♂Nicholas de Percy

Nicholas de Percy (died 1 August 1324) was an English landholder in Wiltshire who served the baron Henry Tyeys and was named with him in an order for arrest in December 1321, three months before the rebels’ defeat at the Battle of Boroughbridge^W. Tyeys was hanged after the battle, and Nicholas himself was killed in 1324. He was the nineteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Joan de Percy (died 1369).

Service and rebellion

By about 1316 Nicholas was in the service of Henry, Lord Tyeys, who had acquired tenements at Burbach Savage in Wiltshire and let Nicholas hold them for as long as he served him. He also held half of Knook, in Wiltshire, for his life, by a grant from Laurence de Sancto Martino.

In December 1321, during the Despenser War^W between Edward II and the barons opposed to his favorites, the Despensers, Tyeys, Nicholas and the younger John Mautravers were ordered arrested. After the rebels’ defeat at Boroughbridge in March 1321/22, Tyeys was hanged and Mautravers escaped; he was later raised to the peerage by Edward III. Nicholas outlived his lord by about two years. He was killed on 1 August 1324, and the records do not say how.

Marriage and family

By 1312–13 Nicholas had married Joan Foliot, the daughter of Walter Foliot and Ada de Sanford. In that year a final concord^W settled the manors of Melbury Sampford in Dorset and Whiteford in Devon on Walter and Ada for their lives, and after them on Nicholas and Joan and the children Nicholas would have by her.

Nicholas and Joan had two daughters. Isabel was seven years old in 1327, when an inquisition post mortem^W into Nicholas’s Wiltshire lands named her as his next heir. Joan, the heir of Whiteford, most likely under the settlement of 1312–13, married Peter de Braose, a knight of Edward III’s household, before 1342. Nicholas’s widow married John Mautravers, the father of the John Mautravers who had been named with Nicholas in the arrest order of 1321.

Lines of descent

Through their daughter Joan de Percy and her daughter Beatrice de Braose, Nicholas de Percy and Joan Foliot were ancestors of Thomas Dudley (1576–1653), who came to Boston in 1630 as deputy governor to John Winthrop. Both lines run through Beatrice’s son Ralph Shirley and his daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and from Beatrix through the Bromes, Dentons, Purefoys and Thornes to Thomas Dudley and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One comes down through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley (1654–1735) 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

Sources for his life

F. N. Craig, “Whose Son was Peter de Braose?”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (July 1996), pp. 315–324, gives his service with Henry Tyeys, the arrest order of 1321 and his death on 1 August 1324 (p. 318), citing the Patent and Close Rolls of Edward II and The Complete Peerage. The article’s table (p. 324) shows him married to Joan Foliot, with two daughters, Joan (died 1369–70) and Isabel (living 1327). The settlement of 1312–13 is a final concord between Peter de Blunt and Walter Foliot and Ada his wife, printed in Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, vol. 6 (1840), p. 352. The inquisition on his Wiltshire lands, on a writ of 13 February 1327, is in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 7, no. 4.

His daughters

Craig’s article opens: “Peter de Braose and Joan his wife, daughter of Nicholas de Percy, were ancestors of Thomas Dudley”. His earlier paper in the Register, vol. 142 (1988), p. 242, cites a Close Roll entry of 1344 naming “Ada Sanford, Joan’s grandmother”; since Joan Foliot was Ada’s daughter and heir, the younger Joan was her daughter, and the settlement of 1312–13, which entailed Whiteford on Nicholas’s children by Joan Foliot, would explain how she came to be its heir. The Wiltshire inquisition of 1327 names only Isabel, aged seven, as Nicholas’s next heir and does not mention Joan; it concerned a holding at Knook that Nicholas had for his life only, which went back on his death to the heirs of Laurence de Sancto Martino.

His family

His parents are not known. Some online family trees make him one of the Percys of Kildale in Yorkshire and his daughter “Joan de Percy of Kildale & Whitford”; they cite no source for it. In 1311–12 an inquiry was held into a grant by John de Percy and his wife Agnes of a messuage, land and rent in South Fawley, Berkshire, to a Nicholas de Percy, keeping the manor of Cerne in Dorset; whether this was the same man, and how they were related, is not known.