♂Sir John Basset

John Basset was an English knight of Cheadle in Staffordshire in the fourteenth century, whose two marriages left two lines of Bassets, one at Cheadle and one at Brailsford in Derbyshire. He was the eighteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Thomas Basset. Through Thomas he was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family

He was a knight before 1424; a plea roll of the Easter term of 2 Henry VI calls him “John Basset, Kt.” Sir John Basset of Cheadle is said to have married twice. By his first wife, whose name the pedigrees do not give, he had a son and heir, Ralph Basset, and Cheadle stayed with Ralph’s line. His second wife was Joan Brailsford, daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford of Brailsford in Derbyshire. Their son, Thomas Basset, was heir to his mother: Brailsford came to him, while Cheadle went to his elder half-brother Ralph, and he was known as Thomas Basset of Brailsford.

Thomas married Margaret Mering, and their daughter, Joan Basset, was her father’s heir and became the first wife of Sir Ralph Shirley of Lower Ettington in Warwickshire.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Thomas Basset, Thomas’s daughter Joan Basset and Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and on through Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down 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

The pedigrees

Apart from one plea roll entry, described below, Sir John is known only from compiled pedigrees. F. N. Craig, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 243, makes Thomas Basset of Brailsford the younger son of Sir John Basset of Cheadle by his second wife, Joan, daughter and heir of Sir Henry Brailsford.

The Shirley pedigree in the heralds’ visitations^W of Sussex (Harleian Society vol. 53, 1905, pp. 5–6) agrees. It makes Joan Brailsford the second wife of “Sr Jo Bassett of Chedle in com. Stafford Knight”, gives the first wife’s son as “Raufe Bassett of Chedley son & heire”, and Ralph’s son as William of Cheadle, Blore, Crondon and Langley, and calls Thomas “heire to his mother”. Maxwell Craven’s A Derbyshire Armory (p. 12) describes the Bassets of Brailsford as the same branch as the Bassets of Blore and Cheadle, their Derbyshire estates passing to younger sons, and notes that heiresses of the line married into the Shirleys.

The plea roll

The entry is in the De Banco rolls for Easter term, second year of Henry VI (m. 105), printed as “John Basset, Kt.” in “Pedigrees from the Plea Rolls”, The Genealogist, New Series, vol. 17. His knighthood is dated from this entry to before 1424.

His dates

None of the pedigrees gives a date for Sir John. His era follows from his granddaughter’s marriage: her husband, Sir Ralph Shirley, served under Henry V at Agincourt in 1415, which places Sir John’s own marriages in the fourteenth century. One online family tree gives him the dates 1302–1370 without a source; they are not used here.