordered arrested. After the rebels’ defeat at the Battle of Boroughbridge^W in March 1321/22, Tyeys was hanged and Mautravers escaped, and on 1 August 1324 Nicholas was killed.

Nicholas and Joan had two daughters. Isabel was seven years old in 1327, when an inquisition post mortem^W into Nicholas’s Wiltshire lands named her as his next heir. Joan, the heir of Whiteford, most likely under the settlement of 1312–13, married Peter de Braose, a knight of Edward III’s household, before 1342.

Later marriages

By 1331, when her mother died and Joan was named her heir, she had married John Mautravers as his second wife. His son, John Mautravers the younger^W, was the man named with Nicholas in the arrest order of 1321, who had escaped after Boroughbridge and was later raised to the peerage by Edward III. Joan and John Mautravers had three daughters, Joan, Alice and Elizabeth. Mautravers died in 1341, and Joan probably married a third time, to Alexander Venables. She died in 1348.

Lines of descent

Through their daughter Joan de Percy and her daughter Beatrice de Braose, Nicholas de Percy and Joan Foliot 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 and inheritance

Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, vol. 6 (1840), pp. 338–339, “Proofs of the Mautravers Pedigree”, calls her “daughter and heir of Sir Walter Foliot, of Melbury-Osmond, Dorset, by Alda, daughter of Sir Laurence Sampford, of Melbury-Sampford”, and quotes a medieval book of heirs (Cotton MS Claudius C. viii): “Johanna, ux. John Mautravers, d. & h. of Alda de Saundford, ob. 4 Edw. III”, that is, Ada died in the fourth year of Edward III (1330–31). The same book has Ada as sister and heir of Thomas de Sanford, who died in 1299. The settlement of 1312–13 is a final concord between Peter de Blunt and Walter Foliot and Ada his wife, printed on p. 352 of the same volume. The editor added a footnote: “Query if Joan Foliot was not previously, i.e. in 1313, wife of Nicholas Percy”. F. N. Craig’s table in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (July 1996), p. 324, shows that she was.

An older pedigree in John Hutchins’s History of Dorset (1774), vol. 2, p. 464, names the heiress “Alice, daughter and heir” and marries her to the younger John Mautravers, but its generations run out of order, and this page does not follow it.

Her marriages and death

Craig’s article (p. 318) says that the widow of Nicholas de Percy “married as her second husband and his second wife John Mautravers, father of John the rebel”. Its table (p. 324) numbers her three husbands, with Alexander Venables third, and gives her death as 1348–9; the third marriage is shown there only. The Collectanea and the table both name her three Mautravers daughters.

Her daughter Joan

Craig’s article opens: “Peter de Braose and Joan his wife, daughter of Nicholas de Percy, were ancestors of Thomas Dudley”. His earlier paper in the Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 242, cites a Close Roll entry of 1344 naming “Ada Sanford, Joan’s grandmother”; since Joan Foliot was Ada’s daughter and heir, the younger Joan was her daughter, and the settlement of 1312–13, which entailed Whiteford on Nicholas’s children by Joan Foliot, would explain how she came to be its heir.