♂William de Say

William de Say (died 1177) was an English landholder of Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire and Saham in Norfolk. He was the twenty-fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Beatrice de Say.

Family

By the Complete Peerage’s account, William was the elder son of William de Say and Beatrice de Mandeville, the only sister of Geoffrey de Mandeville^W, first Earl of Essex. The earl had brought his sister to England from Normandy after her divorce from Hugh Talebot and married her to the elder William, whom the chronicle of Walden Abbey^W calls “ferocis animi viro et bellicoso”, a man of fierce and warlike spirit. He was killed at the siege of Burwell Castle^W in August 1144. In her gifts to Walden Abbey she remembered the souls of her husband and of “Willelmi de Say filii mei”, William de Say her son.

Death and heirs

William died in 1177, it seems shortly before 1 August, leaving two daughters, Beatrice and Maud, as his coheirs. They passed into the king’s wardship, and a royal survey of 1185 records that Kimbolton, “que fuit de feodo Willelmi de Say”, which was of William de Say’s fee, was in the king’s hand with his daughters, in the keeping of Richard Ruffus. Beatrice married Geoffrey Fitz Peter^W, and Maud married William de Boclande, of Buckland in Berkshire. On 25 January 1184/5 the two couples divided William’s inheritance by an agreement made in the king’s court at Melksham. Richardson’s compiled Magna Carta Ancestry names Beatrice as his eldest daughter and co-heiress, and the line from him to Nancy Jane Blanchard probably runs through her.

Notes

Sources

William’s parentage, his lands, his death in 1177 and his two daughters and their marriages are from the Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 5, 1926, pp. 120–121, under Essex), which cites the chronicle and cartulary of Walden, the Rotuli de Dominabus of 1185 and the final agreement made at Melksham. The Complete Peerage does not name his wife.

His date of death

The 1185 survey says that Kimbolton and the daughters had been in Richard Ruffus’s keeping for seven years and from August to All Saints. From this the Complete Peerage concludes that William died shortly before 1 August 1177.

The link to Beatrice de Say

Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (BOHUN 1, p. 99) gives Beatrice, eldest daughter and co-heiress of William de Say, as the first wife of Geoffrey Fitz Peter, 4th Earl of Essex, and the mother of Maud de Mandeville, the line that runs on to Nancy Jane Blanchard. This is a compiled genealogy’s statement, and the record behind it is not named. The Complete Peerage gives the two daughters, Beatrice and Maud, but does not name their mother.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton 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 probable.