♀Joyce la Zouche

Joyce la Zouche (living in 1276) was an English noblewoman, the daughter and heiress of William la Zouche, who married Robert de Mortimer; in 1276 her husband was made to answer at the Exchequer for her dead father’s debts. She was the nineteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son William la Zouche Mortimer (died 1337).

Her father’s debts

Joyce’s father died owing money to the king, and it was her husband who was made to pay. In the Trinity term of 1276 Robert, named in the plea roll as the man “who has to wife the daughter and heir of William la Zushe”, came before the barons of the Exchequer of Pleas^W, having been distrained^W for £63 14s 4d of William’s debts. He argued that Henry la Zouche, William’s brother and the executor of his will, ought to clear him and his wife of the sum, since the dead man’s goods had come into Henry’s hands and Henry had once promised the barons to pay the king what William owed. Henry, who was in court, did not deny it, but said he had none of the goods.

The barons ordered juries in six counties to find out what Henry had taken.

Robert is said to have been Baron of Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire. He and Joyce had at least two sons. The elder, Hugh, came of age in 1295; the younger, William, later took his mother’s family name of la Zouche and sat in Parliament as Lord Zouche.

Lines of descent

The line runs from Joyce through her son William la Zouche Mortimer (died 1337), whose daughter Joyce married into the Botetourt family, and then down through Joyce Botetourt’s descendants. The pedigrees give John Washburn (died 1547) as a son of Joan Mitton, Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter, and he is probably the John Washburn of Bengeworth; through him the line reaches Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Notes

Sources

Joyce’s parentage, her marriage to Robert de Mortimer, his title of Baron of Richard’s Castle, and the ages of her sons are given by Douglas Richardson in Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), in the entry for her son William la Zouche Mortimer. The 1276 case is printed, in Latin and in English, in Jenkinson and Formoy’s Select Cases in the Exchequer of Pleas (Selden Society, vol. 48), under the year 1276. The plea roll does not give her name: it describes Robert only as the husband of William la Zouche’s daughter and heir, which is how Richardson describes this couple.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is given here as probable.