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Ancestry of Dorothy Oakley (est 1610 - ?)
The SHELDON Family
Here we describe the SHELDON family of CHRISTIAN SHELDON, who was the mother of URSULA SEVERNE who married EDWARD OAKLEY. The SHELDONs were wealthy landowners, their wealth being based on sheep farming and the marketing of wool, supplemented by judicious marriages and land purchases. Their surname derived from the place name Sheldon, which comes from two Old English words meaning ‘shelf’ and ‘hill’. We were fortunate in finding considerable information about many members of the SHELDON family, not only our direct ancestors, so we are giving an expansive picture of the family
The SHELDON arms and pedigree were first recorded in the Herald’s Visitation of Worcestershire for 1569, and subsequently in later Visitations of that county and of Warwickshire, in Sir William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (p.584), and in Collections for the History of Worcestershire (pp.64,145) by Dr Treadway Nash, vicar of St Peter’s, Droitwich, in 1781. The arms, which pun on the family name, were ‘Sable, a fess between three sheldrakes Argent’, i.e. a black shield with a horizontal silver band between three silver sheldrake ducks.
 (from VCH for Worcestershire) |
RALPH SHELDON and his Family
The first persons shown in the pedigree were RALPH SHELDON and his sons Richard and MORRIS, who were said to live in Rowley Regis in Staffordshire, which has since been absorbed into the industrial region on the west side of Birmingham. They would have lived there about 200 years before the pedigree was recorded. The Herald Sir William Dugdale observed that William SHELDON, a great grandson of MORRIS SHELDON, held land in the Lordship of Birmingham, and he therefore presumed that they descended from a younger branch of the de SHELDON family who lived within the Lordship at Sheldon in Warwickshire, about 12 miles east of Rowley Regis. This de SHELDON family held half a knight’s fee there until the middle of the 14th century (Skipp, Discovering Sheldon). However, no direct evidence has been found of a connection with our SHELDON family.
No documentary evidence is available for RALPH and his two sons, but Richard’s son John is presumably the John SHELDON of Rowley Regis who was named in a deed of 1416 held at Dudley Archives in Worcestershire (deed 1172). This was a grant of houses and yards by William Anthony, gent, of Dudley to John SHELDON and two others. “John SHELDON esquire” was also recorded to be at Rowley in 1430.
Nothing is known of MORRIS SHELDON except that he had a son JOHN.
JOHN SHELDON and his Family
Dugdale noted that JOHN SHELDON married the daughter of JOHN COTTON of Cotton Hall in Cheshire, and that he lived in the time of Henry IV (1399-1413) at Abberton in Worcestershire, 20 miles south of Rowley Regis. E.A.B. Barnard in The Sheldons, which is very informative about the family, says that JOHN leased the manor of Abberton from the Abbot of Pershore (p.3). Barnard’s working papers, Sheldon Miscellanea, can be consulted at Birmingham Reference Library.
The next two generations both included the name Ralph, but Dugdale and the Herald’s Visitations showed them as one person. The correct pedigree with two successive RALPHS was given by Barnard, by Dr Nash, and in a booklet at Beoley church in Worcestershire (Pearson), where the SHELDONS lived later. The first of the two RALPHS, RALPH SHELDON, is JOHN’s only known son.
RALPH SHELDON and his Family
Barnard tells us that RALPH SHELDON, the son of JOHN of Abberton, married JOYCE RUDING, an heiress descended from a family of considerable antiquity in Worcestershire who owned property to the north of Abberton in Beoley, Feckenham, Hanbury and Martin Hussingtree (p.3). The Victoria County History (VCH) for Worcestershire shows the arms of Ruding of Hussingtree as ‘Argent, on a bend between two lions rampant Sable a wyvern volant of the field’, i.e. a silver shield with a silver flying two-legged dragon on a diagonal black band, between two black lions standing on one leg (Vol. IV, p.137), and they were subsequently quartered in the SHELDON arms. The Visitations do not go back far enough to include JOYCE, but her father may be the William RUDING who according to Nash inherited land in Feckenham parish, as she gave the name William to her eldest son.
 (from VCH for Worcestershire) |
Apart
from William, the
SHELDON pedigree gives the other children of RALPH and JOYCE as Richard,
RALPH, John
of London, Daniel of Spetchley near Worcester, another John, and Morris.
The eldest son William inherited his father’s manor of Abberton (VCH, Vol. IV, p.5), but he established himself at Balford Hall
in Beoley in the reign of Edward IV (1460-1483). Beoley is pronounced ‘Beeley’,
and means ‘bee wood’. William bought Benyt’s Place in that parish in
1488. During the Wars of the Roses, William supported the Yorkists at the battle
of Bosworth in 1485, and as a result of the definitive Lancastrian victory there
he was deprived of his property, but it was restored to him before he died in
1517 (VCH, Vol. IV, p.14, note 25). An Inquisition Post Mortem (IPM) was
held at Pershore, a town 5 miles south of Abberton, and one of those providing
evidence was John RUDING of Hussingtree, gentleman, who presumably was a cousin.
It was said that William owned Balford Hall and 7 other houses and 460 acres of
land in Beoley, and property involving 20 houses in the city of Worcester and a
further 600 acres elsewhere in the county, including King’s Norton and
Northfield in the Lordship of Birmingham, and Feckenham and Pershore (Chan. Inq.
p.m., Ser. 2, clix, 87). In his will (PCC, 35 Holder) he made bequests to the
churches at Beoley and Abberton and to Pershore Abbey, and he bequeathed all his
lands to his brother RALPH SHELDON.
RALPH married PHILIPPA the daughter and co-heiress of BALDWIN HEATH, and her ancestry is described next.
The HEATH Family
PHILIPPA HEATH’s pedigree according to Dugdale is as follows.
The Ancestry of PHILIPPA HEATH
PHILIPPA’s father
BALDWIN HEATH lived at Ford Hall, a moated house near Tanworth-in-Arden, just
over the Warwickshire border 3 miles east of Beoley. BALDWIN’S father THOMAS
lived nearby at Aspley, and his grandfather JOHN HEATH came from Coleshill near
Birmingham. BALDWIN’S wife AGNES was the daughter and co-heiress of JOHN and
JOAN GROVE of Ford Hall, which is how that property came to BALDWIN. The HEATH
arms were ‘Vert, on a chief Argent, three cinquefoils Azure’, i.e. a
green shield with three blue five-petalled flower heads on a silver band
occupying the upper third of the shield; and the GROVE arms were ‘Argent, a
chevron between three pineapples pendant Gules’, i.e. a silver shield with a
red chevron between three pendant red pineapples. They were shown quartered in
the SHELDON arms in the 1619 Visitation of Warwickshire.
 with SHELDON and RUDING (from 1619 Visitation) |
 Chancellor to Queen Mary (from Strong’s The English Icon) |
Having described the HEATH family, we turn now to PHILIPPA HEATH and her husband RALPH SHELDON.
RALPH and PHILIPPA SHELDON and their Family
According to the inscription on RALPH’s tomb in Beoley church, RALPH and PHILIPPA SHELDON had 11 children. The eldest son was named William after RALPH’s elder brother, the second son (our ancestor) was named BALDWIN after PHILIPPA’s father, and a daughter was named Joyce after RALPH’s mother. From wills and pedigrees we know of other children named Thomas, Francis, Henry, Mary, Elizabeth, Alice and Isabel.RALPH inherited property in Abberton and Beoley, but he also became associated with Broadway in the south of Worcestershire, the town in which EDWARD OAKLEY was born later. RALPH took a lease in Broadway in 1509, and he became one of the most important tenants of the Abbot of Pershore. Many abbeys and monasteries had got into financial difficulties, and in 1533, a quarrel occurred between the Abbot and his tenants, including RALPH SHELDON, which originated from the measures taken by the Abbot to lift his debts (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vi, 298, cited in VCH, Vol. IV, p.38). Another dispute arose in the same year, in which RALPH accused the Abbot of not keeping his courts at Abberton and so bringing the town into danger of decay, of trying to force him to give up his farms, and of interfering with rights of common. The Abbot answered that he had been obliged to move the courts in consequence of the threats used against him by RALPH SHELDON (same reference, cited in VCH, Vol. IV, p.5, note 13).
The outcome of these disputes is not known, but it appears that RALPH and the Abbot were not bitter enemies, and that of necessity they continued to meet for discussion of their affairs. This was in the time of great religious tension during the Dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their property. One of these discussions was reported on 22 April 1538 by a so-called groom of the King’s Privy Chamber, who in fact was a spy for the king (Letters and Papers, xiii, Pt.1, 303-4, cited in Barnard, The Sheldons, pp.8,9). They had been speaking of the dissolution of an abbey, and in support of this action of the king against the Roman Catholic Church, RALPH was reported to have said “O good Lord, what a gift hath God given unto the King and his noble Council now to perceive the usurpation of the Church, wherewith we have been long deluded and mocked, and in especial in the usurpation of the Church of Rome”. “Ah,” said the Abbot in reply, “And I have loved you so well and taken you for so true a man and so substantial a man. Well, well, I will love you no more.” Then the Abbot, leaning over the table, said “I trust and I pray God that I may die one of the children of Rome”.
The Abbey of Pershore was dissolved by Henry VIII, as were all the other abbeys and monasteries, and the Abbot was pensioned in January 1539/40, but beforehand he had arranged matters to suit himself and some of the local gentry. In 1535 he had granted a lease for 63 years of the manor house and extensive fields in Broadway to Anthony Daston, who later became the second husband of RALPH’S granddaughter Anne SHELDON, and on 5 September 1538 he had granted the lease for 80 years of the rest of the manor of Broadway to RALPH SHELDON (VCH, Vol. IV, p.38). The Abbot benefited because he received a large fine or down payment, whereas the annual rent, which would go to the Crown after the Dissolution, was g. In this way the gentry tenants were also benefited. RALPH SHELDON of Abberton esquire made his will on 28 March 1545, and Barnard notes (p.9) that despite his reported remarks against the Catholic Church, he bequeathed his soul “unto Almighty God and to our Lady Saint Mary and to all the Holy Company”, and he directed that “every priest that shall be at my dirge and mass to have 12d, And every clerk that can sing to have 4d, and to other that cannot sing 2d. I will that a priest shall sing for me, my father and mother, my brother William and BALDWIN HEATH and AGNES HEATH’S souls and all expired souls, Immediately after my decease five years in our Lady Chapel at Beoley or Abberton at the discretion of my wife and William SHELDON my son”. The formulaic phrases and the references to “our Lady Mary” continue the medieval form adopted before the split from Rome. They are typically Catholic, not Protestant, implying that, despite his comments to the Abbot, he remained Catholic.
RALPH’s long will tells us much about his wealth, and his desire to provide estates for his younger sons in addition to his heir. He had bought the manor of Abberton in the previous year for his sons William and Francis (VCH, Vol. IV, p.5), and at William’s request it had been settled on Francis, but in his will RALPH required that his wife PHILIPPA should be allowed to take the profits of the manor and to continue to live rent-free in the manor house during her lifetime. She was also to have two leases and 100 marks (£67), in addition to her jointure of lands to the clear value of £40. In a nice touch, RALPH added “I will that my said wife shall have during her life my pools at Broadway without any rent paying for the same, to fish at her pleasure and liberty”.
The eldest son William was bequeathed “all such coals as be gotten at Coleorton”, which is about 50 miles away in Leicestershire. This was an interesting investment, as coal was not in common use until the next century. Few other bequests were made to William, because he inherited the Beoley property as the eldest son and heir. His wife Mary was bequeathed £20 for their daughters.
