♂Thomas Corbet

Thomas Corbet, of Leigh in Shropshire, is known only as the father of Margaret Corbet, the wife of William Mitton, a fifteenth-century Staffordshire esquire. He was the fifteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Margaret Corbet.

He appears in the heralds’ visitation^W of Shropshire of 1623, in the Mitton family’s pedigree, where William Mitton’s wife is entered as “Margaretta filia Thomas Corbett de Lee”, Margaret, daughter of Thomas Corbett of Lee. His wife, his parents and his dates are not recorded. Margaret’s husband was born about 1409–11, and the couple had two sons and four daughters.

Lines of descent

Margaret’s daughter Joan became the first wife of John Washbourne. Her son John Washburn (died 1547) is probably the John Washburn of Bengeworth, an identification the Notes explain. The line runs on from him through several generations to Nancy Jane Blanchard.

Notes

Sources

The Mitton pedigree in the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623 (printed by the Harleian Society, vol. 29, 1889, p. 360) names Thomas only in his daughter’s entry: “Margaretta filia Thomas Corbett de Lee”. James Davenport printed the same pedigree in The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), and Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 117, makes Margaret a “daughter of Thomas Corbet, of Leigh”. No record of his birth, marriage or death is known.

Which Thomas Corbet

Richardson notes that other pedigrees give William Mitton’s wife as Margaret Burley. Online family trees also disagree over which Thomas Corbet of Leigh he was, and his own parents are not known. This account follows the Shropshire visitation.

The line below Margaret

That Joan’s son John 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.