♂Peter de Braose

Peter de Braose (died 1377) was an English knight of Edward III’s household who held the manors of Wiston in Sussex and Chesham Bois in Buckinghamshire, and who was knighted on the Crécy campaign of 1346 and served in the king’s own division there. He was the eighteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Beatrice de Braose.

Family background

Peter was probably a younger son of Peter de Braose (1273–1311) and his wife Agnes, of the Braose family whose barony lay in the rape of Bramber^W in Sussex. His father died in 1311 or 1312, when the eldest son, Thomas, was ten years old, and Agnes was still living in 1324 and had died by 1333. Older genealogies made Peter the son of a William de Braose and Eleanor de Bavent instead, a descent that no record bears out.

Marriage and lands

Peter married Joan de Percy, daughter of Nicholas de Percy and heir of the manor of Whiteford in Devon, before 1342. In that year he was granted a weekly market and a yearly fair at Whiteford. On 2 July 1344 Peter and Joan granted Whiteford to the king, who granted it back to them on 16 August 1346, ten days before the Battle of Crécy^W.

In November 1357 Peter and Joan bought the manor of Wiston, with Heene and other lands, from the king for 1,000 marks. Wiston had come to the Crown in 1344 from Sir Roger de Bavent, who was then heavily in debt, and the grant kept it in Braose hands. Peter had also acquired Chesham Bois before 1351, when he complained that his houses there had been broken into, and he presented to its church in 1365. In the same year the king granted him the reversion of the manor of Wedonhill and other lands in Chesham, Amersham and Little Missenden.

The king’s service

In June 1346 Peter was a yeoman of the king. On 26 August 1346, the day of the battle, he was fourth in a list of seven men granted annuities to support the knighthood they had lately taken from the king on the campaign in France. He served in the king’s division as a knight with two esquires and ten archers, beside Thomas de Braose, most likely his elder brother, who led a far larger company as a banneret. He was paid wages of war in July 1349.

Peter stayed close to the king for the rest of his life. He was a knight of the king’s chamber, dealing with Edward III’s personal finances in several years between 1364 and 1377, and in 1370 the king gave him custody of the manors of Findon and Washington in Sussex while the heirs of John de Mowbray were under age.

Death and family

Joan died in 1369–70, and Peter died in 1377 or 1378. Their children were John, who held Wiston until his death in 1426, Beatrice, who married Sir Hugh Shirley, and Richard, Thomas and Philippa, who were living at Wiston. When John died without children, Wiston came to Beatrice and through her to the Shirleys.

Lines of descent

Through Beatrice, Peter and Joan 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

His parentage

F. N. Craig, “Whose Son was Peter de Braose?”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (July 1996), pp. 315–324, is the source for most of this page. Earlier works, among them The Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 2, 1912, p. 34), made Peter the son of William de Braose and Eleanor de Bavent and had Wiston come to him through the Bavents, though in 1876 Elwes found no trace of this William after his appearance as a child in 1286. Craig shows that Peter obtained Wiston by the king’s grant of 1357, not by inheritance, and finds no evidence that the Bavents had a daughter Eleanor. He concludes that “it seems safe to assume that Peter I and his wife Agnes were the parents of Peter II”, agreeing with Gerald Paget (1957): “he was probably younger son of Peter and Agnes”. Thomas de Braose’s tie to Peter is likewise Craig’s inference, from the remainder of Wiston granted in 1357 to Thomas’s son Peter and from Thomas’s widow Beatrice making Peter one of her feoffees in 1372.

His death

The table in the Register (p. 324) gives his death as 1377–8. The text (p. 319, note 30) finds him apparently still alive on 23 March 1378, and William Hudson, from the court rolls of Wiston, thought he had died before 29 September 1378; the reversion of Wedonhill fell in at about this time and went to his son John, so Peter may never have entered it.

Joan Howard

Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011) indexes a Joan Howard as wife of “Peter de Brewes, Knt., of Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire”, and another compiled genealogy names Beatrice’s mother as Peter’s second wife, Joan Howard. The Register’s table shows Joan de Percy as Peter’s only wife, with John, Richard, Beatrice, Thomas and Philippa beneath them; this page follows the table.

His name

Records of his own time write the name Brewose, Brewosa or Brewes; this page keeps the familiar form Braose.