RALPH had many other properties to bequeath. His second son BALDWIN (our ancestor) lived at Broadway, and he was bequeathed the substantial lease within the manor that had been obtained from the Abbot in 1538. He was also to receive £100, and lands to the clear value of 10 marks for his son William. BALDWIN’s daughter CHRISTIAN and sons Ralph, Anthony and William were each bequeathed £10.
To his son Thomas, RALPH bequeathed all his lands in the city of Worcester and in widely scattered places, some near Pershore, in Upton upon Severn to the south west, near Beoley, and near Bridgnorth in Shropshire, 30 miles north west of Abberton. Thomas was also bequeathed the lease of the parsonage of Wickwar in Gloucestershire, about 45 miles to the south west, and he was not to sell any of his inheritance. He was given £200 provided he left Worcester and repaid his debts, and it is possible that these debts resulted from business relating to Pershore Abbey that he had conducted in that city in 1541. He had been MP for Worcester in 1542 and in 1545 (Bindoff, 1509-1558, pp.305,306), but he did leave there and he settled in Childswickham near Broadway, where his descendants continued to live (Nash, Vol. I, p.64).
RALPH’s son Francis was bequeathed 100 marks, a lease from Tewkesbury Abbey, and a croft and pasture for 500 sheep in Broadway, for which he was to pay BALDWIN £7 a year rent. Francis’s descendants continued at Abberton until the early 19th century (VCH, Vol. IV, p.5). RALPH’s son Henry was not mentioned in the will, possibly because he had recently been granted a manor near Abberton. Henry died in 1558, and his young heir John died soon afterwards. Thomas’s daughter Mary was to have £6.13.4 when she married, and leases from Lord Windsor were to be sold to provide money for William’s son Ralph (V), BALDWIN’s son Ralph, and Thomas’s sons Ralph and Thomas.
RALPH’s daughter Mary was to have 400 marks “for the preferment of her marriage”, his daughters Alice and Joyce were each bequeathed £20, and his daughter Elizabeth was to have the lease of land near Droitwich. Joyce’s husband John Rugeley was excused the repayment of a loan, and Elizabeth’s husband William Lench was forgiven rent that he owed. John Fulwood, the son of PHILIPPA’s sister Joan, was bequeathed the lease of half the manor of Aspley near where he lived at Ford Hall. Bequests of £4 were made to RALPH’S brother John, £1 to his brother Richard’s son-in-law, £6.13.4 to poor tenants, and a similar sum for mending highways near Abberton and Beoley, 5 shillings to his women servants, and 6 shillings and 8 pence and coals to his ‘waiting men’.
RALPH’s wife PHILIPPA and his eldest son William were made executors and residuary legatees. He died in Abberton on 21 December 1546 and was buried at Beoley on the 16 January following, and his will was proved at the PCC (28 Alen) on 11 February.
PHILIPPA did not survive long to enjoy her fishing, as she died within the next two years. She had little land to bequeath, but she had other valuable possessions which tell us about the family lifestyle. Her eldest son William was to have a basin and a ewer of silver, a set of 12 apostle spoons, and a double gilt spoon which Barnard presumes may have had a representation of Mary or a patron saint (p.6). William was also to receive a double gilt goblet and 6 gilt cups, a featherbed of down, various items of linen, the greatest pot in the house, and the biggest pan. In addition, he was to have “all those sheep that are now at Combe and all my wool at Broadway and Combe if God call me, And if I live, then to pay me for it with all the right and interest that I have in the said farm”. Finally he was to have her best diamond and a ring, and his wife was to have a little diamond.
PHILIPPA’s son Henry was bequeathed 6 spoons, a silver saltcellar, a little gilt cup with a cover, a ring, two feather beds and bedclothes and other linen, 2 pots and 2 pans, and 6 oxen, 6 cows, 100 sheep and 8 pigs. Her son Thomas was to have linen and 6 oxen, 6 cows, 50 sheep and 6 pigs; his daughter was to receive £40 in addition to RALPH’S bequest to her; and his son Ralph was to be kept at school for 2 years and his son Thomas for one year and then to be apprenticed and paid a wage. PHILIPPA’s son Francis was bequeathed 100 sheep and all her sheep at Broadway, and the rest of her plate and household goods. Her sister Joan was given 4 silver spoons, 10 ewes and one of her best gowns or a frock, and Joan’s husband John Fulwood was to have a gold ring and £3.6.8, and their son John a similar sum that he owed for rent. PHILIPPA’s ‘daughter Lench’s children’ (i.e. Elizabeth’s children) were bequeathed £5, her ‘daughter Rugeley’s children’ (i.e. Joyce’s children) were given £4, and all the rest of her clothes were to be shared among her daughters. Her brother-in-law Richard SHELDON was bequeathed £4, Gillian RUDING £2, her servant Margot 10 shillings, all her other women servants 3 shillings and 4 pence, and all her tenants a quarter of malt.
Her sons William and Francis were to be executors and residual legatees, and they proved the will at the PCC (23 Populwell) on 30 January 1548/9. There was no mention in the will of her son BALDWIN, because he had died relatively young on 5 July 1548. His PCC will was listed on the same page as hers, and had been proved 20 days earlier as we shall see.
There was no mention in PHILLIPA’s will of her daughter Mary, who had been a trouble to the family. The story is surprising, as told in official documents of the complaint made by PHILIPPA and her eldest son William at the Court of Star Chamber against Dame Ursula Knightley of Offchurch near Warwick. Apparently, Dame Ursula had taken Mary into her service at the request of PHILIPPA’s husband RALPH, and while there the girl had engaged herself to marry one of the Dame’s servants named Sylvestre. When RALPH died, PHILIPPA sent Mary to live at Balford Hall in Beoley, and from there Mary secretly informed Dame Ursula that she was pregnant by Sylvestre, and she asked to be taken away as she did not want her mother to find out. Dame Ursula wrote to William, then in London, and told him the story, saying she would take Mary before the crime was publicly known and be like a mother to her. William refused, and sent Mary to the house of John and Alice Fox, but Mary escaped and came to Dame Ursula at Offchurch, and of her own free will married Sylvestre.
The subject of the Star Chamber complaint was that six of Dame Ursula’s tenants rode to John Fox’s house and took Mary away, and that Dame Ursula had been at fault in allowing Mary to become pregnant, and in persuading her to marry the servant (Star Chamber 2/20/94, cited in Barnard’s Sheldon Miscellanea). The outcome of the case is not known, but the pedigrees show that the marriage to Sylvestre did not last, and that Mary took as her second husband George Ferrers of Wetherley, the third son of Sir Edward Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton, between Birmingham and Warwick. This was an amazing social comeback after such a scandal, as the Ferrers family were well-known aristocrats descending from Norman royalty. Baddesley Clinton was inherited in 1564 by Henry Ferrers, who was an antiquary and provided Dugdale with information for his Antiquities, and he was responsible for remodeling the interior of the house, which is now owned by the National Trust.
Our ancestor was RALPH and PHILIPPA’s second son BALDWIN, and we continue with his line, returning later to the eldest son William SHELDON, who as noted by Barnard was “destined to become the greatest of all the SHELDONS”.
RALPH and PHILIPPA’S second son BALDWIN SHELDON and his Family
On the death of his father RALPH SHELDON in 1546, BALDWIN inherited the large part of the manor of Broadway in Worcestershire that his father had leased in 1538 for 80 years. Barnard wrote: ‘The SHELDONs, therefore, were now well established at Broadway, and they together with the Savages and their near neighbours … the Sambaches, now more or less beneficially and for many succeeding years dominated the immediate district, which from before Domesday had been accustomed to the jurisdiction of the Abbots of Pershore ‘ (pp.97-98). We learned of the Sambaches in The OAKLEY Family, and the Savages were descendants of BALDWIN’s niece Anne SHELDON, daughter of his brother William, as we will see later.
BALDWIN’s name appears in the list, drawn up in 1532, of the forty persons who maintained the wall of the churchyard in Broadway (see The OAKLEY Family), and he lived in the town for most of his adult life. According to Barnard he lived at West End manor house in the south west of the town, which eventually became a barn of West End farm after his descendants built another house nearby. It survived until it was replaced in 1989 by a new house copied from the original building, which had become too decrepit to repair and restore by the new owner.
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The 1569 Herald's Visitation of Worcestershire shows that BALDWIN’s wife JANE was the daughter of JOHN WHEELER of Droitwich, a town north of Worcester. She was probably the sister of the Gilbert WHEELER, gent, who witnessed the will of BALDWIN’s father. In 1543, Gilbert WHEELER had leased the 1-acre Vine Close, part of the property in Droitwich that had belonged to the Austin Friars, and when he made his will in 1580 in Great Rollright to the south east of Weston, he bequeathed to his elder son John 'a lease for certain ‘Bullarie’ [boilery] of salt water in Droitwich' plus other leases. The will was proved at the PCC (2 Darcy) by his widow on 10 January 1580/1.
Droitwich had been a major source of salt since the Iron Age, and the Romans constructed large engineering works near their villa complex there. Operations continued around the river Salwarpe near present-day Vines Park and Friar Street, and salt production in the town did not finally cease until 1922. The drawing shows a 16th century salt works.
 (from Savouring the Past) |
A William WHEELER who also leased part of the Friary land may have been Gilbert's cousin. The Herald's Visitation shows that he married Joan Smith who held the lordship of Martin Hussingtree, and he presented to the church there in her right in 1541. William was the son of a Gilbert WHEELER, and grandson of a John WHEELER of Crouch in Worcestershire. William's eldest son John died unmarried in 1560, and the lordship passed to John's brother Humphrey, who was MP for Droitwich in 1600. The WHEELER arms were shown as 'Or, a chevron between three leopard's faces Sable', i.e. a gold shield with a black chevron between three black leopard’s faces. A more elaborate version appears in the east window of Droitwich church, but BALDWIN’S family do not appear to have quartered these arms (Visitation of Worcestershire, 1634). The family of BALDWIN’S grandmother JOYCE RUDING had also held land in Martin Hussingtree, and part of this land was sold to a Sir Edmund WHEELER.
BALDWIN held the rectory of Stanton, south west of Broadway. Barnard (p.98) provides a translation of a document in Latin to the effect that 'BALDWIN SHELDON gentleman holds by indenture dated 13 July 38 Henry VIII [1546], made to him by Princess Katherine late Queen of England by the advice of her Council, all that rectory of Stanton co. Gloucester, with all tithes and appurtenances belonging to the aforesaid rectory. To have to him from the feast of St Michael the Archangel last past, till the end of the term of 21 years then next following, paying therefor yearly at the usual terms £8, with a clause of re-entry if the rent should happen to be in arrears for the space of two months'. No doubt BALDWIN’S elder brother William SHELDON had had some influence, as he was solicitor to the late queen, as we shall see.
BALDWIN outlived his father by less than two years, and was buried in Broadway on 5 July 1548, leaving seven children, Ralph, Jane, CHRISTIAN, Anthony, William, Elizabeth, and Ursula, all of whom were under 21. He was probably in his mid-40s. Three other children, Catherine, Francis and Robert, had died young, and a daughter Edith was buried on 24 September after his death.
BALDWIN had made his will on 6 June 1548, leaving his wife JANE 10 marks a year plus £40 and her chamber, and 'the sole administration of all my goods and chattels with all ye receipts and revenues of all my lands and tenements and leases as well in Broadway and Stanton as in all other places within the Realm of England, with the guiding and oversight of all my children until such time as they do come to their full ages as is appointed by this my will, with the usage of the ffattes [vats] in Droitwich, if she so long do live sole and unmarried'. She was to account yearly to the executors and overseers so that any surplus revenues could be employed according to the will. If she married before the children came of age, the executors would provide the account to the overseers.
