Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/91

12 8. I. JAN. 29, 1916.]

NOTES AND QUERIES. The above statements may now be compared with the following:—

In the Visitation of Warwickshire, 1619, by Camden (Harl. Soc., xii. 3), and Dugdale's 'Warwickshire' (ii. 973), there are pedigrees of the Ferrers family, and in particular of the Groby branch, which began with that William (second son of William Ferrers, Earl of Derby 1248-54) who married Joan le Despencer. and, having inherited Groby from his mother Margaret de Quinci, his father's second wife, was himself father of William, first Lord Ferrers of Groby (1270-1324), as may be seen in the various Peerage pedigrees. William, the fifth Lord of Groby, had a younger son Thomas, who, having married the heiress of Baldwin Freville, became possessed in her right of Tamworth, and the progenitor of the Ferrers of Tamworth. Thomas and Elizabeth above had (with Thomas, who succeeded to Tamworth) a younger son, Henry, of Hambleton, Rutland, who married a Kentish lady, Margaret, daughter and coheir of William Hextall of East Peckham, and widow of William Whetenhall, to whose son by her and heir, William Whetenhall, her East Peckham property passed at her death, away from her second husband, who in virtue of being its holder during her lifetime had been High Sheriff of Kent 3 Hen. VI. and 9 Ed. IV. This Henry and Margaret were parents of Edward Ferrers, who "by marriage with Constance, daughter and heir of Sir Nicholas Brome, obtained Baddesley Clinton, which has remained a family possession. Sir Edward Ferrers left beside his eldest son and heir Henry, who died 1526, younger sons Edward, George, and Nicholas.

Of these George is recorded as having married Mary, daughter of Richard Sheldon of Beoley or Bewley (now Bewdley), Worcestershire. According to Camden's 1619 Visitation, her mother was a Rudings heiress. Two Ralf Sheldons, father and son, are mentioned by Nash, i. 64, of whom the first married a daughter and heiress of Rudings, and the second Philippe, daughter and heiress of Baldwin Heath of Ford Hall in Wotton-Wawen. If these were really two and not one and the same person (their dates are not given), the second had a son "John," described as "of London."

I have so far obtained no further information as to this George Ferrers.

It is interesting to note the existence of a George Ferrers contemporary with George "Allen." The one seems (as far as I have been able to trace the matter) to drop out of the pedigree and disappear not in itself, of course, a very remarkable thing in the case of a younger son and the other emerges from obscurity to head a pedigree. He leaves a son who hands down "on his deathbed" a story, probably enough confused and ill-remembered as told by a dying man, and by the time it has reached his great-grandsons (one or both of whom were probably the Herald's informants) likely to be a little more confused and variant from the original. Those accustomed to genealogical work will, I am sure, agree that it is a common thing for the wives of a father and son to be wrongly attributed, so that it is stretching no point to suggest that the "daughter of John Sheldon" given vaguely as the first wife of Richard might quite possibly have been the wife of his father George. As for the variant "John" and "Ralf" Sheldon, the father of Ralf (or Ralf i. if there were two) is "John" according to Nash, and Ralf (Ralf ii.) has a brother "John" also; so that, as things go in pedigrees such as these, which have never undergone very critical examination, the one name is likely enough to be substituted for the other.

I think it is not saying too much to suggest an element of unlikelihood in the alleged marriage of a purely local man like Richard Allen of Grantham with the daughter of so far away a family—also quite "local" in prestige and position, but much higher, presumably, in both than would be the son of an unknown man himself a new-comer.

It is, of course, quite possible, momentarily taking the family story as true, that George Ferrers or Allen may have married Mary, daughter of Ralf Sheldon; and his son, Richard, through this connexion, a daughter of that Ralf's son John, his own cousin. The wife and child, in such a case, might well take refuge in the paternal home during the husband's exile and wanderings. The implication or assumption that much property and great position have been lost, when all the while the case is that of a younger son who probably had not much to lose, is just what one would expect in such a case, especially when the tale is told by one of a fourth generation; and, to my thinking, helps to give a certain air of verisimilitude to the whole allegation.