♂Stephen Popham

Stephen Popham^W was a fifteenth-century knight of Farington Popham in Hampshire, England, who sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire^W for Hampshire, served as sheriff of Hampshire and of Wiltshire, and owned ships. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter who is said to have married Humphrey Forster of Harpsden in Oxfordshire.

In Parliament and at sea

Born about 1393, he held lands at West Dean, Popham and Binsted in Hampshire, at Alvington in Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, and at Fisherton Anger and Salisbury in Wiltshire. In 1442 he supported a proposal in Parliament for systematic patrols against piracy, and shortly afterwards he is said to have been chosen as chief commander of a force of 565 men that policed the English Channel. He had ships of his own: one of them, the Cokke William, was requisitioned to carry the entourage of Margaret of Anjou^W to Southampton.

Marriages and heirs

He married twice: first, before 1427, Margaret Reade, the heiress of Nicholas Reade of Cherestaunton in Somerset, and later Beatrice Bohun, a daughter of Sir John Bohun of Midhurst in Sussex. He had four daughters and no son, and when he died on 14 November 1444, leaving a will, they became his heirs together. After his death his daughter Elizabeth, from his first marriage, and her husband, John Wadham, took Beatrice and others to the Court of Chancery^W over “the manor of Fisherton, Wiltshire, which the said Sir Stephen agreed to settle on the said Elizabeth at her marriage”.

Another daughter married Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, and through her the Popham arms, two gold bucks’ heads shown face-on on a red band across the top of a silver shield, came into the Forster shield, where the heralds still showed them, quartered^W, at their visitation^W of Berkshire in 1566.

Notes

The sources

Almost everything known of his life comes from Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005, pages 672–673), whose account draws on the calendars of the Patent Rolls, the Victoria County Histories of Hampshire and Wiltshire, lists of early Chancery proceedings, several heralds’ visitations, and the histories of Parliament by Wedgwood (1936) and by Roskell and others (1992). Richardson gives his birth as about 1393, from his age of 25 in 1418, and makes him the son and heir of Henry Popham of Popham, a sheriff of Hampshire, by his first wife, Joan. The 1566 pedigree of the Forsters of Aldermaston, as printed by W. C. Metcalfe in 1885 (page 12), calls him “Sir Stephen Popham of Farington Popham, co. South’ton, Kt.”, and says that Humphrey Forster of Harpsden, esquire, “mar. the fourth da. and one of the heirs of” him. It prints no dates.

Two wives and four daughters

The first wife’s name comes from the Chancery suit, which Richardson abstracts from the published lists of early Chancery proceedings: it describes Elizabeth, the wife of John Wadham, as the daughter and heir of Sir Stephen and of his wife Margaret, herself the daughter and heir of Nicholas Rede, and names Beatrice as the late wife of Sir Stephen. A visitation of Somerset calls the first wife Elizabeth, a daughter of Richard Read. A visitation pedigree of Sussex names Beatrice Bohun as Sir Stephen’s wife and, as Richardson reports it, as the mother of his three younger daughters, whom Richardson names as Margery, the wife of Thomas Hampden; a second Elizabeth, the third daughter; and Alice, the wife of Humphrey Forster. Earlier writers divided the daughters differently: Wedgwood put all four in the first marriage, and Roskell two in each. The 1566 Berkshire pedigree names neither wife and leaves blank the given name of the daughter who married Humphrey Forster. Beatrice was living on 5 February 1446.

The Cokke William

Richardson prints the year of the requisition as 1454, ten years after Sir Stephen’s death. Margaret of Anjou crossed from France to England in 1445 for her marriage to Henry VI.