JANE was to have half of his house if she did not remarry, the other half to go to the eldest son Ralph. In addition, Ralph was to have the part of the lands leased in Broadway that BALDWIN was farming himself, and they were to pay rent for the house and land to the second son Anthony. They were to be supplied each year by Anthony with 24 loads of wood from Broadway wood. BALDWIN also bequeathed to Ralph 'all those my lands and tenements which my father hath given me for my child’s part, trusting that my brother William will further assure the same to my said son and his heirs'. This would have included the manor and advowson of Flyford Flavell near Abberton, which had passed to BALDWIN’s father from his brother-in-law John Fulwood.
When Anthony was 21 he was to have the lands and tenements called 'Bentleys' in Tardebigge parish, which BALDWIN had bought from Mr Pauncefoot, and the lease of part of the pastures called ‘Shadow Hills’ which was owned by widow Jeffreys and her son. The parish included Bentley Pauncefoot, which now includes Upper and Lower Bentley farms and a wood called The Shadow on the side of a hill. The lordship was held by the Pauncefoot family, and the Jeffreys family were tenants of the manor house. In 1556 John Pauncefoot sold the site of the manor to Thomas Jeffreys, and in 1560 he sold the rest to BALDWIN’s elder brother William, who bequeathed it to his son Ralph V in 1570. Before 1577 the manor had been sold to Henry Field, through whose niece it passed to Sir William Whorwood, probably the son of Ralph SHELDON’s step-brother Thomas Whorwood (VCH, Vol. III, p.223).
BALDWIN also bequeathed to Anthony the lease in the manor of Broadway. If he married and had a son and died before he came of age, the son would inherit. If he died without issue the eldest son Ralph would inherit, but it is not clear why Anthony was given precedence over his elder brother.
The third son William was bequeathed the mill during the Broadway lease, and the tithes in Stanton once he came of age, paying the rent of the mill to Anthony. He was also to have his choice of the holdings that became vacant in Broadway without any payment apart from the rent, and the tithes of wool and lambs. In addition, if Anthony died without issue, the land in Bentley Pauncefoot would go to William and his heirs. If both died without issue, all the property would go to the eldest son Ralph and his heirs, apart from any jointure they chose to leave to their wives.
The eldest daughter Jane was to have £40 'towards her preferment in marriage so that she follows the advice of my wife and my executors and overseers', to be paid on the day of her marriage. His daughter CHRISTIAN (our ancestor) was to have a similar amount on the same terms, made up of £30 owing to BALDWIN from his father's will, and the £10 his father had bequeathed to CHRISTIAN, both sums being still in the hands of BALDWIN’s brother William . His four younger daughters were to have £20 each when they married. His two servants were left bequests; £4 to Baldwin Cox, and 20 nobles (£6.66) to Margaret Cross, also on their wedding days.
If his wife's accounts showed by the time the sons came of age that the profits on his lands, after providing her jointure and the education and bringing up of the children, amounted to more than the bequests in the will, the excess was to be divided into three parts. One part would be divided between the four youngest daughters on their marriage, another part would go to his sons Ralph and Anthony, and the third part was to go to his wife and his son William. His mother (PHILIPPA) was to 'have the easement in my part of the manor place of Broadway for the ‘couching’ [storage] of her wool & the dwelling of her shepherd, keeping the same with slate and tiles and other reparations during her natural life, desiring her to be good mother to my wife and children'. In fact she must have died soon after him, as her will was proved 20 days after his.
The poor of Broadway were left 20 shillings, and the poor of Evesham were to have a similar amount. The poor of Childswickham, where his brother Thomas lived, were bequeathed 10 shillings. The poor of six neighbouring villages were also remembered, and three shillings and four pence was to be distributed in each place, 'the same to be sent home to their houses and divided by four of the ‘honestest’ men, in every township'. The poor of the market town of Chipping Campden were to share 13 shillings and four pence. This was a much wider distribution of alms than was usual.
BALDWIN’s wife JANE, his brothers Francis and Henry, and his son Anthony were to be the executors, and his brother William and his “cousin Richard SHELDON” (perhaps the son of BALDWIN’s uncle Daniel of Spetchley) were to be the overseers. Each was to be paid a sum which has not been written into the copy of the will, and those who were involved in the later accounting were also to be paid another undisclosed sum. His wife was to retain her position as long as she remained unmarried and continued to produce the account.
The will was witnessed on 29 June by the priest who had written the will, Richard Sambache, gent, THOMAS WHITE, John Sambache, and others. Their inclusion as witnesses of the will of one of the two major landholders in the town indicates that they were of high status in the community. Richard Sambache of Broadway was the father of William Sambache, who was the first husband of our ancestor ELIZABETH WHITE, and the grandfather of William Sambache who married BALDWIN’s granddaughter JANE SEVERNE, CHRISTIAN’s daughter. John Sambache was Richard's son, and THOMAS WHITE was ELIZABETH’s father. William Sambache and ELIZABETH had been married three years earlier (see The OAKLEY Family).
BALDWIN was buried in Broadway six days later, and his brothers proved the will in London (PCC, 23 Populwell) on 10 January 1548/9. The church of St. Eadburga in Broadway, where he was buried, stands to the south of the town near Broadway Court (Broadway Great Farm), where BALDWIN’s niece Anne Daston lived later, and not far from West End Manor.
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BALDWIN and JANE SHELDON’s eldest son Ralph and their second son Anthony and their families will be described later. Their eldest daughter Jane married Nicholas Blaby, as shown in the 1569 Herald's Visitation and in a family tree of BALDWIN’s descendants in Nash's History. Blaby bought a house and land in Broadway from his wife’s cousin Ralph SHELDON (V) in 1577, and he was succeeded in 1593 by his grandson Ralph, son of John Blaby. BALDWIN’S second daughter, our ancestor CHRISTIAN, married JOHN SEVERNE of Shrawley, west of Droitwich, as described in The OAKLEY Family.
BALDWIN and JANE’S third son William SHELDON was shown in the 1569 Visitation and by Nash to have married Margaret Stokes and had a daughter Jane. He was buried in Broadway in 1576 when he would have been only about 40 years old. It is interesting that he had brought a case in the court of Chancery against our ancestor THOMAS OAKLEY, in which he complained that a yardland 'in the upend of the town of Broadway', which he had inherited through his father from his grandfather RALPH SHELDON, had been obtained by THOMAS OAKLEY by unjust means. Only part of the document survives, and neither the date nor the outcome of the case is known. The land was presumably part of the holding that William had selected in accord with his father's will. Despite the conflict, THOMAS’s son EDWARD OAKLEY later married URSULA, the daughter of William's sister CHRISTIAN.
The pedigrees show that BALDWIN’s daughter Elizabeth married Richard Edgiock, the marriage taking place in 1560 in Alvechurch, where her mother lived with her third husband. Richard lived at Salford near South Littleton. The next daughter Ursula also married in Alvechurch, in 1568. She and her husband Hugh James lived at Astley, near Shrawley where her elder sister CHRISTIAN was living. Her husband was made a bequest in the will of CHRISTIAN’s husband JOHN SEVERNE in 1584, and in CHRISTIAN’s own will in 1592, of which he was an executor. A brass plaque in Astley church commemorates Ursula's death in 1604 as BALDWIN’s daughter. Elizabeth, Ursula and Edith are three of the 'four younger daughters' to whom BALDWIN made bequests, but the name of the fourth is not known. There is no mention of her in the pedigrees or in the Broadway parish records, and she may have been buried in Alvechurch.
The Combe Family of JANE SHELDON’s Second Husband
BALDWIN SHELDON’s widow JANE married John Combe of Stratford-upon-Avon as her second husband, and their son William Combe was born in 1551. They are shown in the following tree together with the family of John Combe, who was John’s son by his first wife Margaret.The Combe Family
The best account of the Combe family is to be found in Sir E.K.Chambers’s William Shakespeare, which was published in 1930. Shakespeare would have grown up knowing the Combes. John Combe was an agent of the bishop of Worcester, and was alderman of the Stratford Guild in 1534. In 1537 he leased from John Greville the manor of Ruin Clifford in Stratford parish for 60 years, at a rent of £9.10.0, and he also took a 99-year lease of 3 messuages and land from the bishop of Worcester in Welcombe, another part of the parish, which he built up into a considerable estate. By his first wife Margaret he had six children including a son John II Combe. After Margaret’s death he married a widow, Katherine Quiney (who is not shown in the above tree), on 30 April 1534, but they had no children. By her first marriage, Katherine was the great grandmother of Thomas Quiney who married William Shakespeare’s daughter Judith. After Katherine’s death, John married JANE SHELDON as his third wife, by whom he had a son William Combe, but he died in 1550 before the child’s birth.
In 1565, John’s son John Combe obtained a fresh lease of Ruin Clifford for 60 years at £40 rent, and he died in 1588 holding the capital messuage and a watermill. By his first wife Joyce Blunt of Kidderminster he had 4 sons (only 3 are shown in the tree) who were about the same age as his stepbrother William I. His second wife Rose Clopton (not shown) was the daughter of William Clopton (died 1560) of Clopton House and New Place, Stratford, who was an ancestor of Barbara Clopton who married Aston INGRAM in 1692 (see The INGRAM Family), and by her he had another five children. She died in October 1579, and in 1583 he married Elizabeth Kinnersley, but she died in 1584. In that year he was granted the arms 'Ermine, three lions passant Gules', i.e. an ermine shield bearing three red lions with their right forelegs raised as if walking.
John Combe’s posthumous son by JANE, William Combe, was brought up by his mother and her third husband Thomas Lewknor in Alvechurch, where he later acquired the estate of Alvechurch Park, but he would have known Stratford well, where his Combe relations lived. He entered the Middle Temple on 19 October 1571, and was called to the bar on 9 February 1577/8 and practiced as a barrister in London, where he would again have come into contact with William Shakespeare.
William was MP for Droitwich in 1588, for Warwick in 1593, and for the county of Warwick in 1598, also becoming the High Sheriff in 1608. In the cold winter of 1607-8, when there was a shortage of corn and disturbances spread to Warwickshire, he wrote to the king’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, reporting the troubles. He lived in Warwick, where he owned property and held a lease of tithes, and he gave counsel to the town, in which he was held 'an honest gentleman, their neighbour, well known to all' (quoted by Chambers). He also kept a close connection with Stratford and advised the corporation in 1597, and took part in local affairs.
In 1593, William bought land in Old Stratford next to a holding of the Combe family, and on 1 May 1602 William Combe of Warwick esquire and John Combe of Old Stratford gentleman (his nephew John Combe) sold 4 yardlands of arable amounting to 107 acres, to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon gentleman for £320 (ER27/1 at Stratford Record Office). This was at a time when Shakespeare was still living in London, and several years before he returned to Stratford. William and John Combe signed, and the deed was ‘delivered to Gilbert Shakespeare to the use of the within named William Shakespeare’. The deed was witnessed by William SHELDON of Broadway, who was BALDWIN’s grandson. William Combe had kept touch with his SHELDON relations: he was the overseer of the will of his brother-in-law JOHN SEVERNE in 1584, and of his stepbrother Ralph SHELDON of Broadway in 1586. On the other hand, he did not share the Catholic religious views of the SHELDONs or of his brother John Combe. He prepared the recusant list for a part of the county in 1605, which included some of his relations, and he was among those who informed the authorities in 1595 of the presence in Alvechurch of the Catholic priest William Freeman, who was consequently tried and sentenced to death (Wilfred English, Alvechurch, p.30).
