♂Roger de Somery

Roger de Somery (died 1291) was an English lord of Dudley Castle^W in Staffordshire, the father of John, Lord Somery, and of the two daughters who shared the Somery estates after John died without children. He was the nineteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Joan de Somery.

Life

Roger and his wife, said to be Agnes, had a son, John, and Roger also had two daughters, Margaret and Joan. Roger died in 1291, and John, then thirteen, succeeded him at Dudley. Joan, the younger daughter, married Thomas Botetourt, the son and heir of John Botetourt, 1st Lord Botetourt, and through her a share of her father’s lands passed in time to the Botetourts.

The family

Roger’s son, John de Somery^W, served in the expeditions to Scotland between 1301 and 1310, was made a Knight of the Bath in 1306, and from 1308 was summoned to Parliament as a baron, Lord Somery. He married a woman named Lucy and died without children on 29 December 1321. His barony ended with him, and his two sisters became his co-heirs: Margaret, then 32, inherited Dudley Castle, and Joan, then 30, was already the widow of Thomas Botetourt.

Lines of descent

Roger’s line to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through his daughter Joan de Somery, her son John Botetourt, John’s daughter Joyce Botetourt, and Joyce’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton, and then, probably, to Joan’s son John Washburn (died 1547). That last step is the one that rests on a historian’s identification rather than on a record; the Notes explain why.

Notes

Sources

Roger’s wife, Agnes, the year of his death (his son succeeded him in 1291, aged thirteen), John’s career, marriage and death, and the two sisters are given in the Complete Peerage, 1st edition, vol. VII (1896), p. 190, under SOMERY, whose note names Margaret and Joan and gives their ages at their brother’s death. Joan’s marriage to Thomas Botetourt is in the Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. II (1912), p. 235, which calls her the sister and co-heiress “of the considerable estates” of John, Lord Somery, and Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 116, names her as a daughter of Roger de Somery, Baron of Dudley. Neither work names Roger’s own parents.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joan Mitton, a great-granddaughter of Roger’s great-granddaughter Joyce Botetourt, 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.