♂Robert de Mortimer

Robert de Mortimer (living in 1276) was an Englishman who married Joyce, the daughter and heiress of William la Zouche, and in 1276 was made to answer at the Exchequer for his dead father-in-law’s debts. He was the nineteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son William la Zouche Mortimer (died 1337).

The Zouche debts

Joyce’s father died owing money to the king, and it was her husband who was made to pay. In the Trinity term of 1276 Robert, named in the plea roll as the man “who has to wife the daughter and heir of William la Zushe”, came before the barons of the Exchequer of Pleas^W, having been distrained^W for £63 14s 4d of William’s debts. He argued that Henry la Zouche, William’s brother and the executor of his will, ought to clear him and his wife of the sum, since the dead man’s goods had come into Henry’s hands and Henry had once promised the barons to pay the king what William owed. Henry, who was in court, did not deny it, but said he had none of the goods.

The barons ordered juries in six counties to find out what Henry had taken. The Cambridgeshire jury found that at William’s manor of Queye Henry had sold the grain in the barns and the livestock to John de Traylly for £40, taken the winter crop and kept the cart horses, the meat in the larder and the sheep, and had done as he pleased with all of it.

Robert is said to have been Baron of Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire. He and Joyce had at least two sons, the younger of whom was William.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard descends from Robert through his son William la Zouche Mortimer (died 1337). Several generations further down, the line probably passes through John Washburn (died 1547), a descendant of William; the reasons for that link are set out in Notes.

Notes

Sources

Robert’s title of Baron of Richard’s Castle, his marriage to Joyce, and the ages of his sons are given by Douglas Richardson in Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), in the entry for his son William la Zouche Mortimer. The 1276 case is printed, in Latin and in English, in Jenkinson and Formoy’s Select Cases in the Exchequer of Pleas (Selden Society, vol. 48), under the year 1276. The plea roll describes Robert only as the husband of William la Zouche’s daughter and heir, which is how Richardson describes this couple.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is given here as probable.