1 - c.1395–1442
from Part I - LIFE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
Summary
The Fortescue Family in Devon
A biographical study of Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of King's Bench, must start in the early modern period rather than the fifteenth century. This is because the high-achieving and numerous descendants and collaterals of the great man felt that they had to endow his ancestors with an eminence and a lustre that they had not in fact possessed. The family contained several notable lawyers, politicians and capable historians and they, assisted by the heralds on visitations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and sycophantic antiquarians, produced an impressive account of the Fortescues from the time of the Norman Conquest. To his credit Thomas Fortescue, Lord Clermont, in his account of the family expressed scepticism about some of the most erroneous claims. As Christine Carpenter has remarked, ‘genealogies can be very revealing about the sense of lineage when they are in error or fail to tell the truth’. More recently Sir John Baker has made a similar point, ‘the pedigree rolls of ascendant families may be more interesting now for what they tell us about a family's claims and pretensions than for factual information about a family's remoter origins’.
The original accounts of the Fortescue family produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put their ancestors in a prominent place in the history of England. They had Richard Strongshield (Fortéscu) fighting for William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings and being richly rewarded. Some of his family returned to Normandy, where they still flourished in the fifteenth century, but the rest settled in Devon and Cornwall, where they served the monarchy loyally and often achieved knightly status. Sir John's ‘grandfather’, also called John, was knighted and made Governor of Meaux after it was conquered by the English. An extra generation was inserted into the family in the shape of Henry Fortescue, called the father of John junior, the subject of this book (Henry was actually his older brother). Not only John junior6 but Henry and their younger brother Richard were knighted.
The real history of the Fortescue family insofar as it can be recovered is rather more prosaic. In the late fourteenth century the principal manor held by William Fortescue, the head of the English branch of the family, was at Wimpstone in the parish of Modbury in Devon.
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- Sir John Fortescue and the Governance of England , pp. 11 - 43Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018