Sir Richard Bray, of Eaton Bray - A new report on Richard Bray and his son Reginald

SIR REGINALD BRAY (1438-1503) (Revised 2 Nov 2023)
When researching ancestors in centuries before the Victorian age, it is necessary to rely on hand-written documents or on their transcribed, printed and digitised versions. It is natural to assume that these documents and their more accessible derivatives are accurate, but this is not always the case and more extensive research can sometimes reveal a very different story. This is particularly true of Sir Reginald Bray.
The College of Heralds’ Visitation of Cumberland in 1615, published by the Harleian Society and digitised by Universities in the USA and others gives every appearance of being a reliable source document. However, its pedigree of the Sandis family of Esthwaite in the Furness Fells area of Lancashire north of Morecambe Bay shows William Sandis and Margaret Rawson as having a daughter Margaret who was the wife of Richard Bray one of the Counsell of King Henry VI. This cannot be right as Richard Bray and Margaret had their first and only known child in 1435, the same year that this William Sandis of Esthwaite was born. Furthermore, it was Reginald Bray, not his father Richard, who was Chief Counsel to King Henry VII, not King Henry VI.
Chambers’ Biographies of Worcestershire, published in 1820, and used by Thompson Cooper for his article on Sir Reginald Bray in the Dictionary of National Biography in about 1885, states that Reginald was born at Bedwardine on the outskirts of Worcester City and that his father Richard was buried in the nave of Worcester Cathedral in 1489. These details are correct but Mr Chambers assumes from them that Reginald Bray grew up in Worcestershire, was employed by Sir Henry Stafford before Henry’s marriage to Margaret Beaufort in 1458 and continued in Margaret’s household after her marriage to Thomas Lord Stanley in 1472.
This paper sets out a different scenario, namely that Richard Bray and his son Sir Reginald were members of the household of Margaret Beauchamp at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire from the early-1440s.
In the 1490s, Sir Reginald Bray was granted or bought a large number of properties spread across several counties in southern England. Many of these properties were in Bedfordshire and this suggests that he or his ancestors had strong links with this County. A study of property transactions and other records for Bedfordshire shows that, between 1200 and 1450, there are over 140 mentions of members of the Bray family. Over two-thirds of these refer to property or events within two miles of Silsoe, midway between Dunstable and Bedford. There are also several records referring to members of the Troughton family, mostly near Dunstable.
The records show that the Brays were minor landowners but of sufficient status and sufficiently well-educated for some of them to be appointed as Sheriff for the County, as jurors in Post-Mortem Inquisitions or to represent the County in Parliament, while others became parish priests.
The most likely sequence is Roger de Bray (born c1170) followed by Robert de Bray (born c1195) then Thomas de Bray (born c1220) who was Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1272. Next came Sir Thomas de Bray (born c1245) who represented the County of Bedfordshire in the Parliament of 1289. With his wife Alice, Sir Thomas had a son Thomas (born c1270) and three other sons Henry, Roger and Richard. Roger was Knight of the Shire (=MP) for Bedfordshire in 1312.
Sir Thomas de Bray had two younger brothers, Nicholas de Bray (born c1250) and John (born c1255). Nicholas de Bray had two sons Hugh (born c1275) and John (born c1276) who both appear in records at Silsoe. John de Bray acquired Sutton Manor at Chiswick in Middlesex in 1324 and his son, also John, held it in 1337 and 1371. After that, Sutton Manor passed to his cousin Thomas. The Brays of Silsoe appear to have died as a result of either the first phase of the Black Death in 1349 or its second phase in 1361 and there is only one record for the Brays at Silsoe after 1362.
Prior to this, Hugh Bray had a son, also Hugh (born c1300), who acquired property at Wyboston, a few miles north of Tempsford, with his wife Ada in 1328. Hugh Bray and Ada had a son John (born c1325) whose wife Alice had inherited two-thirds of the Manor of Great Staughton in 1370. In 1406, Alice sold her share of Great Staughton Manor to the Waweton family who already owned the remaining third.
John Waweton lived at Basmead just inside Bedfordshire near Staploe. He was MP for Bedfordshire in ten Parliaments between 1365 and 1395. In 1381, he would have met Sir John Sandys from Andover representing Hampshire for the first of eight Parliaments. His nephew Thomas Waweton followed in John’s footsteps and served in twelve Parliaments between 1397 and 1432. Thomas Waweton would have met Walter Sandys, the son of Sir John, when he represented Hampshire in 1414. Thomas was Speaker in the House of Commons in 1425 and his father had bought the rest of Great Staughton Manor from Alice Bray in 1406.
