♀Joan Fraunceys

Joan Fraunceys was an English gentlewoman who married Sir Thomas Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire; he died in 1420 and left a son of ten as his heir. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Richard Harcourt (died 1486).

Marriages

Joan is said to have been a daughter of Sir Robert Fraunceys of Foremark in Derbyshire. Thomas Harcourt was probably a younger son who became his father’s heir when an elder brother, John, died about 1406. Thomas and Joan Fraunceys married at about that time. They are said to have had five sons, Robert, Richard, John, William and George, and two daughters, Jane and Isabel.

Thomas inherited his father’s lands in 1417 and died at Stanton Harcourt on 6 July 1420; the inquest on his lands named their son Robert, aged ten years and more, as his heir. Joan most likely married Sir Robert Strelley of Oxton in Nottinghamshire before 1424, and she outlived him as well.

Widowhood

By one account, she was known in her second widowhood by the name of her first marriage, as Dame Jane Harcourt of Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where the Harcourts had held land as early as 1258, and in 1450 she was named as the one who had procured the attacks on the Staffords of Grafton. The killings on both sides, which ran from 1448 to 1471, were compared by a historian of the family to “some Kentucky feud”.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Richard Harcourt (died 1486). One comes down through Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 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 name and parentage

The Latin descent of the Harcourts written into the cartulary of Ranton Priory calls her “Johannam, filiam Domini Roberti Fraunceys, militis” (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, vol. 4, p. 272). J. C. Wedgwood’s “Harcourt of Ellenhall” (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 1914, p. 198) calls her “Jane, daughter of Sir Robert Faunceys of Formark, Derby”, and Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), p. 177, “Jane (or Joan) Fraunceys”. Richardson’s account of Sir Robert Fraunceys of Foremark, under his daughter Isabel, wife of Gervase Clifton (p. 655), does not name Joan. Her parents are not entered in the family tree.

Her marriages

The Strelley marriage and her surviving him come from Wedgwood (p. 198): “this Jane survived him and re-married before 1424 Sir Robert Strelley of Oxton, Notts. Him, too, she survived”. The date of her first marriage is Wedgwood’s inference from the death of Thomas’s elder brother in 1406. Wedgwood also wrote that “Jane Fraunceys was his only wife”, against earlier writers who gave Thomas a second wife, Eleanor Lewknor. Only Robert is named in the 1420 inquest; the other children come from compiled genealogies.

The Stafford feud

Wedgwood (p. 198) wrote that, “known then as Dame Jane Harcourt of Bosworth, it was she who in 1450 is cited as procuring the attacks on the Staffords of Grafton, — murders, which like some Kentucky feud, slew off the Staffords and Harcourts between 1448 and 1471.” He does not name the record that cites her. The Harcourts held a knight’s fee at Bosworth by the time of an inquisition of 1258 (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, vol. 4).