♂Robert Danvers

Robert Danvers was an English knight of Ipwell, in Oxfordshire, in the fifteenth century. He was the seventeenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Agnes Danvers (born about 1445).

Sir Robert is said to have sat as a judge of the Court of Common Pleas^W, the royal court at Westminster that heard suits between one subject and another. His first wife was Agnes Delabar, a daughter of Sir Richard Delabar. Their daughter Agnes Danvers was born about 1445 and was one of Sir Robert’s co-heiresses. Before 1467 Agnes married Sir Walter Dennis of Olveston, in Gloucestershire. The dates of Sir Robert’s birth and death are not known.

Notes

Sources

Sir Robert’s knighthood, his seat at Ipwell, his office, his first marriage and his daughter are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 636, and his Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 272, which describes Agnes Danvers as the daughter and co-heiress of “Robert Danvers, Knt., of Ipwell, Oxfordshire, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, by his 1st wife, Agnes, daughter of Richard Delabar, Knt.” and gives her age as 22 in 1467. Richardson cites Foss’s Judges of England, vol. 4 (1851), pp. 428–429, for Sir Robert’s life.

His office

Richardson calls Sir Robert Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and so does the Danvers pedigree in the Oxfordshire visitations (1566, 1574 and 1634, printed in 1871), pp. 187–188, which calls him “Lo. Chief Justice of the Common Playce”. The Dennis pedigree in the Gloucestershire visitations, as Richardson quotes it, calls him “Judge of the Comon place”. This page follows the plainer description.