♂Thomas Lygon

Thomas Lygon was an English landowner of Great Malvern and Madresfield, in Worcestershire, in the fifteenth century. He was the sixteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Richard Lygon (died 1512).

Thomas is said to have sat for Worcestershire in Parliament as a knight of the shire^W. He married Anne Giffard, the daughter and heiress of Nicholas Giffard of Matson and Cromhall Lygon, in Gloucestershire. Their son Richard was born between 1467 and 1477. He later held Madresfield and Little Mitton, in Worcestershire, and Matson and Giffardes (in Broadwell), in Gloucestershire, and he died at Madresfield on 1 May 1512.

Notes

Sources

Thomas’s lands, his seat for the county, his marriage and his son are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), p. 510, where Thomas appears in the account of his son Richard. Richardson cites Wedgwood’s History of Parliament (1936) for a biography of Thomas. No dates are given for Thomas himself; the fifteenth century follows from Richard’s birth between 1467 and 1477, which Richardson works out from Richard’s age in 1507.

The Giffard marriage in older pedigrees

Older accounts set out the family differently. Burke’s Peerage (1869) makes the husband of Anne Beauchamp, Richard’s wife, the grandson of the Thomas Lygon “who acquired the estate of Madresfield with the heiress of Bracy”. A Lygon pedigree in James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family (1907), drawn from Grazebrook and the heralds’ visitation^W of Worcestershire of 1569, begins with Thomas Lygon and Joan Bracey, whose marriage it places in the early fifteenth century, and shows a Richard Lygon as the husband of the Giffard heiress, with the Lygon who married Anne Beauchamp in the generation after. Richardson names the Giffard heiress’s husband Thomas, and this account follows Richardson.