♀Joane Rody

Joane Rody was an English heiress of the early fifteenth century, the daughter and heiress of Thomas Rody of Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire and the wife of John Brome of Warwick. It was in her right that the Bromes first held land at Baddesley Clinton, the manor their son John later held as its lord. She was the sixteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son John Brome (died 1468). Through that son she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family

The Rodys were a family of Warwick. Joane’s grandfather William Rody is said to have acquired a house and land, with fields and pastures, at Baddesley Clinton in 1360 and 1361. In 1369 the property passed to his son William, with remainder to his brothers and his sister. William and his brother John both died without children, so it came to their brother Thomas, Joane’s father. Joane, his daughter and heiress, inherited the Baddesley Clinton land from him.

Marriage and children

Joane married John Brome, who sat in Parliament for the borough of Warwick in 1406. Through her he came into the lands at Baddesley Clinton that her grandfather William Rody had held, and he was holding them by 6 December 1434. Their son John held land there in his mother’s right before he gained the lordship of the manor itself.

Two sons of John and Joane are known: John, who became a lawyer and lord of the manor of Baddesley Clinton, and William Brome of Holton in Oxfordshire, who died in 1461. The records do not give the date of Joane’s death.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son John Brome, John’s daughter Isabel Brome, her daughter Alice Denton, Alice’s son Edward Purefoy, Edward’s daughter Mary Purefoy, Mary’s daughter Susanna Thorne, Susanna’s son Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and Thomas’s 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 family and her inheritance

The Rody descent comes from James William Hawes, Edmond Hawes of Yarmouth, Massachusetts (1914), p. 91, which cites Henry Norris’s history of Baddesley Clinton and William Dugdale^W’s Antiquities of Warwickshire. Hawes calls her Johanna, “who, as heiress of Thomas, came into possession of the Baddesley Clinton property and m. John Brome, of Warwick”. Dugdale’s Brome pedigree (1656, p. 710) names her “Johanna filia & haeres Thomae Rody de Badsley-Clinton”, and the Warwickshire heraldic visitation^W of 1619 (Harleian Society vol. 12, p. 97) also makes her the daughter and heir of Thomas Rody of Baddesley. Writing of her son, Dugdale says that before he acquired the lordship he “had certain lands within the precincts thereof, in right of his mother (scil. Joane daughter and heir unto Thomas Rodie)” (quoted by Hawes, p. 74).