William Combe married Alice the daughter of Richard Hambury, a London goldsmith, and following her death in 1606 he married Jane the widow of Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, who owned St. Sepulchre Priory in Warwick. He had no children. In his will of 29 September 1610 (proved 1 January 1610/1) he left his property to Jane, and he bequeathed a generous £10 to the poor of Stratford and a similar sum to the poor of Broadway, and £20 to his nephew William SHELDON of Broadway. Others mentioned in the will were his 'sister Edgiock' (BALDWIN’s daughter Elizabeth), and his nephew John Combe, and William Combe, the son of John's brother Thomas.
The eldest son of William's stepbrother John Combe was Edward Combe of Barford near Warwick, who had three daughters. He inherited the Ruin Clifford property, and it passed on his death in 1597 to his brother Thomas Combe. Thomas had bought land in Old Stratford in 1584, and in 1596 he bought The College, the only stone building in Stratford, which had been the home of the parochial clergy until it was confiscated by the Crown. It was the largest house in the town, larger even than New Place, which Shakespeare bought shortly afterwards. He was a learned man and translated from the French, and in 1593 he published a book of poems which, in the judgment of Peter Levi, Oxford Professor of Poetry in recent years, deserve to be reprinted (The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, p.25). Thomas Combe was the father of six children including William and Thomas. In his will of 22 December 1608 he left his son William the manors of Ruin Clifford and Crowle and a half share in the Stratford tithes, and mentioned his uncle William Combe.
Thomas's brother John Combe inherited the Welcombe estate, and in 1599 William Shakespeare’s parents chose him to examine their selected witnesses in a lawsuit, and to advise them in other legal matters. When he died in 1614 he left the Welcombe property to his nephew Thomas Combe, and he also left William Shakespeare £5, and a similar sum to Sir Francis Smith 'to buy him a hawk', and declared that 'every debtor should have 20 shillings for every £20 he owed'. He acquired much of his wealth by money-lending, and his bequests totalled £1,500. The figure on his tomb by the altar in Stratford church was carved by the same mason who made the memorial to Shakespeare, who died four years later. John Combe has long been known by a doggerel verse that was said to have been placed on his memorial, related to the bad reputation of money-lenders: -
Thomas's son Thomas Combe entered the Middle Temple on 14 November 1608, and he and his elder brother William succeeded to the chamber of their great uncle William on 10 February 1608/9. When Shakespeare died in 1616 he left Thomas Combe his sword, something that a man usually left to his own son, so Thomas may have been a godson. Thomas lived at Welcombe, and was recorder of Stratford from 1648 until his death in 1657.Ten-in-a-hundred lies here ingrav'd.
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man ask, who lies in this tomb?
Oh! ho! quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.
 (from Stratford-upon-Avon Record Office) |
 (from Stratford-upon-Avon Record Office) |
BALDWIN and JANE’s eldest son Ralph SHELDON and his Family
Ralph SHELDON was shown in the 1569 and 1634 Visitations and by Nash to have married Mary the daughter of Nicholas Hubaud of Ipsley in Warwickshire. They included four of their seven children, Thomas, John, Elizabeth and Jane, but there was no mention of Margaret, christened in Broadway in 1558, or of Ralph, christened in 1566, who may have died young, nor of Anne who married in Broadway in 1595.Ralph made his will on 1 April 1586. He bequeathed £100 to each of his daughters Elizabeth, Jane and Anne at the time of their marriage, or £10 a year if they left home, and £100 to his son John, which was owed him by his stepbrother William Combe. His wife Mary was bequeathed £11 plus £20 a year, and the use of his house and goods and the best bed and chamber. Their son Thomas was to provide her with food, drink and clothes. The residue of the estate (including the manor of Flyford Flavell) was bequeathed to his son and heir Thomas, who was made the executor. The overseers included his cousin Ralph SHELDON of Beoley, and his stepbrother William Combe of Alvechurch. He was buried 8 days later, and his inventory was assessed at the large sum of £249 on 10 May, equivalent to about £40,000 today. The will was proved at Worcester on 5 January 1586/7.
Ralph’s son Thomas SHELDON was married in 1587 to Elizabeth the daughter of Richard and Ann Hoby of Badsey, north of Broadway, and they christened two daughters in Broadway, Elizabeth in February 1591, and Mary in December 1592. Thomas died in December 1593 aged only 37, and his brother John, the last of Ralph’s sons, died childless a year later, thus ending the SHELDON name in Ralph’s line. In 1597, Thomas’s widow Elizabeth married Philip Kighley of South Littleton, and in 1604 her daughter Elizabeth, aged 13, married John Kighley of the same village, whose relationship to Philip is not known.
Thomas’s younger daughter Mary married William Sambache of Broadway, who was probably the son of Anthony Sambache, the younger brother of William Sambache who married Thomas’s cousin Jane SEVERNE (see The OAKLEY Family). Mary also married young, as her husband was the ‘William Sambache of West End, gent’, whose children William and Mary were christened in Broadway in 1606 and 1608, respectively. West End manor house had been occupied earlier by Thomas’s grandfather BALDWIN, and the name William Sambache appears in the churchyard wall list for 1633 alongside BALDWIN’s name in the 1532 list. We will see later that a new manor house had been built nearby in 1625.
Mary’s stepfather Philip Kighley had died by April 1605, and her mother had married again by 1609 to Charles Ketilby, who in that year sold the manor of Abbots Morton near Flyford Flavell. In 1618 they allowed William Sambache to become the owner of Flyford Flavell, but before 1640 it had been transferred to Edward SHELDON of Beoley.
BALDWIN and JANE’s Second Son Anthony SHELDON and His Family
Anthony was married in
Alvechurch in 1560 to Jane Lewknor, the daughter of his stepfather Thomas
Lewknor. Four of their children, Margaret, William (VII), Francis and Thomas,
were christened in Alvechurch in the next 5 years, and son Baldwin was
christened in Broadway in 1577. They also had a daughter Jane whose christening
has not been found.
The 1634 Herald’s Visitations for Worcestershire give the Lewknor arms as 'Azure, three chevronels Argent', i.e. a blue shield with three narrow silver chevrons, and Anthony quartered them with SHELDON and RUDING. The former chantry lands at Alvechurch that had belonged to her father came to Jane and her husband after the death of her brother Nicholas. In 1579, Nicholas had bought the manor of Hadzor on the eastern side of Droitwich, and he left two-thirds to his brother-in-law Thomas Copley of Bredon and the remaining third to Jane. The manor was sold in 1633, the Copley portion fetching £750, and Jane's grandson William SHELDON receiving £400. In his will of 1 June 1580, Nicholas also left a cottage and 2 acres in Alvechurch to build an almshouse for 12 poor persons, funded by 100 marks a year from Hadzor manor. As he held the manor in chief of the crown, it was necessary that the Queen gave permission, which she did in 1588. In the event only 9 cottages were built, which were known as the Lewknor Hospital or Almshouses. They were rebuilt in about 1800 and again in 1980.
Anthony had inherited from his father BALDWIN the 80-year lease in Broadway. In 1576, his cousin Ralph SHELDON of Beoley granted a capital messuage and land at Broadway to Anthony, but it appears from Barnard's Sheldon Miscellanea at Birmingham Reference Library that Anthony had owned property in the manor at an earlier date, as it quotes a 1576 deed in which Ralph granted to his widowed sister Anne Daston a house and lands in Broadway 'late in the tenure of Anthony SHELDON gent', which Anthony had granted to Ralph in the previous year. There is also mention of a deed of 1564 involving Anthony and the then owner of the manor, and to judge by his children’s christenings, he appears to have moved back to Broadway from Alvechurch only a few years later.
Anthony died two years before his brother Ralph and was buried in Broadway in 1584, being succeeded by his eldest son William, as described below. The elder daughter Margaret was married in 1580 to William Draper of Grafton, about 10 miles north of Broadway. There is no mention in the pedigrees of the second son Francis, and he probably died young. The third son Thomas was married to Mary Farre in 1588 at Upton Snodsbury, near his cousin’s home at Abberton, and she was included in a recusancy list in 1596 with Jane SHELDON, widow, presumably Thomas’s mother, Jane Lewknor.
Anthony’s younger daughter Jane married Barnaby Bishop (1561-1635) of Brailes in Warwickshire, not far from Barcheston where her father's cousin Ralph had his tapestry weaving business, as will be seen. The pedigree of the Bishop family was recorded in the Herald's Visitation for Warwickshire in 1683, and shows that their eldest son John was born in 1586. The booklet describing Brailes church relates that Barnaby's elder brother Dr William Bishop, who was born in 1553 and studied at the Sorbonne, was consecrated in Paris the Titular Bishop of Chalcedon, and was sent to England by the Pope ‘for the comfort of Roman Catholics’ to exercise spiritual oversight of all of that faith. He was thus the first Englishman to receive episcopal orders from the Holy See after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and establishment of the Church of England.
The recusant list for the Kineton Hundred of the county for 10 September 1605, which was drawn up by Anthony's stepbrother William Combe as remarked earlier, includes 'Barnaby Bishop gent' and his wife Jane in Brailes, who were described as 'recusants since the kings majesty’s Reign', i.e. since 1603. They were also included in similar lists five months later and in 1627. Barnaby bought some of the lands of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which had been founded in Brailes in 1433 to support a 'Free School of Grammar For the Erudition and bringing up of divers and many poor Scholars', but had been confiscated at the Reformation, and he applied its rents to the re-endowment of the school.
Anthony’s youngest son Baldwin SHELDON married Eleanor Bishop of Temple Grafton in 1599. Their descendant Thomas SHELDON was living there in 1664/5 and paid tax on 7 hearths. Earlier, before the battle of Edgehill in 1642, the Parliamentary army had entered Warwickshire, and Margaret SHELDON at Temple Grafton had suffered losses totalling £400. This was despite their commander's proclamation 'that no soldier should plunder either church or private house, upon pain of death' (Edgehill and beyond, p.131).
Anthony SHELDON’s Eldest Son William SHELDON and His Descendants
On the death of his father in 1584, William inherited the 80-year lease that his great grandfather had taken out in 1538, so it still had many years to run. However, in 1595 Ralph SHELDON of Beoley settled the manor of Broadway on William, and he became the owner and not just the leaseholder. William and his second cousin Walter Savage, the son and heir of Anne Daston by her first husband, who were the two major landowners in the parish, were donors of two of the six bells in Broadway church in 1603 and 1609, and their names are inscribed on them. The photograph shows that William’s name was spelled 'SHELDOVN'. |
Barnard (p.103) wrote that William “must have been a man of aggressive nature and tenacious of what he considered were the rights of the Lord of the Manor”, as in 1609 and 1610 he was involved in two disputes, one concerning the hill pastures in Broadway, and the other with the villagers of neighbouring Childswickham about pools or fishponds that he had caused to be made there. He married Cicely the daughter of Francis Brace esquire of Doverdale near Droitwich, and they had at least 14 children. Cicely died in 1613, and Barnard informs us (p.104) that William moved to Haselor, a small village near Temple Grafton where his son Brace and his younger brother Baldwin lived, leaving his eldest son William to manage the Broadway estate. He was buried in Broadway on 3 September 1626, aged 62.
William SHELDON’s daughter Margaret, who was christened in Broadway on 24 August 1592, married her second cousin John OAKLEY of the Parsonage in Great Wolford, whose mother URSULA SEVERNE was the daughter of Margaret's great aunt CHRISTIAN. Their son Edward, named after John’s father EDWARD OAKLEY, was christened in Broadway in 1614, and they also had a daughter who was named Cicely after Margaret's mother.
