♂Thomas Berkeley

Thomas Berkeley (died 20 April 1443) was an English esquire who held the manors of Tickenham, in Somerset, and Welham, in Leicestershire, in the right of his wife, the heiress Elizabeth Seymour. He was the seventeenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Cecily Berkeley (about 1441 – 1514).

Marriage and lands

Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Seymour married before 1421, when she was no more than about fifteen years old. She was the one daughter and heiress of Thomas Seymour, the son and heir apparent of Sir Edmund Seymour of Chelvey and Tickenham, and Thomas held her lands jure uxoris^W, in his wife’s right.

Elizabeth, or her mother, was one of the co-heirs of Elizabeth’s uncle, John Farway, some time between 1419 and 1421. In or after 1421 Thomas conveyed lands in Cornwall, probably Elizabeth’s share of the manor of Penhallam^W in Jacobstow, to Walter Stawell, the husband of her aunt Joan Farway, and took in exchange Joan’s share of the manor of Furnax, in Warminster, Wiltshire, which had come to Joan and Elizabeth as co-heirs of Lady Alice Stury.

Death and heirs

The couple had a son, John, and a daughter, Cecily. Thomas died on 20 April 1443, and Elizabeth was still living, his widow, in 1445. John, their son and heir, held Tickenham after them and died shortly before 11 May 1479; Cecily, then the wife of James Ashe, was his heir, and through her Tickenham passed to the Ashes.

Notes

Sources

Thomas’s marriage, lands, the Cornwall exchange, his children and his death are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry, 2nd edition (2011), vol. 1, p. 175, a compiled genealogy. Richardson cites the Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, vol. 3 (1835), pp. 588–594; Notes and Queries, 4th series, vol. 7 (1871), pp. 536–538; the Benolte visitation of Somerset (printed 1885), p. 108; Feudal Aids, vol. 4 (1906), pp. 381 and 427; the Victoria County History of Leicestershire, vol. 5 (1964), pp. 330–336, and of Wiltshire, vol. 8 (1965), pp. 96–103; the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 23 (2004), p. 57; and Foundations 2(6) (2008), pp. 390–422. For his son John he cites the inquisition post mortem^W taken in 1479 (National Archives C 140/70/40).

His parentage

Thomas’s parents are not known. Richardson notes that Emery’s Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales (2006) identifies him in error as the son of Sir Maurice Berkeley (died 1460), of Beverstone, Gloucestershire.

His name

Richardson calls him Thomas Berkeley, Esq. A Furneaux family pedigree dated 1423/44, which Richardson quotes, names the husband of Margaret Farway’s daughter as “Johanni de Bercley” (John de Berkeley), and the Furneaux pedigree in the Benolte visitation calls her the wife of “Berkley of Tykenham.”

The Cornwall lands

Richardson does not name the Cornish lands Thomas gave up; he presumes they were Elizabeth’s share of Penhallam. The exchange is dated only “in or after 1421.”