Nielsen Hayden genealogy

John de Mowbray

Male 1310 - 1361  (50 years)


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  • Name John de Mowbray 
    Birth 29 Nov 1310  Hovingham, Yorkshire, England Find all individuals with events at this location  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5
    Gender Male 
    Alternate birth of Axholme, Lincolnshire, England Find all individuals with events at this location  [6
    Death 4 Oct 1361  York, Yorkshire, England Find all individuals with events at this location  [1, 5, 7, 8, 9
    Burial Friars Minor, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England Find all individuals with events at this location  [1, 5
    Person ID I9023  Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of AP, Ancestor of DDB, Ancestor of DGH, Ancestor of DK, Ancestor of JTS, Ancestor of LD, Ancestor of LMW, Ancestor of TNH, Ancestor of TSW, Ancestor of UKL, Ancestor of WPF
    Last Modified 2 Aug 2020 

    Father John de Mowbray,   b. 4 Sep 1286, of the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire, England Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 23 Mar 1322, York, Yorkshire, England Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 35 years) 
    Mother Aline de Brewes,   b. Abt 1290, of Bramber, Sussex, England Find all individuals with events at this locationd. Bef 23 Jun 1324 (Age ~ 34 years) 
    Marriage 1298  Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales Find all individuals with events at this location  [3, 4, 5, 10
    Family ID F4694  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family 1 Maud de Holand,   b. Abt 1315   d. Bef 10 May 1380 (Age ~ 65 years) 
    Marriage Bef 26 Feb 1322  [11
    Divorce Abt 28 Feb 1327  [11
    Family ID F17336  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 2 Aug 2020 

    Family 2 Joan of Lancaster,   b. Abt 1312   d. Abt 1349 (Age ~ 37 years) 
    Marriage Between 28 Feb 1327 and 4 Jun 1328  [1
    Children 
    +1. Eleanor de Mowbray   d. Bef 10 Jun 1387
    +2. John Mowbray,   b. 25 Jun 1340, Epworth, Lincolnshire, England Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 17 Jun 1368, Thrace, near Constantinople Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 27 years)
    Family ID F5981  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 20 Mar 2021 

  • Notes 
    • Governor of Berwick-on-Tweed. He was summoned to Parliament by writs from 10 Dec 1327 to 20 Nov 1360.

      One of the commanders of the English army at the Battle of Neville's Cross. Present at the Siege of Calais.

      Died "of pestilence" [Royal Ancestry].

      From the original Dictionary of National Biography (article by James Tait):

      MOWBRAY, JOHN (II) de, ninth Baron (d.1361), son of John (I) de Mowbray, was released from the Tower, and his father's lands were restored to him, on the deposition of Edward II in January 1327. Though still under age he was allowed livery of his lands, but his marriage was granted, for services to Queen Isabella, to Henry, earl, of Lancaster, who married him to his fifth daughter, Joan. His mother's great estates in Gower, Sussex, &c., came to him on her death in 1331. Henceforth he styled himself 'Lord of the Isle of Axholme and of the Honours of Gower and Bramber.' The De Brewers inheritance involved him in a protracted litigation with his mother's cousin, Thomas de Brewes which had begun as early as 1338, and was still proceeding in 1347. Mowbray had also had a dispute before his mother's death with her second husband, Sir Richard Peshall, touching certain manors in Bedfordshire, &c., which he and his mother had granted to him for life, and in 1329 forcibly entered them.

      Mowbray was regularly summoned to the parliaments and 'colloquia' from 1328 to 1361, and was a member of the king's council from the former year. In 1327, 1333, 1335, and again in 1337, he served against the Scots; but there is little evidence for Dugdale's statement that he frequently served in France. In 1337, when war with France was impending he was ordered as lord of Gower to arm his tenants; next year he had to provide ships for the king's passage to the continent, and was sent down to his Sussex estates in the prospect of a French landing. According to Froissart, he was with the king in Flanders in October 1339, but this is impossible, for he was present at the parliament held in that month, and was ordered to repair towards his Yorkshire estates to defend the Scottish marches. Next year he was appointed justiciar of Lothian and governor of Berwick, towards whose garrison he was to provide 120 men, including ten knights. In September 1341 he was commanded to furnish Balliol with men from Yorkshire. On 20 Dec. 1342 he received orders to hold himself ready to go to the assistance of the king in Brittany by 1 March 1348, and Froissart makes him take part in the siege of Nantes; but the truce of Malestroit was concluded on 19 Jan., and on 6 Feb. the reinforecments were countermanded.

      At Neville's Cross (17 Oct. 1346) Mowbray fought in the third line, and the Lanercost chronicler loudly sings his praises: 'He was full of grace and kindness -- the conduct both of himself and his men was such as to redound to their perpetual honour'. Froissart, nevertheless, again takes him to France, with the king. In 1347 he was again in the Scottish marches. On the expiration, in 1352, of one of the short truces which began in 1347, he was appointed chief of the commissioners charged with the defence of the Yorkshire coast against the French, and required to furnish thirty men from Gower. The king sent him once more to the Scottish border in 1355. In December 1359 he was made a justice of the peace in the district of Holland, Lincolnshire, and in the following February a commissioner of array at Leicester for Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Rutland. This, taken with the fact that he was summoned on 3 April 1360 to the parliament fixed for 15 May, makes it excessively improbable that he was skirmishing before Paris in April as stated by Froissart. It is possible, however, that the Sire de Montbrai mentioned by Froissart was Mowbray's son and heir, John.