William SHELDON’s eldest daughter Margery married Robert Harewell of Evesham. The second daughter Mary married John Vickeridge of Natton near Tewkesbury, and their son John was christened in Broadway on 21 February 1607/8, but Mary died in 1611 and is commemorated on two slabs in the chancel. William’s second son, named Brace after his mother's family, married Margaret Kempson of Temple Grafton. The third son Thomas (V) died at the age of 5, the next son Anthony died at 14, and another son was buried as 'a male child', presumably before he was christened. Three daughters, Jane, Elizabeth and Anne, also died young. Another daughter named Jane died in 1619 aged 22, bequeathing 'towards moulding, repairing and beautifying the Chapel in the Nether end of Broadway, 50 shillings' and 'to the repairing and pitch of the church way leading along the west end, from my brother SHELDON’s manor house towards the Church, 50 shillings'. A daughter Frances married Thomas Westcote of Tamworth, north east of Birmingham. The youngest daughter Anne, who was christened on 1 January 1610/1, married Robert Talbot. She placed a memorial to her parents 'in the middle Alley' of Broadway church, but it is no longer there, perhaps having been removed in 1866 when the floor of the nave was re-laid with red tiles (Barnard, pp.101-103).
William SHELDON, the eldest son of William and Cicely, was married in 1607 to his third cousin, Anne the daughter of Walter Savage of Broadway Court, and they had 15 children over the next 20 years. The first Thomas, Anthony, Mary and Edward died young, and their names were given to children who were born later. Ann also died young, as probably did Andrew, who is not included in the pedigrees. Nothing further is known of Philippa or the second Thomas, Mary and Edward, though their names do appear in the pedigrees.
William built a new manor house in 1625, only a short distance from the original which appears subsequently to have been occupied by William Sambache, who had married William's cousin Mary, the daughter of Thomas SHELDON (III), as described earlier. The new house is now known as Wych House.
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In 1634, William SHELDON settled his estate. His eldest son William was married and his first two grandchildren had been born, so this would have been a routine arrangement, but he also appears to have been in need of money. The arrangements he made are set out in two documents numbered ER3/3305 and 3306 at Stratford Record Office. The first, in Latin and dated 1 September, was a 'licence to alienate' lands in Broadway, which gave William royal permission by Letters Patent to sell or dispose of property held of the Crown by knight service. The second document was dated 2 November, and it involved William the elder, esquire, his wife Anne, and their eldest son William the younger, gent, Walter Savage, esquire, who was Anne's nephew and represented her side of the family, and John OAKLEY, gent, William's brother-in-law, who represented on behalf of his wife all of William's brothers and sisters. It also involved John Keyt of Ebrington (owner of Ebrington manor), and Anthony Langston of Littleton, both places about 6 miles from Broadway.
The property in the settlement comprised the manor of Broadway, with the 'chief rents' due to the lord of the manor and the right to hold a Court Leet, the capital messuage occupied by William the elder and four other houses, a mill, 570 acres plus commons, and the tithes of hay, wool and lambs. It was stated that the arrangement was made in consideration of £4,500 paid by Keyt to William the elder, and for a jointure for Anne in case she outlived her husband, 'and for the natural love and affection which the said William Sheldon beareth unto the said William his son', and for the conveying and settling of the estate.
The settlement gave William and Anne the use for life of the coppice wood, the chief rents, and the rents from a quarry and a claypit, which would afterwards go to their son. William the younger had the use of the manor and court leet, the capital messuage (with two pigeon houses), a house called Hathways, the mill, a headland, and 50 acres. Keyt and Langston were to have the use of 3 yardlands of copyhold land, 30 acres of arable, and the reversion of a house and one yardland. Keyt was to have the use of the rest of the land, of yearly value at least £247 clear of all charges, which was described in detail and included the parsonage house, the tithes, a 6 acre meadow in the possession of William Sambache, a hop yard, and 10 yardlands of arable, meadow and pasture in the open fields. The signatures of the two William Sheldons, Walter Savage and John Oakley appear at the foot. This document signalled the beginning of the decline of this branch of the SHELDONs.
William died in June 1653. His eldest daughter Cicely married Robert Savage of Calway Hill near Beoley, who may have been a relation. Her brother Sherington SHELDON became a distinguished Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and the youngest of the family, Anthony, was killed in 1644 aged 17 at the second battle of Newbury in the Civil War (Barnard, p.104).
The eldest son William married Philippa the only daughter of Sir Richard Tracy, Baronet, of Stanway House in Gloucestershire, 4 miles south west of Broadway. The house was built in 1626, presumably by her father, and a much-photographed gatehouse was added later. Barnard tells us (p.105) that the marriage took place without the consent of her father, but reconciliation took place, and on 17 June 1637 he bequeathed £1,500 to their daughters. A Tracy from the previous generation had become the second wife of William INGRAM (IV) of Earls Court in Worcester, as described in The INGRAM Family, and the Tracy coat of arms appears on one of the SHELDON tapestries which are described later.
William and Philippa's first child Richard may have been christened at Stanway. Their second child Ann was christened at Broadway in 1634, and the other two children Elizabeth and Catherine were christened at Great Wolford when they were staying at the Parsonage with William’s aunt Margaret OAKLEY. The eldest daughter died in 1639. Nash tells us that Elizabeth married Richard Savage, presumably the son of Walter Savage the younger of Broadway Court, and that Catherine married John Barcroft. Their mother Philippa died in 1640, and William married Mary nĂ©e Brett, the widow of Spencer Lucy of Charlecote Park near Stratford (Barnard, p.105). He was probably a younger brother of Robert and Richard Lucy who were successive owners of Charlecote at that period, and a great grandson of Sir Thomas Lucy from whom Shakespeare is said to have poached deer.
William and Mary had three sons and four daughters. Barnard reported the rest of William’s life story (The Sheldons, Part II, Chapter II). William was actively engaged in support of King Charles in the Civil War, and probably met the King when he stayed at ‘Mr Savage’s house’ in Broadway on 16 June 1644. After the King’s defeat, the cases of William and his father came before the Committee for Compounding in April 1649. William claimed he was not worth £200 in estate and had not had a commission against Parliament. Barnard remarks that this was probably true, as his estate at Broadway was already but a shadow of the former SHELDON possessions. At the restoration of the monarchy, he was one of the JPs in the first commission of the peace to sit at the Quarter Sessions of July 1660. He was claimed to have an estate of £600 a year, a very good income, but it was actually less than £175. His wife Mary died in 1661, and he took as his third wife Mary Burst, the widow of Sir Robert Staresmere. They had no children, and she died in 1670.
In 1663, 'Captain William SHELDON' was in command of The Clergie Band, at that time made up of 43 officers and men but later many more. He was also made one of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners or Gentlemen-at-Arms at £100 a year. This later became one of the oldest corps in England apart from the Yeomen of the Guard. The Captain was also put in command of a foot company as Deputy Governor of Guernsey in the Channel Islands off the French coast. This was no sinecure. In 1670 William complained that he had no money or provisions for the troops, and as war with Holland had been threatening, the fortifications of Guernsey were strengthened and the garrison reinforced and paid, but money was short again in 1674. He was accused of smuggling French salt into England as Guernsey salt in order to make money, and he always lived in a more or less impecunious state. Then at about midnight on 29 December 1672, Castle Cornet on Guernsey blew up when the powder magazine was struck by lightening. Among those killed were the wife and mother of the Governor, Lord Viscount Hatton, and his steward. Apparently there is a large collection of letters in the British Museum between Hatton and SHELDON, who may even have been the Lieutenant of the Company of Foot who had a miraculous escape in the explosion, being thrown clear into an entry. The castle was surveyed in 1678-80, and it was recommended that over £16,000 should be spent and that the Governor and his Lieutenant should continually reside in the island. In the event the castle was patched up. The oil painting below shows the castle before the explosion.
 (from Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery) |
He complained in November 1680 that he still needed money for his men, but he was dead before Christmas. The St. Peter Port parish record contains the entry 'Monsieur William Sheldon, Lieutenant Gouverneur de cette Isle, fut InterĂ©e Le Mardy 21 Decembre 1680', and a memorial was erected there in his honour. The inscription under the SHELDON arms reads 'Here lieth the Body of Capt. Will. Sheldon of Broadway in ye County of Worcester, Justice of Peace in ye said County. A person of great courage, being Captain of a Troop of Hussars in ye Service of King Charles ye first of Blessed Memory, in whose Service he behaved himself both loyally and gallantly during ye Civil Wars of England, though much to ye impairing of his Estate. From ye year 1664 hath been his Majesty’s Lieut. Governor of ye Castle and Isle of Guernsey where he served his Majesty faithfully 16 years 11 months and 3 weeks. Departed this life the 18 day of XII month Anno Dom. 1680, being aged 71 years'.
When he was in his 60s, he had married Mary the widow of Richard Loveyn, as his fourth wife, and they lived at the house called Hathways in Broadway that had been included in the 1634 settlement. They had two sons and two daughters, and in 1678 he had conveyed the manor of Broadway to his son-in-law John Barcroft, in trust, to be sold for the benefit of his children after his death. The manor had been mortgaged for £8,500, and it was sold to Sir Francis Winnington. There was a lawsuit against his widow, and an inventory in the Chancery proceedings gives the assets as £325 and debts as £7,199. The manor of Broadway had been sold for £5,900.
The Broadway churchwarden's book records that in 1694 a certain Mary Sheldon was in receipt of parish relief for 40 weeks, and for the whole year of 1695. She died early in 1696, described as the daughter of William Sheldon esquire. We know nothing of the rest of William’s children, and the SHELDON line of our ancestor BALDWIN SHELDON had come to a sad end.
Now we turn to the life of BALDWIN’S elder brother William SHELDON and his wife with their descendants. We are fortunate in finding considerable information on the collateral lines and on the whole SHELDON family.
RALPH and PHILIPPA’s Eldest Son William SHELDON and His Family
He was Marshal of the Inner Temple in 1542 and 1544, and no doubt this brought him to the attention of Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Queen Catherine Parr, for whom he became solicitor by May 1544. By 1548 he had been made steward to Sir Thomas Seymour of Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, who in the previous year had married Catherine Parr following the death of King Henry VIII. Sir Thomas was the brother of Jane Seymour, who had been Henry VIII’s third wife but who died after giving birth to Henry’s only son, and he was made Baron Sudeley by his young nephew, the new king Edward VI. William SHELDON’s position as steward would not have lasted long, because Catherine died in childbirth in September 1548, and a year later Seymour was charged with treason and executed for plotting against his own brother, who was Protector during the king’s minority.
William SHELDON has been described as the richest commoner in England, and Habington, the chronicler of Worcestershire, said of him “in our age for wisdom, estate and authority in our county equalled most of the gentlemen of England”, yet he never received a title. At a meeting of the Privy council in July 1554 it was agreed that, whereas William SHELDON esquire was to have been made a Knight of the Bath (presumably with others as part of the celebration of the approaching marriage of Queen Mary), “he shall now in consideration of his small ability and living be spared and forborne from receiving that Order”. No reason was given for the change of mind. It is possible that his earlier connection with Seymour had counted against him, though changes in monarchy from Edward to Mary and then to Elizabeth did not seem to affect his career. Apparently he was also not affected by the royal changes of religion, as in 1564 he was among those described by Bishop Sandys as “indifferent in religion or else of no religion” (Bindoff, p.307).
