♂Sir Thomas Harcourt

Thomas Harcourt (born before 1377, died 6 July 1420) was an English knight of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire who inherited the family’s lands at about forty and held them for only three years, leaving them to a son of ten. He was the sixteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Richard Harcourt (died 1486).

Heir and husband

Thomas was the son of Sir Thomas Harcourt and Maud Grey. He was probably a younger son who became his father’s heir when an elder brother, John, died about 1406. Thomas and Joan Fraunceys married at about that time. They are said to have had five sons, Robert, Richard, John, William and George, and two daughters, Jane and Isabel.

He was most likely the Sir Thomas Harcourt who sat on the commission of the peace for Staffordshire in 1413 and 1415, and who in 1414 was ordered to put down the Lollards^W in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. That was the year in which Sir John Oldcastle’s Lollard followers rose against Henry V^W.

Inheritance and death

His father died on 12 April 1417. The inquest^W on the father’s Staffordshire lands found that he had held Ellenhall of the bishop, and named “Thomas Harcourt jun. chiv.”, aged forty and more, as his son and heir. Thomas may then have been living at Ellenhall.

He died at Stanton Harcourt on 6 July 1420, three years after his father. The inquest held at Stafford that September found that he too had held Ellenhall of the bishop, and that his heir was his son Robert, aged ten years and more.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Richard Harcourt (died 1486). One comes down through Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and the other to Nathaniel’s wife, Anna Smith (1764–1825); the two lines meet again in their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Sources for his life

His age comes from the inquisitions taken after his father’s death in 1417 (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 20, no. 723: “Thomas junior, knight, his son and heir, is aged 40 years and more”). J. C. Wedgwood’s “Harcourt of Ellenhall” (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 1914, pp. 197–198) abstracts the Staffordshire inquest held at Eccleshall in May 1417, which gives the father’s death on 12 April. Thomas’s own death comes from the inquisition held at Stafford on 6 September 1420 (Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. 21, no. 500: “He died on 6 July last”); Wedgwood’s abstract of it names the heir as “Robert Harcourt … his son and heir aged 10 years and more”, and Wedgwood places the death at Stanton. The inquisitions of that September (vol. 21, nos. 500–503) write him “Thomas Harecourt, knight”, the spelling the record uses.

An elder brother and the marriage

Wedgwood thought that Thomas’s father may have had an elder son, John, by an earlier marriage, and wrote that a John de Harcourt “seems to have died in 1406, … after which time Thomas, till then the second son, married the daughter of Sir Robert Fraunceys”. He held that Maud Grey “was undoubtedly the mother of his heir Thomas”. No marriage record survives; the date is Wedgwood’s inference. A Latin descent of the Harcourts written into the cartulary of Ranton Priory names Thomas’s father’s wife as Alice, daughter of the lord Grey of Rotherfield, and Thomas’s wife as “Johannam, filiam Domini Roberti Fraunceys, militis” (Collections for a History of Staffordshire, vol. 4, p. 272).

The commissions of 1413 to 1415

Wedgwood wrote: “I think it must have been his son, another Sir Thomas, who was on the Staffordshire Commission of the Peace in 1413 and 1415, and was instructed to suppress the Lollards in Counties Bucks, and Oxon in 1414.” He also thought Thomas was living at Ellenhall and a justice of the peace for Staffordshire when his father died. Both are his reading, not a record naming this Thomas.

His wife and children

Earlier writers (Canon Bridgeman and Collins) gave Thomas a second wife, Eleanor Lewknor; Wedgwood wrote that Eleanor married his brother Richard Harcourt of Saredon, and that “Jane Fraunceys was his only wife”. Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), p. 177, calls the daughter Jane “daughter of her father’s 2nd marriage” and her mother “Jane (or Joan) Fraunceys”. Only Robert is named in the inquest; the other children come from compiled genealogies, Richardson’s among them.