Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 39.djvu/226

 the assistance of the king in Brittany by 1 March 1348, and Froissart (iii. 24) makes him take part in the siege of Nantes; but the truce of Malestroit was concluded on 19 Jan., and on 6 Feb. the reinforcements were countermanded (Fœdera, ii. 1216, 1219; Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, App. p. 545).

At Neville's Cross (17 Oct. 1346) Mowbray fought in the third line, and the Lanercost chronicler (p. 351) 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' (see also Chron. de Melsa, iii. 61). Froissart, nevertheless, again takes him to France with the king (iii. 130). In 1347 he was again in the Scottish marches (, Baronage, i. 127). 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 (ib.) The king sent him once more to the Scottish border in 1355 (ib.) 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 (Fœdera, iii. 463; Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, App. p. 621). 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 (v. 232). 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 (, i. 296; Cont. of, p. 195; , Monast. Angl. vi. 321). The favourable testimony which the Lanercost chronicler (p. 351) 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 (, Isle of Axholme, pp. 19, 35). 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' (ib. p. 293). 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 [q. v.] in 1626, and led to riots in 1642, and again in 1697 (ib. pp. 77 seq.)

Mowbray's wife was Joan, fifth daughter of Henry, third earl of Lancaster. His one son, (III)  (1328 P-1868), was probably born in 1328 (, Baronage, i. 128), 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 (, Baronage, i. 676). 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 (ib.) 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 [q. v.], and lived until May 1399 (, ii. 230). 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 (, i. 337;, p. 1); his second son, Thomas (I) de Mowbray, twelfth baron Mowbray and first duke of Norfolk, is separately noticed.
 * [Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, the Continuator of Adam of Murimuth, and the Chronicon de Melsa, in Rolls Series; Chronicon de Lanercost, Maitland Club ed.; Froissart, ed. Luce for Société de l'Histoire de France; the Byland and Newburgh account of the Mowbray