John Bray and Alice had a son Thomas (born c1350) who appears to have inherited his cousin John’s property at Chiswick and to have lived there at least enough of his time for him to be elected as MP for Middlesex in 1391 when he would have met Sir John Sandys. John Bray, son of MP Thomas, bought Dillington Manor a few miles from Great Staughton in 1427 and it is presumed that he lived there with his older son Richard (born c1405).
The Parliament of 1414 met at Leicester. Walter Sandys could well have travelled with Thomas Waweton on the first stage of his journey home and could have stopped off to visit the Brays. As a result of this re-union, Walter Sandys’ daughter Margaret (born c1409) was betrothed to John Bray’s son Richard. It is suggested that Richard Bray joined the household of Margaret Beauchamp at Bletsoe in about 1420 and later became as an assistant Estate Manager there. Bletsoe is only a few miles from Dillington. Richard Bray married Margaret Sandys in about 1430 and they had one child John born in about 1435. Margaret died shortly giving birth and Richard married Joan Troughton in about 1436. She was the daughter of John and Alice Troughton of Dunstable.
The Beauchamp family had had ties with Worcester City and County since Waleron de Beauchamp received them on his marriage to Matilda the daughter of King Stephen in 1138. It is suggested that Margaret Beauchamp sent Richard Bray and his second wife Joan to assist Elizabeth Beauchamp the young heiress of the Beauchamp lands in Worcestershire and that this is how Reginald came to be born at Bedwardine in 1438. It is also suggested that the family returned to Bletsoe a few years later and that young Reginald Bray grew up close to, or actually within, the Beauchamp household.
Margaret Beauchamp had a daughter Margaret Beaufort who was born at Bletsoe in 1443 and who lived there until she married Edmund Tudor in 1455. Edmund died in 1456 and Margaret’s only son, the future King Henry VII, was born in January 1457. In January 1458, Margaret Beaufort married Henry Stafford and they lived at Bourne in Lincolnshire for the first eight years of their marriage. This was a Manor which Margaret had inherited from her father.
As already noted, some records state that Reginald Bray had been employed by Henry Stafford before his marriage to Margaret Beaufort but, given the above history of the Brays in Bedfordshire and close to Bletsoe where Margaret grew up, it seems much more likely that it was Margaret who recruited Reginald to join them at Bourne.
Having known Reginald Bray as a teenager at Bletsoe before she married Edmund Tudor, also gave Margaret a good reason to keep him on as her Estate Manager and to trust him in the dangerous assignments leading to her son Henry’s return from exile in 1485.
In 1466, King Edward IV granted Woking Manor in Surrey to Henry Stafford and his wife Margaret Beaufort, and Henry died there in 1471. Margaret married her third husband, Sir Thomas Stanley, in 1472 and they lived at Woking until 1486 when her son King Henry VII persuaded Margaret to give it to him in exchange for Collyweston in Northamptonshire.
Richard Bray appears to have moved back to Worcestershire and to have owned property at Bedwardine. After his death there in 1489, this property passed to Margery, the daughter of his first son John the elder, and then to her husband Sir William Sandys when they married in about 1493. They sold their interest in Bedwardine in 1501-2.
Richard’ Bray’s widow Joan appears to have moved to the Woking area with her step-daughter Margery, her own two daughters Alice and Joan and John Bray the younger, born in about 1455. Joan (senior) died there and was buried at Guildford.
Alice and Joan married and are mentioned in Sir Reginald Bray’s Will. John Bray the younger must have died before 1503 as he is only mentioned in his brother’s Will of that year as having been the father of Sir Reginald’s nephews. All three nephews, Edmund, Edward and Reginald, were underage in 1503 and two of them married and brought up families in the Woking area. Reginald’s Will also makes provision for masses to be said for the souls of his mother Joan, buried at Guildford, and of his father Richard and his wife Katherine.
After moving with Margaret Beaufort to Woking, Reginald Bray married Katherine Hussey in about 1475. She was born in 1462, the younger daughter of Nicholas Hussey of Harting, south of Petersfield on the Hampshire-Sussex border. They had no children, but Reginald later became guardians of Elizabeth & Agnes Lovell, the two daughters of Katherine’s sister Constance.