♂Ralph Brailsford

Ralph Brailsford (died before 21 October 1344) was lord of Brailsford in Derbyshire in the first half of the fourteenth century, a landholder whom the Crown used to raise its taxes in the county and who held the office of sheriff for a few weeks in the autumn of 1324. He was the twentieth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Henry Brailsford. Through Henry he was an ancestor of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Family

Ralph was the son of Henry Brailsford, who held Brailsford before him. In 1302 Henry and his heirs received a royal grant of free warren^W, the right to take small game, in their demesne lands at Brailsford and Wingerworth, and Ralph succeeded him in both.

In the king’s service

On 6 November 1319 Ralph and Robert de Touk were commissioned to levy the scutage^W in Derbyshire for the army of Scotland, the money owed by tenants in place of service in the field. Five years later the office of sheriff came to him, though not for long. On 20 October 1324 Henry de Fauconberg was ordered to hand the office of sheriff over to Ralph, as from Michaelmas; on 11 November Ralph was told to meddle no further with it, because Fauconberg had only been sent to Yorkshire for a time.

In 1330, in the Crown’s quo warranto^W inquiries, he was called on to prove his right to free warren in Brailsford, and he answered that it had been granted to Henry, his father. In 1336, and again the following year, he and Richard Foljambe were the collectors of the subsidies.

Wingerworth

In 1337 Thomas de Brailsford, the rector of Brailsford, and John Barrington granted to “Ralph de Brailsford and Margery, his wife” the manor of Wingerworth, together with 128 acres of land, 4 acres of meadow, 64 acres of pasture and 25 acres of wood, and holdings at Chesterfield, Barlow and Dronfield. Ralph is said to have been a knight, and to have sealed with three cinquefoils on a bend, a different coat from the single black cinquefoil on gold that his son later used.

Death

Ralph was dead by 1344, and his son Henry succeeded him. On 21 October that year Henry was named a collector of the subsidies in his turn.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Henry Brailsford, Henry’s daughter Joan Brailsford, her son Thomas Basset, Thomas’s daughter Joan Basset and Joan’s daughter Beatrix Shirley (died 1483), and on through Governor Thomas Dudley (1576–1653) and his son Samuel Dudley (1608–1683). One 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

Sources for his life

Ralph’s offices, the 1330 claim, the 1337 grant and his death by 1344 are from S. P. H. Statham, “The Brailsfords”, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, vol. 59 (1938), pp. 75–76. Statham drew them from the calendars of the fine rolls^W, the printed quo warranto pleas and, for the 1337 grant, J. P. Yeatman’s Feudal History of the County of Derby, vol. II, p. 317. The grant shows only that Ralph and Margery were married by 1337; the date of the marriage is not known. Yeatman also records that in 1346 Henry held a half fee in Wingerworth that had formerly been Ralph’s.

His place in the family

A plea of 1424 in the Court of Common Pleas^W, Henry Knyveton against Ralph Shirley of Brailsford the younger, printed in The Genealogist, new series, vol. 17 (1901), pp. 22–23, sets out the Brailsford descent: Henry, son of Henry, living in 1285–86; then Ralph; then Henry; then Joan, daughter and heir, the wife of Sir John Basset. Statham gives the same order. The heralds’ visitation^W pedigree of Shirley for Sussex also names a Ralph, lord of Brailsford, between two Henrys, but it has fewer generations above him than Statham does.

His seal

Maxwell Craven’s A Derbyshire Armory (1991), p. 24, describes “A seal of Ralph Brailsford kt (d. 1344), father of Sir Henry” bearing on a bend three cinquefoils, citing Local MS 6341, and derives the later arms of the Brailsfords of Seanor from it. The knighthood and the seal rest on Craven’s entry alone.