♀Millicent de Cantilupe

Millicent de Cantilupe (died before 7 January 1299) was an English heiress who, with her young nephew, inherited the lands of her brother George de Cantilupe in 1273, and who in her widowhood gave the manor of Bingley in Yorkshire to her daughter Ellen, although her son William was her heir. She was the twentieth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Ellen la Zouche.

Heiress of her brother

Millicent was a daughter of William de Cantilupe and his wife, Eva, who is said to have been a daughter and co-heir of William de Braose. Her father died in 1254, leaving a small son, George, who was born at Abergavenny. George died in 1273, young and without children. Millicent de Cantilupe and Eudes la Zouche were married by November 1273, when the inquest^W on the lands of her brother, George de Cantilupe, named “Milisanda the wife of Eudo la Zuche, of full age” and her young nephew John de Hastings as his next heirs. John was the son of her sister Joan. Bingley was among George’s lands, and it came to Millicent.

Marriages

Eudes was her second husband. She had married first into the Montalt family, by one account John de Montalt, who left no children. Millicent’s daughter Ellen la Zouche was most likely Eudes’s child too, and so was her son and heir, William la Zouche, born about 1276; later accounts add daughters named Eve and Elizabeth.

Bingley

In 1276 a royal inquiry found that Eudes held the sheriff’s court at Bingley himself, and that the king’s officers had not been allowed in for thirty years. With Millicent’s consent, Eudes gave three clearings, or assarts^W, in the fee of Bingley to the canons of Drax Priory^W, who already held Bingley’s church.

Eudes died before Millicent, most likely by 1284. In her widowhood, styling herself Milisenta de Monte Alto, she gave the manor of “Byngele” to “Alianore la Zuche my daughter and the heirs of her body lawfully begotten”, with its knight’s fees, mills, market and fishing, for a rent of 40 marks of silver a year to Millicent for life. Kirkby’s Inquest^W of 1284 found Ellen holding Bingley of her mother, who held it of the king, and a final concord^W of 1284–5 settled the manor on Ellen and the heirs of her body, to return to Millicent if that line failed.

In her widowhood and at her death Millicent went by the name of her first husband, not of Eudes; the records do not explain why.

Death

Millicent died before 7 January 1299, the date of the writ for the inquest on her lands, under the name Milicent de Monte Alto. It named “William la Zouche, her son, aged 22 and more” as her next heir, but Bingley was already Ellen’s.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Ellen la Zouche and Ellen’s son William Harcourt (1300–1349) and, much further down, through Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Thomas’s son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). From Samuel one line 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

Parents and the Cantilupe inheritance

The inquisition after the death of George de Cantilupe (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 2, no. 17; writ of 4 November 1273) names “Milisanda the wife of Eudo la Zuche, of full age, and John, son of Henry and Joan de Hastinges, who is under age” as his next heirs, “the said Milisanda and Joan being sisters of the said George”. The same inquisition records a chapel at Totnes endowed “for the souls of … Sir William de Cantilupo and Eva his wife”, George’s birth at “Bergeveny” (Abergavenny) on a Good Friday, and that “the said George’s father died at Calveston 18 years ago”; its extent of Bingley calls Millicent “Milisand, the wife of Ivo la Suche”. The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 23) gives his heirs as “his sister Milicent, then of full age and wife of Eudes la Zouche, and his nephew John”. Eva’s descent from William de Braose rests on J. Horsfall Turner’s Ancient Bingley (1897, p. 67): William de Cantilupe “married Eve dau. and co-h. of William Broase, lord of Brecknock and Abergavenny”.

Her first husband and her name

Turner (p. 67) says she “married (1) John de Montalt or Mawd, who left no issue, and (2) Eudo la Zouch”; the first edition of the Complete Peerage (vol. 1, p. 328) calls her “Millicent relict of William de Montalt”. Her own charter for Bingley, made “in my pure and legitimate widowhood”, is in the name “Milisenta de Monte Alto” (Turner, pp. 91–92, translated and abridged), and the fine of 13 Edward I names “Milesenta de Montalt” (p. 87). Her inquisition (vol. 3, no. 539) is headed Milicent de Monte Alto.

Dates

The writ for her inquisition is dated 7 January 27 Edward I (1299). Turner gives other dates for her death, “about 1280” (p. 67) and “c. 1281” (p. 119), and says her inquest “was taken in 1292” (p. 98); the dated writ is preferred here. Her death before 1284 cannot be right, as Kirkby’s Inquest of that year finds her alive and holding Bingley of the king.

Her children

Millicent’s charter names “Alianore la Zuche my daughter”, and her inquisition names “William la Zouche, her son, aged 22 and more” as her heir. Neither record names their father; the surname and her marriage to Eudes by 1273 make him the likely father of both. The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 129) names a daughter Eve, “da. of Eudes la Zouche, by Milicent, da. of William de Cantelou, of Bergavenny”, and the first edition (vol. 6, p. 301) a daughter Elizabeth, “da. of Eudo La Zouche by Milicent Montalt his wife”. Turner (p. 67) calls Ellen their “only daughter”, which these accounts contradict.