♂John de Mowbray

John de Mowbray^W (25 June 1340 – 17 June 1368) was an English nobleman, the fourth Lord Mowbray, of Axholme in Lincolnshire, who died overseas in 1368, when his heir was a boy of three or four. He was the nineteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Thomas Mowbray.

Marriage and inheritance

John was born at Epworth, in Lincolnshire, on 25 June 1340, heir to the Mowbray lordship of Axholme. A papal dispensation^W dated 25 March 1349, needed because the two were related in the fourth degree of kindred, allowed John de Mowbray, then eight, to marry Elizabeth de Segrave, then ten. She was the daughter and heiress of John de Segrave, Lord Segrave, and his wife Margaret of Norfolk, Duchess and Countess of Norfolk. Through her the Segrave manors, among them Kyngton Magna in Warwickshire and Lodden in Norfolk, came into John’s hands.

Knight and lord

John was knighted in July 1355, when the king lay with his fleet in the Downs on the way to invade France, and the next year he served in the campaign in Brittany. From 14 August 1362 to 20 January 1365/6 he was summoned to Parliament. He also went to law against his father’s widow, Elizabeth, who held Mowbray lands for her life. By a writ of waste^W he recovered from her the site of the manor of Hawnes, in Bedfordshire, with damages that were to be paid to him over twenty years.

Death

In 1367 John had the king’s license to go overseas. A Latin chronicle printed in Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum records that he set out for the Holy Land, and he is said to have been slain by the Turks in Thrace, near Constantinople, on 17 June 1368. He was probably buried in the convent at Pera, in Constantinople. Elizabeth had died before him. The inquisitions taken after his death^W, early in 1369, found that he had died “in parts beyond seas” and that his heir was his son John, then three or four years old.

The family

The couple had two sons, John and Thomas, and three daughters, Eleanor, Margaret and Joan. Their elder son, John, later Earl of Nottingham, died in 1383, and his brother Thomas became his heir; Thomas was created Duke of Norfolk in 1397.

Notes

Sources

John’s birth, marriage and its dispensation, knighthood, service in Brittany, summonses to Parliament, license to travel, death and probable burial, and the names of the couple’s children, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 601, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility. The Complete Peerage (1st edition, vol. 6, 1895, p. 41) also names Thomas as the second son of John, Lord Mowbray (died 1368), by Elizabeth, Baroness Segrave. The inquisitions taken after John’s death are printed in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 12 (1938), no. 397, pp. 380–383. They show him holding the Segrave manors by the courtesy of England in right of his late wife, the writ of waste against his father’s widow, his death overseas and his son’s age. His son John’s earldom and death, and Thomas’s dukedom, are from the same printed genealogy, pp. 602–603.

The Holy Land and the Turks

Richardson quotes the Latin chronicle from Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1830 edition, vol. 6, part 1, pp. 320–321): John “peregre profectus est ad Terram Sanctam” (set out abroad for the Holy Land) and was killed by the Turks near Constantinople in 1368. The place in Thrace and the burial at Pera are Richardson’s; he gives the burial as “presumably”.

Date of death

The county juries did not agree on the day. The Buckinghamshire inquisition dates his death to the feast of St. Botolph in the 42nd year of Edward III, that is 17 June 1368, the date Richardson gives. The Huntingdonshire jurors said that “the place and time of his death are not known, but the jurors think it was about the Nativity of St. John the Baptist last” (24 June). The Leicestershire jury gave the feast of St. Denis in the same regnal year, which would be 9 October 1368, but the writs ordering the inquisitions were issued on 4 December 1368, so all the juries agree that he was dead by then. The Leicestershire jury gave his son John’s age as four at Whitsun 1368; the Huntingdonshire jury, as “aged 3 years and more”.