♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret was the wife of Sir Roger Washbourne, a fourteenth-century Worcestershire knight, lord of the manor of Washbourne, the township in the parish of Overbury from which his family took its name. She was the eighteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Margaret had married Roger by about 1316, when his father, Sir John Washbourne, confirmed to “Roger his son and heire and Margaret his wife” all his manor of Washbourne. Her own surname and family are not known. By the account of the antiquary Thomas Habington^W, written about 1640, Sir Roger had two sons, both christened John, and Margaret was probably their mother. The younger John married Isabelle and was the father of Peter Washbourne, and it was Peter’s son John who in time became the heir of his great-uncle, the elder John, and so lord of Washbourne and Stanford. The line to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) probably runs through this younger John and his descendants, down to John Washburn (died 1547), a great-great-great-grandson of the younger John.

The family

The elder of Sir Roger’s two sons named John married Katherine Thromwin and died without children. Katherine married again, to Sir John Musard, a Worcestershire knight, and their daughter, Joan Musard, became the first wife of the elder John’s great-nephew and heir, John Washbourne.

Notes

Sources

Margaret is known only from James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), pp. 5 and 7, which follows the two College of Arms pedigrees of the family. One of them records that “Iohn Washborne Knight did confirm to Roger his son and heire and Margaret his wife all his manor of Washborne” in the ninth year of Edward II (1315–16), and Davenport writes that Sir Roger “married his wife Margaret as early as 1316”. No surname or parentage is given for her.

Her sons

Davenport does not say which wife was the mother of either son, and no other wife of Sir Roger is named; that Margaret was the mother of the two Johns is probable rather than shown.

The descent below Peter’s great-grandson John

That the John named in the heralds’ pedigrees as a younger son of John Washbourne of Wichenford (died 1517) is John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is Davenport’s identification, not a record’s; the 1517 will does not name him. The descent from Margaret is therefore given here as probable below that generation.