Between 1535 and 1564 he held many Crown appointments. He was commissioner for musters of troops for the county in 1539, and in 1547 he was receiver in the Court of Augmentations which was set up after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and collected the sums received in respect of the monastic estates in eight Midland counties. When the Court was dissolved in 1553 he retained his post in the Exchequer court which replaced it, with fees of £100 plus porterage. He was appointed to survey the lands of the bishopric of Worcester in 1560, and he was collector of loan for the county in 1562 (Bindoff, pp.306,307).
He was always interested in finding ways of developing schemes in which to invest his money. The family owned large flocks of sheep, and he exploited the profits from sheep farming and wool stapling, in which several of his agents were engaged. He possessed property in Birmingham, then a growing little town, and its markets made a useful centre (Barnard, p.13). He also entered the market in monastic lands. In 1544 with his brother Francis he bought property in Worcestershire for £1,804, most of which they resold, and with his brother BALDWIN in 1546 he bought the manors of Eckington and Tenbury, which they also sold subsequently. In 1545 he leased for 21 years the manor of Shrawley, where his niece CHRISTIAN SHELDON lived later on her marriage to JOHN SEVERNE. He was granted the reversion by Henry VIII, but sold it in 1558, retaining the lease and the advowson and Shrawley wood. In 1550 his cousin Nicholas HEATH obtained from Edward a licence to sell property in Blockley parish to William. Bindoff points out (p.307) that William’s “appointment in the augmentations ought to have put him in a favourable position for making further acquisitions, but although he continued to buy lands none of his purchases was from the crown, and most of them were not of former monastic property”; i.e. he did not abuse his position.
In about 1530, William SHELDON had married Mary Willington, one of the 7 daughters of William Willington, a wealthy Merchant Stapler of Barcheston north of Wolford, who was involved in some of the INGRAM deeds (see The Ingram Family). The Willington arms were ‘Or, a saltire Vair‘ i.e. a gold shield with a St Andrew’s cross in a stylised blue and white pattern. William Willington had bought the manor of Barcheston in 1507, and had settled there, depopulating the village to provide pasture for his sheep. In the Midlands, there was a good deal of such forcible eviction of tenant farmers, especially before about 1540 (Youings, p.59). His 7 daughters all married into prominent families. One married Sir Edward Greville of Milcote near Stratford, and their descendant, the poet Fulke Greville, was given Warwick Castle by king James I and was raised to the peerage as Lord Brooke. Another daughter became the grandmother of Sir Thomas Holte, who between 1618 and 1635 built the spectacular Aston Hall, now within the city of Birmingham. The youngest daughter Catherine married Sir Richard Catesby’s only son William, one eventual outcome of which was that they became the grandparents of Robert Catesby of the Gunpowder Plot.
It may be that William SHELDON’s marriage to Mary Willington enabled him in 1535 to purchase the manor of Weston for £533. It was in Long Compton parish, 3 miles south of Barcheston, and close to JOHN INGRAM’s estate in Little Wolford. Weston had been depopulated in about 1510 and enclosed, in a similar manner to Barcheston, and in 1545 William obtained a licence from the king to empark 300 acres, to be called Weston Park. He wished to use the land for hunting, but as this was a royal prerogative he had had to obtain permission. The manor house became William’s home for a time, but his son Ralph later replaced it with a much larger building. After the death of his father RALPH SHELDON in 1546, William inherited Balford Hall in Beoley. In 1544 he acquired further land in Beoley which had belonged to Alcester monastery, and five years later he bought the manor from John Neville, Lord Latimer.
By 1543, William and Mary SHELDON had two surviving sons, Ralph and William, and four daughters, Anne, Philippa, Goditha, and Catherine. They had had another son Francis who was buried in Beoley in 1542. Mary died in 1554 and was also buried in Beoley. By 1559 William had married Margaret the daughter of Sir William Brooke, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and widow of Sir William Whorwood, Attorney General to Henry VIII. We know what William SHELDON looked like at that time, because his portrait was painted in 1560 by an unknown artist.
 (from Birmingham Reference Library) |
Around 1560, William SHELDON purchased 2,000 acres of land at Skilts, between Beoley and his mother’s home Ford Hall. It had been a grange of Studley Priory, and had been purchased in 1536 by Sir Edmund Knightley, husband of Dame Ursula who had taken William’s sister Mary into service. William emparked it for deer, and at Lower Skilts, overlooking the Warwick road, he built ‘a very beautiful house of brick’ of 32 hearths, which he made his home with his second wife. It was described in the VCH for Warwickshire in 1945 (Vol. 3, p.177), by which time the western half had been demolished, and by 1992 only the gatehouse survived.
 (from The Story of Lower Skilts in Warwickshire) |
William SHELDON became the owner of the Barcheston estate of his father-in-law William Willington in 1561. He may have expected to inherit it on Willington’s death in 1554, when he had acted as executor together with Willington’s cousin William Barnes, but it went instead to Barnes, and SHELDON brought pressure on him to withdraw, even causing him to be put in prison for several weeks. An affray took place in 1555 which resulted in lawsuits, and in 1558 the estate became the subject of a chancery suit against SHELDON and his co-executors for payment of legacies.
Having become the owner of Barcheston, SHELDON established there the enterprise for which he is best known, the first tapestry-weaving business in England. It was a great success, and was much admired: when the Town clerk of Warwick visited the Earl of Leicester in 1571 hoping for aid in relieving the town’s poverty, the Earl remarked ‘I marvel you do not devise some ways among you to have some special trade to keep your poor on work as such as SHELDON of Beoley devised which me thinketh should be not only profitable but also a means to keep your poor from idleness’. John Humphreys explained the background in his book Elizabethan Sheldon Tapestries in 1924. Tapestries had been woven in France and particularly in Flanders for many centuries, and in England they were bought by such important figures as Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, the king having over 2,000 in his many palaces. But the price was prohibitive for the smaller English mansions, which had to make do with painted cloths. When England benefited later from the plunder of Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver from the new colonies in South America, a larger market developed for the domestic display of great means.
Humphrey’s work was updated in 1928 by Barnard, who provides information about Richard Hyckes, the man who was put in charge of the enterprise, including the statement that Hyckes married Anne INGRAM of Wolford. It is possible that Hyckes had travelled abroad with William SHELDON’s son Ralph in 1554 or 1555, and may have received instruction in tapestry weaving at that time. Barnard pointed out that there was a pool of suitable craftsmen locally, who would soon have become skilful at the craft. The SHELDONs had themselves become a famous weaving family in the 15th century, and had developed around Beoley a successful cottage industry making and selling cloth, to the extent that other weavers took action before the Privy Council in an attempt to curb their trading activities (Pearson, p.21). Most of the tapestry manufacture at Barcheston took place during the time of William’s son Ralph, so further description will be provided later.
William SHELDON of Beoley Esquire made his will on 3 January 1569/70, and as a result of his determination to provide detailed instructions about all his property, it fills 16 closely written pages, including a 2 page codicil that was added on 27 September 1570. The details are particularly interesting as an example of the interests of a wealthy man of the time, though in the ways in which he made productive use of his money he may not have been a typical example.
The will shows no particular religious interest, thus supporting the comment five years earlier that he was indifferent or of no religion. He began in conventional Church of England style by bequeathing his soul ‘unto Almighty God my Maker and Redeemer Jesus Christ trusting by the merits of His glorious passion and Resurrection to be saved’, and he made no bequests to churches. His executors, who included his elder son Ralph and two of his sons-in-law, received the greater part of his considerable estate for six years to pay debts and legacies. Most of the freehold was then to pass to the heir, providing he allowed it to be encumbered with various annuities and life grants to his stepmother and sisters. Frampton in Gloucestershire and the lease of Wadborough Park near Worcester were left to his younger son William, who was allowed to take four deer a year at Wadborough, and £40 out of the profits of Frampton. William was also to have a fifth of the residue of the household stuff and plate, and a fifth of the armour, which was usually kept at Beoley, ‘except the hangings of tapestry and arras which I do will shall remain at Beoley from heir to heir‘.
He explained that by agreement he had begun to extend the coal mines in Coleorton onto neighbouring land, and he wished his executors to continue this work, which would be ‘beneficial unto my heir or heirs but great commodity to a great number of the Queen majesty’s subjects to have the said coals at reasonable price for their fuel’. He was very interested in enterprises of this kind, whereby he provided employment in a worthwhile undertaking, together with an opportunity to make a profit, and thereby to increase the wealth of the country as well as of his heirs.
This interest extended to his tapestry-weaving business. His executors were also to lend money to persons who ‘use the art of making tapestry’, and the first loan was to be made to a servant of ‘Richard Hyckes the only author and beginner of this Art within this Realm’. In the codicil he explained that he had paid Sir John Throckmorton £2,500 for the manor of Barcheston, and had placed Richard Hyckes there rent-free for him to make tapestry and other fabrics. He had agreed in writing with Hyckes about the money that he and his heirs would lay out each year, and how the money and other expenditure were to be repaid, adding ‘And for that his trade will be greatly beneficial to this common wealth to trade youth in, and a means to store great sums of money within this Realm that will [otherwise] issue and go out of this Realm for the same commodities to the maintenance of the foreign parties and to the hindrance of this common wealth’. He thought that Ralph would share these considerations, but he made arrangements for the enterprise to continue without Ralph’s support.
He explained that his father had disparked some of Beoley Park, and that he had done the same and intended to dispark most or all of it. Disparking was the opposite of emparking, and meant that a private park was converted to agricultural use so that it provided food and employment to benefit others than the owner who had kept it for his private hunting grounds. William was unhappy that the land was not put to productive use. He gave his reason for disparking ‘that the soil of the ground thereof may be used and employed rather to the benefit of the common wealth than used and employed for the keeping of things for the pleasure of few men’. This attitude seems remarkable for the time, and it is also striking that William forces his heir to be equally public spirited. His son Ralph would inherit Beoley, and if at any time within 16 years he newly emparked or kept his deer in a section that had been disparked, and did not reverse the situation within a year, he would not be an executor and would not receive a legacy, which would otherwise go to Ralph’s son Edward when 21.
William’s second wife Margaret was to have £300, with a further £300 within a year. His son William and daughter Goditha were each to have the £80 bequeathed to them by their grandfather William Willington. In addition, each of his daughters was bequeathed £100, as were his sons-in-law Edmund Plowden and Anthony Pollard; his son William was bequeathed 200 marks, and Plowden was bequeathed an extra £100 as overseer of his children and as executor. Among many other bequests, the unmarried children of his sister Lench and his sister Rugeley were to share £20, and the children of his sister Ferrers (Mary, who had earlier given him so much trouble) were to share £40.
If £3,000 remained after all his debts had been paid, his daughter Catherine was to have £200 towards the marriage of her children except the eldest son, his daughter Philippa was to have 200 marks if she had children, but £100 otherwise, and Goditha and William were made similar bequests. £700 was to go towards the marriage of Ralph’s children apart from the eldest. The remainder of the £3,000 was to be used to buy land for William’s son William and his heirs, and if there were no heirs he directed that one third of the land was to go to the sons of his late brother BALDWIN and their male heirs, another third to Ralph (IV) the elder son of his brother Thomas, and the remainder to Thomas the younger son.
William had bought for £10 a 51-year lease of all the tolls, fairs and markets each week in the lordship of Bishops Castle in Shropshire, to begin in 1575, and this would go to his grandson Edmund, the son of Edmund Plowden, when he was 24. This was an appropriate gift, as the Plowdens lived in that area. If William’s son Ralph outlived him, the executors were to pay £200 towards the cost of Ralph’s livery, presumably for distinctive dress for his servants. An interesting bequest was of £4 to each of his musicians. Perhaps they played to him at mealtimes, as in the drawing.
