♂John de Lacy

John de Lacy (died 22 July 1240) was an English baron of Pontefract in Yorkshire and hereditary Constable of Chester, one of the barons who stood surety for Magna Carta in 1215, and from 1232 Earl of Lincoln, an earldom that came to him through his wife, Margaret de Quincy. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent, all through his daughter Maud de Lacy: by three of them he was her twenty-third great-grandfather, and by the fourth her twenty-fourth.

Early life and Magna Carta

John was born about 1192, the son and heir of Roger de Lacy, Constable of Chester, and his wife Maud. The family name was new. In 1194 Roger’s grandmother Aubreye, who had inherited the estates of her cousin Robert de Lacy, gave the honor of Pontefract to Roger, and he took the name of Lacy.

John came into his inheritance in July 1213, undertaking to pay the king 7,000 marks within four years, and in 1213–14 he served with King John in Poitou. On 4 March 1215 he was one of the few English barons to take the cross with the king. In 1215 he joined the barons’ confederacy against the king and was one of the twenty-five barons elected to enforce the observance of Magna Carta, and with the others he was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III^W on 16 December 1215. By the end of the year he had made peace with the king, but the next summer he was in rebellion again, and John destroyed his castle at Donington. Henry III pardoned him in August 1217, and that November sent him to escort the King of Scots to court.

Crusade and the king’s service

In 1218 John went on crusade with Ranulph, Earl of Chester, and fought at the siege of Damietta^W in Egypt. He was home by about August 1220, and in February 1220/1 he helped to take Skipton Castle. Before 21 June 1221 he married Margaret de Quincy, daughter and heiress of Robert de Quincy and Hawise of Chester. His first wife, Alice d’Aigle, a daughter of Gilbert de l’Aigle of Pevensey, had died without children and was buried at Norton.

In the years that followed he sat as a traveling judge in Lincolnshire and Lancashire, went on an embassy to Antwerp in 1227, and in 1229 escorted the King of Scots to meet Henry at York. In 1230 he and Margaret gave up their claim to the main Quincy estates to her uncle Roger de Quincy, who granted them her mother’s dower in return, among it the manor of Grantchester in Cambridgeshire. In 1232 he was a leading commissioner in the proceedings against Hubert de Burgh^W, the fallen justiciar, and early in 1233 he was one of Hubert’s keepers at Devizes Castle, where he angered the king by letting his prisoner escape.

Earl of Lincoln

The earldom came through Margaret’s family. Her uncle Ranulph, Earl of Chester and Lincoln, had granted the earldom of Lincoln to his sister Hawise, and on 22 November 1232, at Hawise’s request, the king granted John the £20 a year that Ranulph had drawn as earl from the county, to hold as Earl of Lincoln for himself and his heirs by Margaret. The chronicler Matthew Paris^W wrote that Lacy de barone comes effectus est, “from a baron was made an earl.”

In 1233 John joined the party against Peter des Roches^W, Bishop of Winchester, but the bishop won him over, with a bribe of 1,000 marks according to Matthew Paris, and from then on he sided with the court as one of the king’s unpopular counselors. At the queen’s coronation in 1236 he carried one of the state swords, in 1237 he was sent to make peace with Scotland, and from 1237 he was Sheriff of Chester.

John died on 22 July 1240, after a long illness, and was buried near his father in the monks’ choir at Stanlaw Abbey^W; his body was later moved to Whalley^W. His epitaph claimed that he had fought in every land. Margaret outlived him by more than twenty-five years and married twice more.

The family

John and Margaret had one son, Edmund, and two daughters, one of them Maud. In 1237 John won for Maud a marriage to the young Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, then the king’s ward; the match caused a great commotion among the barons, and John and Simon de Montfort^W were removed from the king’s council. Maud and Richard were married on or about 25 January 1237/8, and in 1243 the king ordered the late earl’s two daughters sent to Windsor to be brought up with his own.

Edmund^W, who is said to have been born in 1230, was a minor when his father died and grew up a ward of the king; in May 1247 he was married at Woodstock to Alice de Saluzzo, a near kinswoman of Queen Eleanor of Provence. He died on 2 June 1258, before his mother, and was buried at Stanlaw. He seems never to have been formally invested as Earl of Lincoln, presumably because she outlived him.

Lines of descent

All four lines run through Maud de Lacy. They meet again in Maurice Berkeley (about 1435–1506), whose parents James Berkeley (about 1394–1463) and Isabel Mowbray (died 1452) both descend from John and Margaret; in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825) both do; and in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884) both do.

Notes

Sources

John’s parentage, his career, both marriages, his children, his death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), LACY 1, pp. 479–480, and G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. VII (1929), LINCOLN, pp. 676–680. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility, citing the patent, close and fine rolls, the Whalley cartulary and the chronicle of Matthew Paris. The fine of 7,000 marks, the change of name in 1194, his letting Hubert de Burgh escape, the bribe, Matthew Paris’s Latin, his long illness, his epitaph, his shrievalty and the commotion over Maud’s marriage are from the Complete Peerage’s notes; the excommunication is from Richardson. The order of 1243 for the daughters, and Edmund’s birth, wardship and earldom, are from the Complete Peerage, p. 680; Edmund’s marriage and death are from Richardson, LACY 2, p. 480.

His mother

The tree names John’s mother as Maud. Richardson calls her “his wife, Maud”; the Complete Peerage calls her Maud de Clare.

Taking the cross

Richardson’s entry for John (LACY 1) says he was one of the few English barons to take the cross with the king on 4 March 1214. Richardson’s entry for Saher de Quincy (QUINCY 1) gives 4 March 1215 for the same taking of the cross with the king, and the Complete Peerage, citing Gervase of Canterbury, also places it in 1215. The text above follows 1215.