♂Thomas Botetourt

Thomas Botetourt (died 1322) was an English knight of Upton in Norfolk and Great Bradley in Suffolk, the son and heir of John Botetourt, 1st Lord Botetourt^W, but died two years before his father and so never came into the barony. He was the eighteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Botetourt (died 1386).

Life

Before 1318 Thomas married Joan de Somery, born about 1292, a daughter of Sir Roger de Somery of Dudley in Staffordshire. They had a son, John, born about 1317 or 1318, and a daughter, Maud. In 1316 he was one of five men, Bartholomew de Badlesmere^W among them, who came into Chancery and acknowledged a debt of £1,166 13s. 4d. to William de Roos of Helmsley, which was afterwards paid. In 1317 he and Thomas de Lovayn, of Essex, with Badlesmere and others, stood surety^W before the king for two men to answer a suit. His seal of 1316 hung from a hook between two small wyverns and bore his arms, a saltire engrailed.

Death

Thomas died shortly before 28 July 1322, when his son was four. When the old lord died on 25 November 1324, the boy became his grandfather’s heir. Joan outlived Thomas by sixteen years.

Lines of descent

From Thomas, the line runs through his son John Botetourt (died 1386), John’s daughter Joyce Botetourt (died 1420), Joyce’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton and then, probably, Joan’s son John Washburn (died 1547). That last step rests on a historian’s identification rather than on a record, and the Notes explain why.

Notes

Sources

Thomas’s marriage, his children, the debt of 1316, the surety of 1317, his seal and the date of his death are given by Douglas Richardson in Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd edition), pp. 341-343, which cites the Close Rolls and the National Archives. His parentage and his son’s ages are also in Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 116, and in the Complete Peerage, vol. II (1912), p. 235, which says that Thomas was his father’s heir apparent and died in his lifetime, in 1322, and gives the first lord’s death on 25 November 1324.

The descent through John Washburn

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