♀Popham

Popham, whose given name the heralds did not record, is said to have been the fourth daughter and one of the heirs of Sir Stephen Popham of Farington Popham in Hampshire, England, and the wife of Humphrey Forster of Harpsden in Oxfordshire. She was the fourteenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son George Forster.

Her father, a knight of the shire^W for Hampshire, had daughters but no son, and when he died on 14 November 1444 they became his heirs together. She married Humphrey Forster, the eldest son and heir of Humphrey Forster of Harpsden. Through her the Popham arms, two gold bucks’ heads shown face-on on a red band across the top of a silver shield, came into the Forster shield, where the heralds still showed them, quartered^W, at their visitation^W of Berkshire in 1566. The heralds named only one of the couple’s children: their eldest son and heir, George Forster, who married Elizabeth Delamere, the heiress of the Delamere family, and was seated at Aldermaston in Berkshire.

Notes

The heralds’ pedigree

Almost everything known of her comes from the pedigree of the Forsters of Aldermaston in the 1566 heralds’ visitation of Berkshire, as printed by W. C. Metcalfe in 1885 (page 12). It says that Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, esquire, “mar. the fourth da. and one of the heirs of” Sir Stephen Popham of “Farington Popham”, knight, in Hampshire, and by her had George, “his eldest son”. It names no other child of the couple, gives no given name for her and prints no dates. The quartered arms it prints put the Popham coat second, after Forster. Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005, page 672) also lists the Pophams of “Faringdon Popham, Hampshire”.

Her name

Richardson calls her Alice: “Alice (wife of Humphrey Forster, Knt.)” (page 672), and again as Alice Popham, a daughter and co-heiress of Sir Stephen, who married Humphrey Forster, in a note on the Forster arms beside his citation of the Harleian Society’s Four Visitations of Berkshire (1907, page 207). The 1566 pedigree as Metcalfe printed it leaves her given name blank.

Her father and mother

Richardson (pages 672–673) gives Sir Stephen Popham of West Dean and Popham in Hampshire, born about 1393, as a knight of the shire for Hampshire and sheriff of Hampshire and of Wiltshire, who died on 14 November 1444. By his first wife, Margaret Reade, he had one daughter, Elizabeth, the wife of John Wadham; by his second, Beatrice Bohun, a daughter of Sir John Bohun of Midhurst in Sussex, he had three: Margery, the wife of Thomas Hampden; a second Elizabeth, the third daughter, who was six when her father died; and Alice, the wife of Humphrey Forster. That would make her the youngest of the four, as the heralds’ “fourth da.” agrees, and her mother Beatrice Bohun, whom the 1566 pedigree does not name. Richardson notes that earlier writers divided the four daughters between the two wives differently.

Her age at her father’s death

The 1566 pedigree prints no dates for her, and Richardson gives her no birth date or age (pages 672–673).