♂Richard Mitton

Richard Mitton (died 10 November 1418) was a knight of Weston under Lizard in Staffordshire, a village on the Shropshire border, and the son of a Shrewsbury burgess^W. He married Margaret Peshale, a daughter and co-heiress of Sir Adam Peshale, and died while their only son was still a child. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son William Mitton and, probably, William’s grandson John Washburn (died 1547).

Family and marriage

Richard was the son and heir of Reynold Mitton, a burgess and bailiff of Shrewsbury, by his first wife, Eleanor, a daughter of William le Parminter, also called le Skinner. In or before 1406 he married Margaret Peshale, who was then no older than about thirteen. She was one of the two daughters and co-heiresses of Sir Adam Peshale and his wife, Joyce Botetourt. Her marriage portion was the Staffordshire manors of Hagley in Rugeley and Tamhorn in Fisherwick. They had one son, William, who was born at Weston about 1410.

Lands and death

Besides Weston under Lizard and Bobbington in Staffordshire, Richard held West Tilbury in Essex, Henhurst in Kent and property at Stepney in Middlesex. Sir Richard Mitton died on 10 November 1418, when William was still a child. Margaret survived him by less than two years: she died on 5 August 1420, a week before her own mother, and was buried at Weston under Lizard. On 22 March 1437 William was given seisin^W, the legal possession, of the lands that had belonged to his parents and his grandmother Joyce, in Staffordshire, Shropshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex.

Notes

Sources

Richard Mitton is known from the heralds’ pedigrees of his family and from Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), which gives his parents, his lands, his marriage in or before 1406, his wife’s marriage portion and the date of his death, citing the Staffordshire and Shropshire visitations and Canon Bridgeman’s history of Weston-under-Lizard (1899). The Mitton pedigree in the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623 sets him and his wife, Adam Peshale’s daughter and heir, against the seventh year of Henry IV (1405–06); James Davenport printed that pedigree in The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907). Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) and the volume of corrections to the Complete Peerage (1998) also name him as Margaret Peshale’s husband. Margaret’s age at the marriage is reckoned from Richardson’s dates. The name is also written Mytton. No record of his birth or burial is known.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of William’s daughter Joan was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s. In 1914 another writer on the Evesham Washbournes judged it a reasonable probability but no certainty, so the descent through him is given here as probable.