♂John Ashe

John Ashe (died 19 August 1540) was an esquire of Tickenham, in Somerset, England. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Jane Ashe.

Lands and lawsuits

A compiled genealogy gives John as the son and heir of Richard Ashe and his wife, Margaret, and he was of age by 1529. He held lands at Tickenham, Burnham, Chelvey, Compton Bishop and Migill in Somerset, at Ashe next Ross in Herefordshire and at Welham in Leicestershire. Tickenham had come to the Ashes through his grandmother, Cecily Berkeley, the heiress of the Berkeleys of Tickenham.

His lands brought him into court more than once. Between 1532 and 1538 Philip Cayme, a husbandman of Tickenham, sued him in Chancery^W over an action for contempt of an injunction, concerning lands granted by John’s father, Richard. In the same years Philip Keynes, his wife, Isabel, and their daughter, Margery, sued him over a house and land at Stonage, in Somerset, that had been let to them for their lives. Some time before 1547 John Brither took either John or his son to the Court of Requests^W over ground called “Chilveys Park,” part of the manor of Chelvey.

Marriage and death

John married Isabel before 1526. They had one son, John, and three daughters, Margaret, Mary and Jane. Jane, who also appears as Joan, married William Basset of Uley, in Gloucestershire.

John Ashe died on 19 August 1540, while his son and heir was still under age. On 1 July 1541 his widow, Isabel, and John Mawdley were granted an annuity of £19 from his lands in Somerset and Herefordshire for the length of the boy’s minority, together with his wardship and the right to arrange his marriage.

Notes

Sources

John’s parents, lands, lawsuits, marriage, children, death and estate are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, pp. 173–176. Richardson cites the 1623 Visitation of Gloucestershire (Harleian Society vol. 21, pp. 204–207), Burrows’s Collectanea, 2nd series (1890), Byrchmore’s Collections for a Parochial History of Tickenham (1895), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 16 (1898), p. 641, The American Genealogist, vol. 10 (1933), the Chancery and Requests suits (National Archives C 1/761/24, C 1/837/13 and REQ 2/5/180), and the inquisition post mortem^W taken after his death (National Archives E 150/930/15). Richardson calls him John Ashe (or Asshe, Ayshe), Esq.

Dates

Richardson gives no birth date. John was an adult by 1529, so he was born no later than about 1508.

His wife

Richardson names John’s wife only as Isabel, “allegedly a Rudhale.”

The children

Richardson gives Margaret’s husband as John Goodwin. The line to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through Jane and her son Edward Bassett (1558–1602).