♂John Smythe

John Smythe (buried 24 December 1580) was a farmer of Hillmorton, a Warwickshire village about two miles from Rugby, who in his last illness left forty shillings to the cottagers of the village to maintain their common “if the same doe come to triall of lawe”. The common^W was land the villagers used together, and the will does not say who was expected to contest it. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Isabel Smythe (buried 1617).

Family

His parents are not known. Two brothers outlived him: Clement, and Edmund, who had children and rented from John the house he lived in. John married at least twice, and his first wife’s name is not known. On 30 April 1565 he married Agnes Jones at Hillmorton. His will names six children from before that marriage, Thomas, Richard, John, Susan, Agnes and Elizabeth, and five he had with Agnes: William, Francis, Nicholas, Luke and Judith. The link to his daughter Isabel is probably his: the will names her only as “my daughter Elizabeth”, and Moody reads that bequest as Isabel’s (see Notes).

Will and death

On 10 December 1580, “beinge verie sicke in bodye”, he made his will. His son Richard, the executor, received his lands and tenements in Hillmorton and the residue. Thomas received a lease at Newenham with three horses, forty sheep, a cart and a plow, and was to pay £60 to his brother John and his sisters Susan and Agnes. William received land at Palmiston and Francis a house in Daventry. His wife Agnes kept the lease of the farm where they lived, held from Mr. Astley, and was charged to educate and bring up the children.

Near the end of the will come four small legacies: a cow to Michael Gater, a year-old heifer to “my daughter Elizabeth”, two sheep to Richard Baylie and one sheep to John Gater. Michael Gater had married Isabel at Hillmorton in 1576, after the death of her first husband, William Bailey. Richard was her son by William, christened in 1573, and John her son by Michael, christened in 1579. In that company the daughter Elizabeth was most likely Isabel herself. John left his clothes to his brothers, and named Michael Gater one of the five overseers of the will.

He was buried at Hillmorton on 24 December 1580, two weeks after making the will. It was proved in the ^W on 15 February 1580/1.

Notes

Sources

Everything here comes from Melynie Moody’s article “Who Was Isabell Baylie?” (New England Historical and Genealogical Register 180, Winter 2026, pp. 88–93). It quotes the Hillmorton parish register for his second marriage (“John Smithe and Agnes Jones”, 30 April 1565) and his burial (“John Smithe”, 24 December 1580), and abstracts his will, dated 10 December 1580 and proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 15 February 1580/1 (The National Archives, PROB 11/63, folios 53–54). Moody estimates his birth at about 1520; no record of it is known. Noting the marriage to Agnes Jones, Moody adds that the will’s bequest of £3 6s 8d for the use of Sybil Jones “suggests a connection of some sort”.

His daughter Isabel

Isabel was born too early for her baptism to appear in the surviving Hillmorton registers, so no register entry names her father. Her first marriage, as “Isabell Smithe” to William Baylye on 9 May 1572, gives her birth surname, and Moody estimates her birth at about 1552, before John’s marriage to Agnes Jones. Moody argues that “Isabel was probably the daughter “Elizabeth” named in her father’s will”: the names Isabel and Elizabeth were often interchangeable; her heifer is a small legacy, which suggests she had already received her main portion, probably at her marriage; and she stands in the will after Michael Gater and before Richard Baylie and John Gater, her sons by her two marriages. The link from Isabel to John Smythe is that inference from the will, not a register entry.

The children of the will

The will does not give the children’s ages, and Moody leaves the order of the earlier children uncertain. Four of the five children of the second marriage, William, Nicholas, Judith and Luke, were christened at Hillmorton between 1567/8 and 1577/8, each entered as a child of John Smithe. A daughter Goodith, christened there in 1574/5, is not named in the will. A Michael, son of John Smithe, was christened at Hillmorton on 15 May 1581, less than five months after John’s burial, and buried there that September; Moody takes him as probably John’s posthumous son. Richard’s own will, made on his deathbed in February 1584/5, directs his widow to pay the legacies due to his brothers and sisters “geyvin unto them by my father John Smeythe hys laste well & testayment”.

The cottagers’ common

Moody’s abstract of the will gives the bequest as “to the cottagers of Hillmorton 40s; to maintain their common “if the same doe come to triall of lawe”“, which reads the forty shillings as given for that purpose. The will’s full wording has not been read for this page.