      Mowbray died at York of the plague on 4 Oct. 1361, and was buried in the Franciscan church at Bedford. The favourable testimony which the Lanercost chronicler bears to the character of John de Mowbray is borne out by a piece of documentary evidence. In order to put an end to disputes between his steward and his tenants in Axholme, he executed a deed on 1 May 1359 reserving a certain part of the extensive wastes in the isle to himself, and granting the remainder in perpetuum to the tenants. This deed was jealously preserved as the palladium of the commoners of Axholme in Haxey Church 'in a chest bound with iron, whose key was kept by some of the chiefest freeholders, under a window wherein was a portraiture of Mowbray, set in ancient stained glass, holding in his hand a writing, commonly reported to be an emblem of the deed'. This window was broken down in the 'rebellious times,' when the rights of the commoners under the deed were in large measure overridden, in spite of their protests, by the drainage scheme which was begun by Cornelius Vermuyden in 1626 and led to riots in 1642, and again in 1697.

      Mowbray's wife was Joan, fifth daughter of Henry, third earl of Lancaster. His one son, John (III) de Mowbray (1328?-1368), was probably born in 1329, and succeeded as tenth baron. Before 1353 he had married Elizabeth, the only child and heiress of John sixth lord Segrave, on whose death in that year he entered into possession of her lands, lying chiefly in Leicestershire, where the manors of Segrave, Sileby, and Mount Sorrel rounded off the Mowbray estates about Melton Mowbray, and in Warwickshire, where the castle and manor of Caludon and other lordships increased the Mowbray holding in that county. The mother of Mowbray's wife, Margaret Plantagenet, was the sole heiress of Thomas of Brotherton, the second surviving son of Edward I, and she, on the death of her father in 1338, inherited the title and vast heritage in eastern England of the Bigods, earls of Norfolk, together with the great hereditary office of marshal of England, which had been conferred on her father. Neither her son-in-law, John de Mowbray the younger, nor his two successors were fated to enjoy her inheritance; for the countess marshal survived them, as well as a second husband, Sir Walter Manny, and lived until May 1399. But in the fifteenth century the Mowbrays entered into actual possession of the old Bigod lands, and removed their chief place of residence from the mansion of the Vine Garths at Epworth in Axholme to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. John III met with an untimely death at the hands of the Turks near Constantinople, on his way to the Holy Land, in 1368. His elder son, John IV, eleventh baron Mowbray of Axholme, was created Earl of Nottingham on the day of Richard II's coronation; his second son, Thomas (I) de Mowbray, twelfth baron Mowbray and first duke of Norfolk, is separately noticed.

  • Sources 
    1. [S142] Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families by Douglas Richardson. Salt Lake City, 2013.

    2. [S789] The Wallop Family and Their Ancestry by Vernon James Watney. Oxford, 1928., year only.

    3. [S145] Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700 by Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. 8th edition, William R. Beall & Kaleen E. Beall, eds. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004, 2006, 2008.

    4. [S128] The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant ed. Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, Duncan Warrand, Howard de Walden, Geoffrey H. White and R. S. Lea. 2nd edition. 14 volumes (1-13, but volume 12 spanned two books), London, The St. Catherine Press, 1910-1959. Volume 14, "Addenda & Corrigenda," ed. Peter W. Hammond, Gloucestershire, Sutton Publishing, 1998.

    5. [S1526] The Ancestry of Dorothea Poyntz, Wife of Reverend John Owsley, Generations 1-15, Fourth Preliminary Edition, by Ronny O. Bodine and Bro. Thomas Spalding, Jr. 2013.

    6. [S77] The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester by George Ormerod. Second edition, revised and enlarged by Thomas Helsby. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1882.

    7. [S789] The Wallop Family and Their Ancestry by Vernon James Watney. Oxford, 1928., date only.

    8. [S145] Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700 by Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. 8th edition, William R. Beall & Kaleen E. Beall, eds. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004, 2006, 2008., date only.

    9. [S128] The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant ed. Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, Duncan Warrand, Howard de Walden, Geoffrey H. White and R. S. Lea. 2nd edition. 14 volumes (1-13, but volume 12 spanned two books), London, The St. Catherine Press, 1910-1959. Volume 14, "Addenda & Corrigenda," ed. Peter W. Hammond, Gloucestershire, Sutton Publishing, 1998., date only.

    10. [S142] Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families by Douglas Richardson. Salt Lake City, 2013., says "aft 29 Nov 1297". Date only.

    11. [S4258] Douglas Richarson, 30 Jul 2020, post to soc.genealogy.medieval.