On 15/05/16 17:08, Stewart Baldwin via wrote: > The evidence of the brass is perhaps not ideal, but it seems strong > enough to accept in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Agreed. And there's apparently corroboratory evidence. According to Spencer Hall in /Echyngham of Echyngham/ (1850), Thomas's will asks that he "be buried in the Chapel of the Virgin at Echyngham near to his mother Joan". Unfortunately I've not managed to locate the will to verify that it does say this. Sir William's IPM says that Thomas was "13 years and more" in March 1414 [CIPM vol 20, no 23-4], so probably born 1400-01, and letters patent from February 1401 says that William's wife was named Joan [CPR Hen IV, vol 1, p 434]. My concern is not whether Thomas's mother was called Joan, but rather whether this Joan is the daughter of John, 1st Baron Arundel. John's will (as abstracted in /Testamenta Vetusta/, vol 1, p 105) confirms that he had a daughter named Joan, and she would have been about the right age. Most modern sources agree that Joan married to Sir William Bryan (who died 22 Sept 1395) before Sir William Echyngham. The problem with this is one of chronology. The will of Agnes de Arundel (again as abstracted in /Testamenta Vetusta/, vol 1, p 156) mentions her sisters Ladies Ross and Brian. Agnes was the widow of Sir William Arundel, a younger son of John, Lord Arundel, and in the conventional interpretation, Lady Bryan is Joan. The will was written in September 1401 and refers to Joan as Lady Bryan, implying she had not remarried, yet we know from the letters patent that in February 1401 Sir William Echyngham was married to a Joan. Put together this suggests that Sir Thomas Echyngham's mother was not the daughter of John, Baron Arundel. The obvious next step is to locate these three wills (John, Baron Arundel; Agnes de Arundel; and Sir Thomas Echyngham), but I've been unable to find them. I would expect all three individuals to have property in multiple dioceses, so I'd expect their wills to have been proved at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, but I cannot find any of them in The National Archive's Discovery catalogue, nor in the index on Ancestry.com. Presumably a copy has been preserved elsewhere, but I have no idea how to locate them. Chichele's register was my first guess, but the dates are wrong. > The obvious question is whether or not the statement by Nigel Saul is a > significant enough "red flag" to cause concern. What reason does he > give for suggesting that William had two wives named Joan? He doesn't give one. Saul's work covers the late 13th and 14th centuries, and this marriage is out of this period. It's not mentioned in the text at all, but appears on a tree on p 2. While the text is reasonably well sourced, the four family trees are unsourced. Richard

On 15/05/16 21:02, Richard Smith wrote: > The obvious next step is to locate these three wills (John, Baron > Arundel; Agnes de Arundel; and Sir Thomas Echyngham), but I've been > unable to find them. I hadn't realised that all there was a whole series of archbishop's registers separate to the PCC registers. Thomas's will is entry 864 in Stafford's register (fo 124), as transcribed in David Foss's PhD /The Canterbury Archiepiscopates of John Stafford (1443-52) and John Kemp (1452-54)/ (1986). It says "et corpus meum ad sepeliendum in cancello beate Marie virginis de Echyngham iuxta seputuram domine Johanne matris mee", confirming that Thomas's mother was named Joan. (Though as I said previously, I didn't seriously doubt that. My concern is over the identification of Joan as Joan Arundel.) John's will is 102 Sudbury, and Agnes's is 183 Arundel i. (Archbishop Thomas Arundel was Agnes Arundel's husband's uncle.) I don't think these registers have been transcribed, so I should try to obtain a copy of them. Richard

For the benefit of anyone finding this thread in the future, I thought I'd follow up my earlier posts to say that I've found the proof I was looking for that Sir Thomas Echyngham was the son of Sir William Echyngham and Joan, the daughter of John, Baron Arundel and Eleanor Maltravers. The monumental brass in the chancel at Etchingham for William, Joan and Thomas once had nine coats of arms on it. Only half of one survives, but in 1776 they were evidently still there, and were recorded by William Hayley. One of the arms was directly above the depiction of Joan, and was "Quarterly, 1 & 4 a lion rampant, 2 & 4 fretty of six." [/Som & Dor Notes & Queries/, IX (1905), 297; also Spencer Hall, /Echyngham of Echyngham/ (1801), citing Add MS 6346, vol 1.] The /Dictionary of British Arms/ confirms that the Arundel / FitzAlan arms were /gules, a lion or/ [vol 1, 141], while those of Maltravers were /sable, fretty or/ [vol 4, 101]. Eleanor Maltravers was an heraldic heiress (and became Baroness Maltravers suo jure), so we would expect her daughter to include this as a quartering. According to Hayley the adjacent coat of arms, located above and between one of the left-hand male figure and Joan, was Echyngham impaling quarterly FitzAlan and Maltravers. The sinister half of this impalement (showing FitzAlan and Maltravers) is the one part of the arms that still survives, and confirms Hayley's account. These are the arms we would expect William to have borne after his marriage to John and Eleanor's daughter, and it corroborates what the Visitations of Sussex say. I still can't explain why Agnes Arundel described Joan as Lady Brian several months after we know Joan to have been married to William Echyngham. Maybe we need to consider the possibility that Sir William Bryan's wife was not Joan Arundel. Or perhaps it was just an error in the will. (I've ordered a copy of Agnes's will to check the date.) Either way, I'm now content that Sir Thomas Echyngham was the grandson of John, Baron Arundel (and has a Plantagenet descent through him). Richard