♀Joan Mitton

Joan Mitton was the first wife of John Washbourne, lord of the manor of Wichenford in Worcestershire, and, by the heralds’ pedigrees of both families, a daughter of William Mitton, lord of the manor of Weston under Lizard in Staffordshire. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), probably through her son John Washburn (died 1547).

Parents and ancestry

Her mother, Margaret Corbet, was a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh. Her father, born at Weston about 1410, is said to have served as sheriff of Staffordshire and Shropshire and to have sat for Staffordshire as a knight of the shire^W; he was still living in 1489. Joan was one of four daughters, with two brothers, John and Richard.

Through her father’s mother, Margaret Peshale, Joan’s line is traced back by way of the Botetourt lords of Weoley to Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford^W, one of the twenty-five barons chosen in 1215 to see that King John kept the terms of Magna Carta.

Marriage

John and Joan had four sons, Robert, John, Walter and Francis. The Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, identified their second son John with John Washburn of Bengeworth, beside Evesham, though their father’s will of 1517 does not name him.

Joan died before her husband, who married again. The wife named in his will of May 1517 is his second wife, Elizabeth Monington.

The family

Robert, the eldest son and heir, married Eleanor, daughter and heir of Walter Staples of Doddenham, whose lands there the antiquary Thomas Habington called “a good augmentation to the family after the diminution susteyned by a mache with Salewey”, the loss of Stanford. Robert died before his father, leaving two sons, John and Norman, and it was this John, aged seventeen in 1517, who became his grandfather’s heir.

Notes

Sources

Joan is known only from the heralds’ pedigrees. The Visitation of Worcestershire of 1569 gives John Washbourne’s first wife as “Jonne, da. to William Mytton, of Weston, in Staffordsh.”, and James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907) prints the Mitton pedigree from the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623, with William Mitton’s wife as “Margaretta filia Thomas Corbett de Lee”. Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) lists “Joan (wife of John Washburn)” among the children of William Mitton and Margaret Corbet, and gives his offices, his birth about 1409–11 and his being alive in 1489; Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) agrees on the marriage. No record of her birth, marriage or death is known.

Her ancestry

Richardson’s Botetourt chapter opens with Henry de Bohun and Maud de Mandeville and runs through their son Humphrey de Bohun, the Tony family, Joyce la Zouche and John, Lord Botetourt, to Joyce Botetourt, whose daughter Margaret Peshale married Sir Richard Mitton of Weston; their son was Joan’s father, William.

Her son John of Bengeworth

That the John in the pedigrees is John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is Davenport’s identification, not a record’s. He supposed that John had left Wichenford as a younger son, “overlooked in the will”, to make his way near Evesham. In 1914 Barnard, writing on the Evesham Washbournes, judged that “although this identification seems a reasonable probability it is by no means a certainty”, since there is no direct evidence for it in the visitation pedigrees. The descent from Joan Mitton is therefore given here as probable.