♀Margaret Corbet

Margaret Corbet was a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh and the wife of William Mitton, a fifteenth-century Staffordshire esquire and lord of the manor of Weston under Lizard, a village on the Shropshire border. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Joan Mitton and, probably, Joan’s son John Washburn (died 1547).

Marriage and children

She married William Mitton, who had been left an orphan as a boy and on 22 March 1437 had been given seisin^W, the legal possession, of the lands of his parents and his grandmother in five counties. They had two sons, John and Richard, and four daughters, Anne, Jane, Joan and Eleanor. Joan became the first wife of John Washbourne, lord of the manor of Wichenford in Worcestershire. Not every pedigree agrees on who she was, however: others give William Mitton’s wife as Margaret Burley.

The family

John, the couple’s son and heir, served as sheriff of Staffordshire. Through his first wife, Anne Swinnerton, a daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Swinnerton, he held the Staffordshire manors of Hilton and Essington, and after her death in 1470 he married Jane Middlemore, the widow of Thomas Brome of Woodlow. He died in February 1499/1500 and was buried at Weston under Lizard.

Notes

Sources

Margaret is known only from the heralds’ pedigrees. The Mitton pedigree in the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623 gives William Mitton’s wife as “Margaretta filia Thomas Corbett de Lee”, and the Peshall pedigree in the Staffordshire visitations of 1614 and 1663–64 calls her simply “Margareta”. James Davenport printed the Shropshire pedigree in The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), and Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) and Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) both make her a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh. No record of her birth, marriage or death is known.

Her name

Richardson notes that other pedigrees state that William Mitton married Margaret Burley. This account follows the Shropshire visitation, which makes her a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh.

Joan’s son John

That Joan’s son John was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s. In 1914 another writer on the Evesham Washbournes judged it a reasonable probability but no certainty, so the descent through him is given here as probable.