♀Margaret Peshale

Margaret Peshale (about 1393 – 5 August 1420) was one of the two daughters and co-heiresses of Sir Adam Peshale, lord of Weston under Lizard in Staffordshire, and the wife of Sir Richard Mitton. Married as a girl and widowed at about twenty-five, she died less than two years after her husband and a week before her own mother. She was the fifteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son William Mitton.

Parents and ancestry

Her father, Sir Adam Peshale, was a Shropshire and Staffordshire knight who sat in Parliament for both counties as a knight of the shire^W and served as sheriff of both. Her mother, Joyce Botetourt, was his third wife, and Margaret and her sister Joan were the couple’s two daughters and co-heiresses.

Through her mother, Margaret’s line runs back by way of the Botetourt lords of Weoley to Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford^W, one of the twenty-five barons chosen in 1215 to see that King John kept the terms of Magna Carta.

Marriage

In or before 1406, when she was no older than about thirteen, Margaret married Richard Mitton, the son and heir of Reynold Mitton, a burgess^W and bailiff of Shrewsbury. Her marriage portion was the Staffordshire manors of Hagley in Rugeley and Tamhorn in Fisherwick. They had one son, William, who was born at Weston about 1410. Through William’s daughter Joan, a compiled genealogy carries the line on to John Washburn (died 1547), and that descent is probable. Besides Weston under Lizard and Bobbington in Staffordshire, Richard held West Tilbury in Essex, Henhurst in Kent and property at Stepney in Middlesex.

Widowhood and death

Sir Richard Mitton died on 10 November 1418, when William was still a child. Margaret’s father died on 26 October 1419, and in August 1420 she and her mother died within a week of each other, Margaret on 5 August and Joyce on 12 August. Margaret was buried at Weston under Lizard. On 22 March 1437 William was given seisin^W, the legal possession, of the lands that had belonged to his parents and his grandmother Joyce, in Staffordshire, Shropshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex.

Notes

Sources

Margaret is known from the heralds’ pedigrees and from Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), which gives her age as twenty-six in 1419, her marriage in or before 1406, her marriage portion, her son, the dates of her husband’s death and her own, and her burial at Weston under Lizard, citing among others Canon Bridgeman’s history of Weston-under-Lizard (1899). Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) also names her as the daughter of Sir Adam Peshale and Joyce Botetourt and the wife of Richard Mitton of Weston under Lizard. Her age at her marriage and at her husband’s death is reckoned from Richardson’s dates. No record of her birth or marriage is known.

Her husband’s name

The Peshall pedigree in the Staffordshire visitations of 1614 and 1663–64 calls her “Margareta [Peshall], ux. Will’i Mitton”, the wife of William Mitton, and gives her father’s death as 1439 and her mother’s as 1455. The Mitton pedigree in the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623 makes her the wife of Richard Mitton of Weston, as Richardson and the Complete Peerage do, with William as their son, and Richardson gives her father’s death as 26 October 1419 and her mother’s as 12 August 1420.

Her parents’ daughters

The Botetourt pedigree in the Complete Peerage (1912) marks Joyce Botetourt’s marriage to Sir Adam Peshall as without issue. The volume of corrections published in 1998 amends this to without male issue and adds that the couple “had two daughters and coheirs who married and left issue”: Joan, wife of Sir William Birmingham, and Margaret, wife of Sir Richard Mytton, on the authority of Canon Bridgeman’s history of Weston-under-Lizard.

Two Joyce Botetourts

Margaret’s mother is a different woman from her niece of the same name, Joyce Botetourt, the wife of Hugh Burnell, Lord Burnell, to whom she was co-heiress in 1407. Burke’s Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages (1883) confuses the two, as Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry points out.

Her ancestry

Richardson’s Botetourt chapter opens with Henry de Bohun and Maud de Mandeville and runs through their son Humphrey de Bohun, the Tony family, Joyce la Zouche and John, Lord Botetourt, to Margaret’s mother, Joyce Botetourt.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of William’s daughter Joan 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.