 (from Food and cooking in 16th century Britain) |
William SHELDON died at Skilts on 24 December 1570, aged about 70, and the will was proved by Ralph at the PCC on 10 February 1570/1 (8 Holney). He was buried at Beoley on 15 January, and Barnard reports that Clarenceux King-of-Arms and other heralds came from London to be present at the ceremony. The funeral certificate is still at the College of Arms.
His son Ralph built a chantry chapel, known as the SHELDON chapel, next to the chancel of Beoley church, to house family memorials and the altar which had been a gift to Ralph from Pope Gregory XIII in 1580. There he erected memorials to his grandfather RALPH SHELDON and his great uncle William SHELDON. He pierced the wall between the chapel and the chancel with an arch, in which he placed an elaborate memorial to his parents, with the arms of SHELDON, RUDING, HEATH and GROVE quartered with Willington.
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The effigies on the tomb, of Italian workmanship, show his father in armour, his head resting on a helmet with a crest, and gauntlets at his feet, and his mother with cap and ruff.
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William’s widow Margaret died in 1589 aged 80, and she was buried in London. She had had two children by her first husband, and in her will (PCC, 17 Drury) she bequeathed a gold chain to her son-in-law Sir Thomas Throckmorton, whose sister Anne married William SHELDON’s son Ralph. She bequeathed a standing cup to Ralph, and 40 shillings for the repair of the highway adjoining Skilts Park.
William and Mary SHELDON’s daughters and their younger son William are described next, followed by the elder son Ralph and his descendants.
William and Mary’s Daughters and their Younger Son William SHELDON
The younger son William made his will on 30 September 1587 as William SHELDON of Wadborough Park, Worcestershire, Esquire, and his wife Jane proved the will at the PCC on 27 October of that year. William’s portrait was painted by the artist Hieronimo Custodis, who came to England in 1587 from Antwerp to escape persecution as a Protestant, so William appears to have been one of the first to give him a commission after his arrival (Strong’s The English Icon, p.203). This interest in a new artist is consistent with the impression of his character that is provided by his will, which reveals him as a lover of fine clothes and horses. Custodis painted portraits in 1590 of William’s brother Ralph and of Ralph’s son Edward, which are similar in style, the men being shown wearing soft collars instead of the usual ruff.
 (from The English Icon) |
In his will, William left £20 to his nephew and godson Walter Savage, and ‘my armour for my own body with two head pieces, my great dagger and girdle, my staff, my grey colt, my silk nightgown, my cloak guarded with velvet, and my black cloth cloak’, and ‘all my statute books’. Anthony Savage was to have ‘my black satin doublet and hose cut upon velvet and my taffeta cloak lined through with tuffed taffeta’. Other bequests were of his roan colt, his green velvet hose and coloured satin doublet, his fine mare, his young black horse, his grey trotting nag and the best of [his] mare colts the next year, and a hogshead of wine lying at Wadborough. He bequeathed 1000 marks to his daughter Mary, and made provision for the possibility that his wife was carrying another child. His wife and daughter were to have his manor of Frampton for 21 years, paying 200 marks a year to his father’s heirs as had been directed in his father’s will. His wife was bequeathed all his plate, jewels and household stuff, and his daughter got 10 feather beds and any leases left at the time of his death. There does appear to have been a second child, Jane, but she was buried in Broadway on 28 March 1588. The other daughter Mary may also have died young, as the pedigrees say that William was childless.
William SHELDON’s sisters all made good marriages. Philippa, who had been named after her grandmother PHILIPPA HEATH, married Anthony Pollard of Newnham in Oxfordshire, a younger brother of Sir John Pollard, but they had no children. Goditha married Robert Brayne of St James in Bristol. The youngest sister Catherine married Edmund Plowden of Plowden near Bishops Castle in Shropshire. He was a celebrated Catholic jurist, noted for his skilled advocacy in recusant trials (Dictionary of National Biography).
The eldest sister Anne SHELDON married Francis Savage of Elmley Castle, west of Broadway, who was MP for Worcestershire in 1552, and they had five sons and two daughters. He died in 1557, and Anne moved to Broadway when she took as her second husband Anthony Daston, who had obtained the lease of a large part of Broadway manor from the Abbot of Pershore in 1535. They lived at Broadway Great Farm, and in 1574, two years after Anthony’s death, Anne bought the house and the 2,960-acre farm. The gatehouse still survives, and above the archway are carved Anne’s arms of SHELDON quartering RUDING and Willington, and the crests of Savage, SHELDON and Daston. Anne died in 1619 aged about 90, having outlived all her sons apart from Walter Savage, who took over the Broadway property. By her second marriage she had a daughter Anne, who married Ralph Hubaud of Stratford, and in 1605 Shakespeare bought from him for £440 a half share in the Stratford tithes. Thomas I Combe owned the other half of the tithes.
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The eldest son by her first marriage, Sir William Savage, became the lord of the manor of Elmley Castle, and in that capacity he acted as host to Queen Elizabeth, who arrived for a two-day visit on 20 August 1575. The signboard on the Queen’s Head Inn in the village shows the date and William and his wife receiving the Queen, who is arriving on horseback with her retinue. She made it a policy to visit the homes of her leading subjects because the cost of the visit, with up to two hundred retainers, ensured that they did not become too wealthy and powerful.
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Sir William Savage was a JP, and was Sheriff of the county in 1589 and 1601. He died in 1616. In 1572 his sister Anne Savage had married Richard Daston, who presumably was related to her stepfather Anthony Daston. Richard Daston was a Justice of Great Sessions for West Wales from 1604 to 1619, and may have advised his wife’s relation EDWARD OAKLEY on his move to Carmarthenshire (see The Oakley Family). Richard and Anne’s daughter Catherine Daston married her first cousin Sir Giles Savage, Sir William’s son. Sir Giles died in 1632, and a tomb was erected in Elmley Castle church with alabaster figures of Sir Giles, his father Sir William, and Lady Catherine holding in her arms her infant daughter, born after Sir Giles’s death. Kneeling and facing their parents are their four sons.
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William and Mary SHELDON’s Elder Son Ralph SHELDON and His Family
Ralph SHELDON inherited most of his father's property, and in his lifetime the family fortunes
were at their summit. The Beoley church booklet says of the family that they
were lords of the manor of Beoley from 1549 to 1788, and at one time they held
13 other manors. Ralph held office as MP for Worcestershire from 1562 to 1567,
and as High Sheriff of the county in 1576. His portrait aged 28 was painted in
1565 by Stephen van der Meulen, and as has already been mentioned, his portrait
was also painted by Hieronimo Custodis in 1590.
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Portraits of Ralph SHELDON, in 1565, and in 1590 (from The English Icon) |
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The Throckmortons lived at Coughton Court, 6 miles south of Beoley. They had moved there from the village of Throckmorton near Pershore following a marriage to the heiress of Coughton in 1409, and the impressive stone gatehouse was built by Sir George, father of Sir Robert, who succeeded to the estate in 1518. The house is now a property of the National Trust. Anne’s brother Sir Thomas Throckmorton had married Margaret Whorwood, the stepdaughter of Ralph’s stepmother, and the other stepdaughter was the wife of Ambrose Dudley, later Earl of Warwick, a relationship that may have been helpful to Ralph during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. Dudley’s brother Robert, Earl of Leicester, was well known as one of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtiers.
 (from J. Arthur Dixon Studios) |
The Throckmortons were well known as Catholics. In 1583 they were involved in the Throckmorton Plot to murder Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots, which resulted in the attainder and execution of Francis, the son of Sir Robert's younger brother. In 1603 Ralph's brother-in-law Sir Thomas Throckmorton was imprisoned for recusancy, and had debts of over £8,000. The Throckmortons were closely related to the Gunpowder Plotters (the Plot itself will be described shortly). Robert and Thomas Winter were grandchildren of Sir Robert's sister Catherine, and Francis Tresham’s mother Muriel was Sir Robert’s daughter by his second wife. The leader of the Plot, Robert Catesby, was the son of Muriel's sister Anne and Sir William Catesby, and there was a further connection because Sir William Catesby's mother Catherine Willington had married Sir Robert's brother Anthony Throckmorton as her second husband. However, Sir Thomas Throckmorton had got wind of the Plot, prudently lending Coughton Court to his brother-in-law Sir Everard Digby, and going abroad. Another dangerous connection in a different context was that Bessie the daughter of another of Sir Robert's brothers, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth, was married in secret and without the Queen’s permission to the courtier Sir Walter Raleigh, as a result of which she spent time in the Tower when the Queen found out, as did Sir Walter.
 (from Bodleian Library, Oxford) |
Ralph SHELDON was a Catholic but also avoided any involvement in the Plot. Mass was said fairly openly at Beoley, which was a small pocket of Catholicism. England was a small country, and was conscious of the might of the Catholic countries in Europe, and especially of Spain, against whom they had resisted an attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588. Catholics were looked on as potential traitors, and laws had been introduced against recusants, those who refused to attend Protestant services and take communion (which included some Puritans). Ralph was regarded as a dangerous agent and was imprisoned for a time in 1580. He spent much of his time travelling abroad, but he was still under surveillance, as the State Papers of 1579/80 included him among the English Papists living in Paris. His house at Beoley was searched in 1594 because of suspected aid for a rebellion in North Wales, and he was under suspicion of being concerned in plots to kill the Queen, and to offer the crown to the Earl of Derby with the aid of the King of Spain. Such were the times in which he lived.
Ralph was helpful to Robert Catesby, who was his first cousin by descent from Catherine Willington, and their wives were stepsisters, as both were daughters of Sir Robert Throckmorton. The Catesbys had come to prominence when one of the family became an important minister under king Richard III. They owned manors in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire in addition to Chastleton, where Robert Catesby lived, and where THOMAS OAKLEY was one of his tenants. Robert was born in 1573, and in 1592 he married Katherine the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey (not related to our LEIGHs), whose brother held the manor of Adlesdrop next to Chastleton (and where the novelist Jane Austen later visited her mother's Leigh cousins). Robert's grandmother was buried in Chastleton in 1593, and from that time the manor house was occupied by the young couple. They had two sons, William who died young, and Robert who was christened in the parish church in 1595.
Robert Catesby's father Sir William and his young Protestant wife Katherine both died in 1598, and from that date Robert was a very zealous Roman Catholic, to which faith his father had been converted around 1580. Katherine had brought with her a dowry of £2,000, but the Catesbys were not careful with their money, and Robert paid fines for being an active Catholic, so one by one the manors were sold until only Chastleton was left, and even this he had already mortgaged to his father-in-law in 1596 against an increase in his wife's jointure. On 20 May 1599 he raised further money against the manor by borrowing from Ralph SHELDON and his son Edward, and from John Throckmorton, probably Ralph's nephew (Document E/24/1/1D/13-14 at Oxford Record Office). In the following year the mortgage was transferred for £3,000 to Sir Thomas Leigh and others, but Catesby was plunged further into debt when he was fined 4,000 marks for his support for the rebellion of the Earl of Essex against Queen Elizabeth I in 1601.
