♂William St. Omer

William St. Omer (died between 1277 and 1278) was the husband of Parnel de Lacy, the widow of Ralph de Tony. In the autumn of 1277 he and Parnel were answering a suit together in the Exchequer; by the following summer he was dead, and on 4 August 1278 Parnel, now a widow, granted her manor of Britford, near Salisbury, to Thomas St. Omer. He was the twenty-first great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through Thomas St. Omer (died between 1316 and 1318).

Lands and marriage

William is said to have been a knight, to have held the manors of Brundall in Norfolk and of Bramshaw, to have sat on royal commissions from 1254 to 1271, and to have married Parnel before 15 October 1256. Her father had given Britford to her and Ralph de Tony in frank-marriage^W. In the Michaelmas term^W of 1277 “William de St. Omer and Petronilla his wife” were summoned to answer William de Bradicote in a Norfolk case before the Exchequer of Pleas^W. William died within the year. Thomas St. Omer, to whom Parnel then gave Britford, was probably William’s son by an earlier marriage. Britford was Parnel’s own, from her marriage to Ralph de Tony, and after her gift Thomas held it against her Tony descendants, who later went to law to claim it as their inheritance.

Lines of descent

Both lines run from Thomas through his son William St. Omer (died before 1353) and on down to Thomas Dudley^W (1576–1653), later governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his son Samuel Dudley (about 1608–1683). One comes down through Samuel’s son Stephen Dudley (1654–1735) 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

Marriage and death

The 1277 case is in Select Cases in the Exchequer of Pleas (Selden Society 48, 1932), p. 88, no. 147, which shows William married to Petronilla (Parnel) in Michaelmas term 1277. Parnel’s charter “in widowhood” granting Britford to Thomas, dated 4 August 1278, is no. 1000 in J. L. Kirby, ed., The Hungerford Cartulary, Part Two (Wiltshire Record Society 60, 2007). Together they place his death between the autumn of 1277 and August 1278. His knighthood, his lands, the commissions of 1254 to 1271 and the marriage to Parnel before 15 October 1256 are from F. N. Craig, “Maternal Ancestry of Governor Thomas Dudley”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 140 (1986), p. 219, who cites Knights of Edward I (Harleian Society 83) and the Complete Peerage; Craig spells the Norfolk manor Brundale. Craig names Parnel’s father William de Lacy, where the Victoria County History of Hampshire (vol. 4, p. 624) names Walter de Lacy as the man who granted her Britford.

His son Thomas

That Thomas was William’s son rests on a pedigree memorandum of about 1400 copied twice into the Hungerford Cartulary (no. 1003 and the note after no. 1052), on Blomefield’s History of Norfolk (vol. 5, p. 76), which makes Thomas the son of a William de St. Omer of the time of Henry III, and on Craig (p. 219), who writes that William “is thought to have had an earlier wife, who was mother to his heir Thomas”. The memorandum makes Parnel’s daughter Margaret de Tony the wife of William and the mother of Thomas. That cannot stand beside the 1277 case: a man married to Parnel could not also have married her daughter. The Victoria County History and Craig (p. 220) marry Margaret to Thomas instead, and this page follows them. Thomas’s mother’s name is not known. Some online trees split William into two men, a father married to Parnel and a son married to Margaret; no source names two Williams.