♂Matthias Bessiles

Matthias Bessiles (died before 30 December 1295) was an English landholder and king’s yeoman who held, through his wife Elizabeth de Averenges, the manors of Kings Brompton in Somerset and Radcot in Oxfordshire. In 1272 the king granted him a weekly market and a yearly fair at Radcot. He was the nineteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Geoffrey Bessiles (1276–1339).

Marriage

Matthias was probably a younger son of Matthias Bessiles (died 1268) and his wife Beatrice; when the elder Matthias died in 1268, his manors passed to his eldest son, John. The younger Matthias married Elizabeth de Averenges, the youngest of the three daughters and heirs of John de Averenges, who had died in 1257 when she was three. Because her father had held land of the king in chief^W, the Crown took charge of his lands and of his daughters’ marriages, and the king sold that wardship to two of his yeomen, William de Renham and Emery Bezill. The match most likely came about through that grant.

Radcot and Kings Brompton

Most of what Matthias held came through Elizabeth: the manor of Kings Brompton, land at Buckland in Berkshire, and Radcot. At Radcot the grant of 1272 gave him a market every Friday and a fair over three days at the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in September. Their son Geoffrey was born about February 1276. In 1295 Matthias and Elizabeth had the king’s licence to grant Radcot to John Wogan for life, for a rent of £9 a year, with the manor to come back to them and Elizabeth’s heirs.

Death

Matthias died before 30 December 1295, the date of the writ for his inquest^W. A jury at Oxford on 3 February 1296 found that Radcot was Elizabeth’s own inheritance and that she, “aged 40 and more”, was heir of the whole manor. A jury at Taunton on 26 February found that Kings Brompton was hers as well, and named Geoffrey, “aged 20 at the Feast of the Purification”, as his father’s heir. The king took Elizabeth’s homage and ordered that she have the lands they had held of him in right of her inheritance, and she kept them until her death in 1315.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Geoffrey down to Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They part among the Dudleys and meet again in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825) both descend from Matthias.

Notes

Sources for his life

His life comes from J. Renton Dunlop’s “The Besils Family of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Somerset” in Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 5th series, vol. 5 (1923–25), Notes 5 and 16–17, which abstracts the Patent, Close and Charter Rolls and the inquisitions post mortem on him (Edward I, file 74/1) and on Elizabeth (Edward II, file 36/8); the same inquests are in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, volumes 3 and 5. The name is also written Bezill, Besill, Besilles and Besylles, and he is sometimes called Matthew.

His parents

No record names his parents. Dunlop suggests that the marriage was “probably owing to” the wardship grant of 1259, and that Matthias was “a younger son of Matthew de Besilles and his wife Beatrice”, married to Elizabeth “by family arrangement”. The elder Matthias’s inquest of 1268 names only his eldest son John, “aged 23”, as heir. Emery Bezill, who held the wardship, shared the surname, but his relationship to the family is not stated; his heir in 1274 was a nephew, Peter de Bezilles.

The wardship

The patent roll entry of 1259 says that the king had lately sold the wardship of the lands and heirs of John de Averenches, with the marriage of the heirs, to William de Renham and Emery Bezill, king’s yeomen, and that because of quarrels and lawsuits over it that had greatly damaged them, he let them have it free of payment.

The market grant

Dunlop dates the market and fair grant 1272 but cites it as Charter Rolls 21 Henry III, a regnal year that falls in 1236–37. Radcot came to the family through Elizabeth, who was born about 1254, so the grant belongs to the later date.