The only solution was for Catesby to sell Chastleton, and in this respect Ralph SHELDON again came to his aid, acting as the intermediary whereby it was purchased by Ralph’s friend Walter Jones. He was a wealthy lawyer who had been MP and Town Clerk for Worcester, and was a distant cousin of Lord Burghley, the Queen's chief minister, through their Welsh ancestry in Monmouthshire. The sale was made on 20 May 1602 for £4,000 (Document 1D/19), and the document was signed by Raff Sheldon.
 on Chastleton sale deed (from Oxford Record Office) |
Even after this transaction, Jones was willing to allow Catesby to redeem the property, which he never did, though he still lived at Chastleton in January 1605, by which time he had become the ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot that came to its end on November 5th. When King James of Scotland had come to the throne of England on the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, Catholics had hoped and expected to benefit because James’s mother had been the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, but when their hopes did not materialize, a few hotheads among them decided that they had to take matters into their own hands. Catesby and his collaborators planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament at the State Opening, when the royal family and the Lords and MPs would be present. They placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in a vault under the Parliament building, but they were discovered, and one of their number, Guy Fawkes, was arrested in the vault. The other conspirators fled, but were followed, and Catesby was among those killed when resisting arrest. Ever since, the defeat of the Plot has been celebrated throughout Britain by firework displays and the burning of a ’Guy’ in effigy on ‘Bonfire Night’, November 5th, both in back gardens, and now, more commonly, in community events.
After Catesby's death Walter Jones replaced the manor house with the beautiful Chastleton House that has survived to this day. Jones’s descendants were fined for supporting the losing side in the later Civil War, and the financial difficulties that resulted kept the house little changed. It is open to visitors, and it was photographed by Derek Williams when he visited the house with his parents and family in 1966, long before he discovered his connection with the building through his OAKLEY and SHELDON ancestors.
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The best bedroom in the house, at the end of what may have been a sequence of state rooms, is still known as the Sheldon Room, and its lavish decoration accords with that status. Its contents listed in the inventory on Jones's death in 1633 (Chastleton Estate Document W/2, Oxford Record Office) were more valuable than those of other bedchambers, and it had been decorated in honour of Ralph SHELDON, who belonged to the old-established class of gentry that new men such as Walter Jones sought to cultivate. The chimneypiece in this room shows the arms of SHELDON impaling RUDING. In the niches on each side of the arms are the figures of two Jacobean gentlemen, who represent Ralph and his son Edward, Ralph holding a skull because he died when the decoration of the house was being completed.
 (from Chastleton House brochure) |
To return to Ralph’s personal life, in 1589 he had begun to build his own great house at Weston near Little Wolford. It was a courtyard house of 38 hearths, with wings projecting slightly forward from the entrance range, and was approached through a detached gatehouse built in the same style. Ralph lived there in great state, and his hospitality was renowned. The house was finally demolished in 1827, and was replaced with a large Gothic mansion which itself was demolished 100 years later. The site still lies empty.
 (from The Sheldons, frontispiece) |
Ralph was not as active in the market for land as his father had been, and he did not have his father’s interest in new enterprises. However he did make some purchases. In 1576 he bought the manor of Broadway, and in the following year he sold plots of land there to various people including Thomas SEVERNE, John Sambache, and BALDWIN SHELDON’s son-in-law Nicholas Blaby. In 1590 he sold another plot to Richard Hyckes, and in 1595 he settled the whole manor on BALDWIN’s grandson William SHELDON. In 1605 Ralph added to his inheritance by the purchase of the manor of Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire, about 12 miles south east of Weston. Barnard described it as a reckless purchase. Thomas Hoerd of London, also a recusant, lent him £24,000, and in his will of 20 November 1612, Ralph referred to the “wilful and hard dealing” that he had received from Hoerd. He died at Skilts four months later at the age of 76, a poorer man than he had been earlier. His wife had died in 1603, and he had become the fourth husband of Jane, Lady Tasborough, born Jane West the daughter of Lord de la Warr.
Ralph SHELDON was buried at Beoley, and his tomb was erected in the chantry chapel he had built. It is next to his parents' tomb, further away from the altar, and it is the more splendid. The effigy of Anne, his first wife, lies to his right as she was the more nobly born. She is dressed in a gown, headdress and ruff, and he is in armour.
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The SHELDON tapestry-weaving business had continued at Barcheston under the direction of Richard Hyckes and his son Francis until Ralph’s death in 1613. The surviving tapestries are now in both public and private collections, and are extremely valuable. Several are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, including The Flight into Egypt cushion cover, which has an arcade and side borders with men and women, and hunting scenes at top and bottom.
 (from the Victoria and Albert Museum) |
Tapestries were made for Walter Jones, probably for his house in Worcester. They included The Story of Judah in four large panels, each about 10 ft by 8 ft, with the initials of Walter and his wife Eleanor, and texts from the Breeches Bible of 1560. When Chastleton House was built, the tapestries were cut to fit their new home. Sudeley Castle, once owned by Thomas Seymour to whom Ralph's father was steward, has a tapestry 15 ft long by 6 ft broad, which is described as the finest piece in its collection. Its subject is The Expulsion from Paradise, and it contains eight small medallions with representations of 'Justice', 'Temperance', 'Providence', and so on, placed in a background of a large variety of English flowers and various animals and birds, some shown with human faces, and a border with a succession of country scenes.
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Details from The Expulsion from Paradise tapestry (from Sudeley Castle) |
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Among the most famous products of the business were four tapestry maps, each 12 ft high and over 15 ft broad, which were designed in 1588 to hang in the dining room at Weston. They would have taken a long time to make, as one worker could weave only 10 sq ft a year. The maps were of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire with Berkshire, and the design was taken from the maps produced by Saxton in the 1570s, bordered with a mixture of flowers, mythological figures and architectural motifs. When they wore out they were replaced by direct copies of the originals, but these were made at the Mortlake tapestry works in London, as production at Barcheston had ceased. The Warwickshire map of the second series is in Warwick Museum. The part illustrated here, in which north is to the left, includes Weston, Barcheston, the Wolfords, and Chastleton. With the exception of Weston, the buildings are not meant to be true representations, but churches and bridges are also marked pictorially, instead of by conventional signs as on a modern map, and this gives the tapestries great charm.
 (from Warwickshire Museum) |
Ralph SHELDON’s Son Edward and His Descendants
Ralph's son Edward SHELDON (1561-1643)
married Elizabeth the daughter of Thomas Markham of Ollerton
in Nottinghamshire, a more distant county than in previous marital
alliances.
They lived both at Weston House, where their eldest son William was
born, at Beoley the birthplace of their youngest son Edward, and at
Steeple Barton,
though Weston was Edward’s principal seat. They also had a middle son Ralph
and three daughters. Edward is shown here in the Custodis portrait of 1590.
 (from The English Icon) |
Edward spent much of his
time abroad. In 1625 he applied for a licence for himself and his wife
Elizabeth, their son Ralph and his wife Bridget, and 18 servants and 6 horses,
to travel on the continent for two or three years on the advice of his doctors.
The Letter of Safe Conduct, in French, was signed by Charles I.
Edward settled at Namur, and remained there with his wife until she died in
1630. He made his will (PCC, 54 Pembroke) on 20 September 1643, the day of the
first battle of Newbury in the Civil War, and he died a few weeks later.
Edward and Elizabeth's second son Ralph SHELDON lived at Steeple Barton, and Ralph’s grandson Ralph eventually inherited the family estate. Edward’s youngest son Edward SHELDON lived at Stratton near Cirencester in Gloucestershire, and according to the Dictionary of National Biography he translated several religious works from the French. He married Mary the daughter of Lionel Wake of Antwerp and of Pedington in Northamptonshire, and they had 12 children, some of whom gained distinction in the royal service. Lionel SHELDON was a Benedictine monk and chaplain to Anne, duchess of York; Dominick was a colonel of horse in the army of king James II in Ireland; and Ralph was equerry to James II, and went with him on his flight from Rochester to France when he was deposed in 1688.
Edward and Elizabeth's eldest son William SHELDON was born in 1589, and in 1611 he married Elizabeth the daughter of William the second Lord Petre of Chelmsford in Essex. They had five children, Ralph, Edward, who became a Benedictine monk at Douay, George, Elizabeth and Catherine. Nash tells us that in 1647 William held the rectory of Bishampton at a rent of £13.10.0, but that it was valued at £86 over and above that rent, presumably in the main from the income from the tithes. This shows just how profitable such an investment could be. William entertained Charles I at Weston in 1636, and as a wealthy Royalist he suffered heavily in the Civil War, as is recorded by Philip Tennant in Edgehill and Beyond. His mansion at Weston was pillaged in 1642, shortly after the battle of Edgehill, by a Parliamentary troop of horse from Warwick, and a similar contingent from Kenilworth drove a herd of his cattle over 20 miles back to their garrison.
The lesser seat at Beoley escaped notice until December 1643. Nash stated that 'the house at Beoley was burnt down in the civil war by the cavaliers, lest the enemy should make a lodgement there', and the Victoria County History repeats these claims, but Tennant says there is no evidence to validate them, and he prefers William's own testimony that it was destroyed by the Parliamentary soldiers, who also 'put all the Irish therein to the sword'. Weston was fortunate to escape serious damage. William’s wife died at Weston in 1657, and he died there in 1659, and there are memorials to them at Beoley, where they were buried. He left over £100 to the poor of Weston, Long Compton, Brailes, Shipton on Stour and Beoley.
William and Elizabeth’s eldest son Ralph SHELDON (1623-1684) achieved fame as an antiquarian. The research he sponsored has been of great benefit to genealogists, and his bequest of documents was the largest that the College of Arms has received. His life has been described by Barnard and in the Dictionary of National Biography, and Nash said he was a man 'of such remarkable integrity, charity, and hospitality, as gained him the universal esteem of all the gentlemen of the county; insomuch that he usually went by the name of The Great Sheldon. His estate was the second largest in Warwickshire. He paid tax on 38 hearths at 'Weston Palace', and on 5 hearths in Barcheston, and it appears that he still had a large house in Beoley because he paid tax on 10 hearths there. He was a generous patron of learned men, and he built up an excellent library at Weston. In his visits to Rome he collected rare books, medals and coins, and 250 manuscripts and rolls of pedigrees were left to him (Barnard, The Sheldons, p.56). He drew up A Catalogue of the Nobility of England since the Norman Conquest, according to their several Creations by every particular King, with the arms finely emblazoned. He married Henrietta Maria Savage, the daughter of the first earl Rivers, who died in 1663.
 ‘The Great’ SHELDON (from The Sheldons) |
As Ralph and his brothers were childless, the estate was inherited after his death in 1684 by his cousin’s son Ralph SHELDON of Steeple Barton (1652-1720). This Ralph had four sons, two of whom became Jesuits and died abroad, and three daughters, one of whom was a Benedictine nun in Dunkirk. In the next generation, Edward SHELDON (1679-1736) had four sons and 8 daughters, and was succeeded by William SHELDON (1716-1780). In 1770, William and his eldest son Ralph barred the entail made at his marriage, and this allowed Ralph in 1788 to sell Beoley, then heavily mortgaged, and much of the rest of the property. This Ralph SHELDON died in 1822, and was the last of the family to be buried at Beoley. He had one son, Edward Ralph Charles SHELDON, and a grandson Henry James SHELDON, who married Alicia Mary the daughter of General Sir Evan Lloyd. She was the widow of William Oakeley (1806-1851), who, by a remarkable coincidence, belonged to the Shropshire family whose coat of arms was used by our OAKLEYs. Henry SHELDON was 78 when he died on 24 December 1901. A memorial in the form of a sarcophagus-like structure on six pillars, and surmounted by two sphinxes, was erected in the churchyard at Brailes near Barcheston by his only sister Isobel. On the inscription his address was given as Brailes House, and as he died childless his sister described herself as 'the last of the Sheldons'.
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By Derek Williams
August 2006
I just have to thank you, because it’s very difficult to find valuable information like your blog today, thank you very much.
ReplyDeletehttps://blog.mindvalley.com/william-sheldon/
thank you for this, I have done a lot of research tracing my lineage back to the late 12th early 13th century. Just wish there were not so many surname variations or the family bad luck curse lol but I do love our history though!
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