St Marys Adderbury
Forward to GGF13 – Sir Thomas Denton of Fyfield [2] (1453-1497) – Forward to American Denton’s Index
Back to GGF15 – Sir Thomas Denton (1401-1427) – Back to Denton Family Bible
This Sir Thomas was born at Baddesley Clinton and could not have known his father, as he died the same year Thomas was born He was only nine years old when Agnes Danvers married her third husband.
Perhaps this had something to do with his marriage to Lady Alison Dauncy (or Dauncey?), aka Baldington, at a young age. He was just seventeen and she was fifteen years old (she would go on to marry three times).
They married at Adderbury, Oxfordshire in 1444 and neither of them proved to be long-lived, Thomas emulating his father and dying at twenty-six years of age. Alison reached only twenty-four. They had one son Sir John Denton of Wittenham (1445-1497).
They both appear to have died in 1453 which begs the question as to how? He died at Caversham, she at Baddesley Clinton. But I can find nothing about their deaths, could it have been due to the plague?
| THE BLACK PLAGUE: The plague arrived into the UK by ship from Gascony to Melcombe in Dorset, aka today’s Weymouth, shortly before the Feast of St John the Baptist on 24 June 1348. Though it may have started in England as early as 8 May. The first major city to be struck was Bristol and the disease reached London by the autumn. By March 1349 the disease was spreading haphazardly across all of southern England. A second front opened up in 1349 when the plague arrived by ship at the Humber, after which it spread south and north, by May it had reached York. Modern estimates of the mortality caused by the Black Death is 23.6 per cent of the entire population. The clergy at the time claimed it to be 30 to 40%. Over the following decades the plague returned on a national or regional level, every five to twelve years, with gradually dwindling death tolls. Then, in the decades from 1430 to 1480, the disease returned in force – in 1471 taking 10–15 per cent of the population; in 1479–80 perhaps as high as 20 per cent. From that point on, outbreaks became fewer and more manageable. |
However, 1453 was a momentous year for other reasons. It was when the Hundred Years’ War between England and France came to its unsatisfactory end. It was when the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. In fact many historians suggest that 1453 marks the end of the Middle Ages, believing the period ran for a millennium from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE according to Gibbon) to the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire (1453).
| Note on shorthand acronyms being used in the DFB: – GGF1 / GGM1 – means first great-grandfather /mother; – GU11 / GA11 – means eleventh great-uncle / great-aunt; – 1C3 – means first cousin three times removed |
Forward to GGF13 – Sir Thomas Denton of Fyfield [2] (1453-1497) – Forward to American Denton’s Index
Back to GGF15 – Sir Thomas Denton (1401-1427) – Back to Denton Family Bible
