♂William Mitton

William Mitton was a fifteenth-century Staffordshire esquire, lord of the manor of Weston under Lizard, a village on the Shropshire border, who was left an orphan as a boy and came into lands in five counties. He was the fourteenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Joan Mitton and, probably, Joan’s son John Washburn (died 1547).

Early life

William was the only son of Sir Richard Mitton of Weston and his wife, Margaret Peshale, and was born at Weston about 1410. He was still a child when his father died on 10 November 1418. His mother’s father, Sir Adam Peshale, died the following October, and in August 1420 his mother and her mother, Joyce Botetourt, died within a week of each other.

Through his grandmother Joyce, his line is traced back by way of the Botetourt lords of Weoley to Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford^W, one of the twenty-five barons chosen in 1215 to see that King John kept the terms of Magna Carta.

Lands and offices

On 22 March 1437 William was given seisin^W, the legal possession, of the lands that had belonged to his parents and his grandmother Joyce, in Staffordshire, Shropshire, Essex, Kent and Middlesex. Besides Weston he held Bobbington, Hagley in Rugeley and Tamhorn in Fisherwick in Staffordshire, the last two having come to the family as his mother’s marriage portion, with West Tilbury in Essex and Henhurst in Kent.

He is said to have served as sheriff of Staffordshire and Shropshire and to have sat in Parliament for Staffordshire as a knight of the shire^W. He is said, too, to have favored the Lancastrian party in the Wars of the Roses and to have been wasteful of the estate he had inherited. He was still living in 1489.

Marriage and children

He married Margaret Corbet, a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh. They had two sons, John and Richard, and four daughters, Anne, Jane, Joan and Eleanor. Joan became the first wife of John Washbourne, lord of the manor of Wichenford in Worcestershire.

The family

John, the couple’s son and heir, served as sheriff of Staffordshire. Through his first wife, Anne Swinnerton, a daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Swinnerton, he held the Staffordshire manors of Hilton and Essington, and after her death in 1470 he married Jane Middlemore, the widow of Thomas Brome of Woodlow. He died in February 1499/1500 and was buried at Weston under Lizard.

Notes

Sources

William Mitton is known from the heralds’ pedigrees of his family and from Douglas Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), which gives his lands, his offices, the seisin of 1437 and his being alive in 1489, with references to the Close Rolls of 1435–1441 and to Wedgwood’s History of Parliament (1936). Richardson gives his age as ten or twelve in 1421, which places his birth about 1409–11, and gives the dates of his parents’ and grandparents’ deaths. The Mitton pedigree in the Visitation of Shropshire of 1623 gives his wife as “Margaretta filia Thomas Corbett de Lee”; James Davenport printed that pedigree in The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), and Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2011) agrees on the marriage and the children. The remark on his politics and his estate is from Davis’s Ancestry of Nicholas Davis (1956), as Richardson cites it. No record of his death is known.

His wife’s name

Richardson notes that other pedigrees state that William Mitton married Margaret Burley. This account follows the Shropshire visitation, which makes her a daughter of Thomas Corbet of Leigh.

Joan’s son John

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. In 1914 another writer on the Evesham Washbournes judged it a reasonable probability but no certainty, so the descent through him is given here as probable.