♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret (living in 1327) was a lady of Kirk Langley in Derbyshire, married to Sir John Twyford, an English knight who was lord of Kirk Langley and of Stretton Baskerville in Warwickshire. She was the twenty-first great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Robert Twyford. Through Robert she was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Marriage and family

Margaret’s own family is not known. Her husband had sat for Derbyshire as knight of the shire^W in 1314 and 1318 and was a follower of the earls of Lancaster, twice paying the crown for pardons after their risings. In 1327 the king granted Sir John and Margaret, his wife, view of frankpledge^W in Kirk Langley, the right to hold the court that kept order among the men of the manor.

John and Margaret were, according to the family pedigrees, the parents of Robert, the eldest son, and Edward (died 1375), and probably of John, a vicar of Spondon, and Thomas, a knight of the shire in 1381; one copy of the pedigrees adds Michael, Philip and a daughter, Isabella. In 1343 Sir John gave Robert land in Spondon and Chaddesden. The records do not say when Margaret died.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Robert Twyford, Robert’s daughter Joan Twyford, her daughter Joan Brailsford, Joan Brailsford’s son Thomas Basset, Thomas’s daughter Joan Basset and that Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and on through Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Her name

Margaret is known only from the royal grant of 1327, calendared in the Calendar of Charter Rolls, vol. 4, p. 422, and from the statement in M. J. Sayer, “Twyford of Kirk Langley and Spondon”, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal, vol. 94 (1974), p. 26, that Sir John “married Margaret”. Neither gives her surname or her parents.

Her children

Robert and Edward appear as Sir John’s sons on all three surviving versions of the Twyford pedigree (one at the College of Arms and two in copies of the 1611 heralds’ visitation^W of Derbyshire at the Bodleian Library and Queen’s College, Oxford); Sayer adds John and Thomas as probable sons, and the Queen’s College copy alone adds Michael, Philip and Isabella. Sayer names Margaret as Sir John’s wife but does not say which of the children were hers; this page makes her their mother because she is the only wife of Sir John that he names.