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- Sir William Wadham (c.1386–1452) of Merryfield in the parish of Ilton, Somerset and Edge in the parish of Branscombe, Devon came from a West Country gentry family with a leaning towards the law, who originally took their name from the manor of Wadham in the parish of Knowstone, between South Molton and Exmoor, north Devon. His father, Sir John Wadham, was a Justice of the Common Pleas from 1389 to 1398, during the reign of King Richard II; one of many Devonians of the period described by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England as seemingly "innated with a genius to study law." William Wadham was Sheriff of Devon in 1442. His monumental brass and chest tomb in the Church of St Mary, Ilminster is said by William Henry Hamilton Rogers to depict him with his mother Joan Wrottesley, daughter of Sir William Wrottesley of Blore and Joan Bassett of Drayton Bassett, both in Staffordshire. It is among the best surviving brasses from the fifteenth century, and depicts him in complete plate armour exported to England by Milanese armorers; the finest of the period. His mother is wearing 'widow's weeds'. William Wadham married Margaret Chiseldon, a daughter and co-heiress of John Chiseldon of the manor of Holcombe Rogus, Devon, Sheriff of Devon in 1406, who brought the Wadhams the manors of Penselwood, Aunk, South Tawton, and Rewe, where his arms impaling his wife's may be seen carved on the pews at the Church of St Mary the Virgin.They had eight children. On the death of Margaret Chiseldon, he married Katherine Payne, the widow of his brother-in-law's uncle, John Stourton (died 1438), of the manors of Preston Plucknett and Brympton d'Evercy near Yeovil, Somerset. There were no children by this marriage. Sir William lies buried with his mother in the transept traditionally known as 'the Wadham aisle' in the Church of St Mary, Ilminster, built in spectacular Perpendicular English Gothic style from the local Hamstone, of which there is every reason to believe he was the builder. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, in South and West Somerset, described the chantry as "... a glass-house. Only the panelled buttresses seem to remain of solid wall. The windows are transomed. Decorated parapet and pinnacles". (en)
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- Sir William Wadham (c.1386–1452) of Merryfield in the parish of Ilton, Somerset and Edge in the parish of Branscombe, Devon came from a West Country gentry family with a leaning towards the law, who originally took their name from the manor of Wadham in the parish of Knowstone, between South Molton and Exmoor, north Devon. His father, Sir John Wadham, was a Justice of the Common Pleas from 1389 to 1398, during the reign of King Richard II; one of many Devonians of the period described by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England as seemingly "innated with a genius to study law." (en)
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