Zachariah Mudge 1694 1769
ZACHARIAH MUDGE b. 1694; d. April 3rd, 1769; Preb. Exon., Vicar of St. Andrew's, Plymouth.Married 1st Mary Fox. 6gg.
The original researcher did not have any information on Mary Fox, but her genealogical lineage is now included.
Mary Fox was born 1689 and died 1759, she was the daughter of Tabitha Croker and Francis Fox.
Tabitha Croker was the daughter of George Croker 1628 - 1697 and Antice Tripe 1632 -1695
George Croker was the son of Francis Croker 1584 - 1659 and Thomasine Pascoe 1595 - 1630
Francis Croker was the son of Hugh Croker 1552 - 1614 and Agnes Bonville 1569 - 1628 10gg
Agnes Bonville's lineage can be traced through Sir William Bonville, who was a Member of Parliament, in late 1300s.
The Croker family held lands in England prior to the Invasion, probably then a Saxon family.
Francis and Thomasine Croker had several children among them:
William 1612 - 1692 Recorded as being in Scituate Massauchutus 1636
John 1619 - 1669 Recorded as being in Scituate Massauchutus 1636
Francis 1620 - 1700 He went to Massachutus
The marriage to Mary Fox began a long line of similar sorts of marriages. Either to members of the landed gentry, or to those who held religious beliefs. Mary's family, being Quaker, appear to be at odds with the thoughts that Rev Zachariah Mudge preached.
Children
1. Zachary b. 1714; d. 1753 ; a Surgeon.
2. Mary b. 1715.
3. Thomas b. 1717; d. 1794.
4. Richard b. 1718; d. 1773.
5. John b. 1721; d. 1793.
Married 2ndly, Elizabeth Neell in 1762 ; she died 1782. Elizabeth's family lived in Plymouth, and most likely her grandfather was John Neell, who was a merchant in Plymouth. He died in 1711. He appears to have expanded his business to Barbados, where his son John b c 1690 and his wife Eleanor, had a daughter Elizabeth, born 1739. There are no other traceable records for Elizabeth Neell.
William Crocker (fl. 14th c.), living during the reign of King Edward III (1327-1377), of Crocker's Hele in the parish of Meeth, Devon, was a Member of Parliament. His descendants were the prominent Crocker family seated at Lyneham in the parish of Yealmpton, Devon until 1740. William Crocker is the earliest member of the family recorded in the Heraldic Visitations of Devon, although one of his ancestors is known to have been Richard Crocker (fl.1335) of Devon, England, a Member of Parliament for Tavistock (UK Parliament constituency) in Devon in 1335.
The earliest known Devonshire seat of the Crocker family was Crocker's Hele, in the parish of Meeth, (in 2016 a 7-acre solar farm) which in the 14th century was abandoned by William's grandson John II Crocker in favour of Lyneham in the parish of Yealmpton, Devon, which he had inherited from his wife Alice Gambon, daughter and heiress of John Gambon of Lyneham.
The Crocker family is believed to be one of the most ancient in Devon, reputedly of Anglo-Saxon origin, very rare for English gentry who mostly descend from Norman invaders who took part in the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to "that old saw often used among us in discourse", the traditional rhyme related by Prince (d.1723)
"Crocker, Cruwys, and Coplestone,
When the Conqueror came were at home"
The last male of the Crocker family of Lyneham was Courtenay Crocker (d.1740), several times MP for Plympton. The Cruwys family in 2014 still resides in its ancient manor house at Cruwys Morchard where, despite the traditional rhyme which seeks to give it Anglo-Saxon origins, it is first recorded in the reign of King John (1199-1216), or possibly a little earlier.
The senior branch of the Copleston family died out in the male line in 1632, but the Coplestons of Bowden in the parish of Ashprington survived a further century until the death without progeny of Thomas Copleston (1688-1748), MP, whose heirs in 1753 sold Bowden to William Pollexfen Bastard of Kitley
In 1714, at the age of 20 he married Mary Fox. The following year he was the Vicar of St Andrew’s Church Plymouth.
In 1717 he was in Exeter Devon, where his son Thomas was born
In 1718 he was the Master of Bideford Grammar School.
In 1729 he was the Church of England incumbent at Abbotsham
Bonville Lineage
The Bonvilles, of French origin, established themselves in Devon shortly after the Conquest and by the end of the 14th century their wealth and standing in the county had become second only to that of the Courtenays. The antagonism between the heads of the respective families in the mid 15th century, which expressed itself on the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses and ended in the extinction of the main Bonville line, was exacerbated if not caused by jealousy of the material prosperity of the Bonvilles, for which Sir William himself was largely responsible. At his death in 1408 he was holding some 40 manors, and extensive lands and rents, in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, providing his grandson and heir with an income sufficient to justify his elevation to the House of Lords. Such material assets led Sir William into wide fields of public service and military enterprise. In 1369 he served under the duke of Lancaster at Caux and later at Boulogne, and in October 1377 he was again absent overseas and unable to take his seat in Parliament.
His military career, however, was only an interlude in a remarkably active political life: beginning in 1366, Bonville sat, either for Devon or Somerset, in 20 out of the 33 Parliaments convened in the next 36 years. His position in the West Country, if not already evident from this near monopoly, may be gauged by the frequency of his appointments to royal commissions, some of which were of major importance. Thus he served on bodies appointed to inquire into Richard Lyons’s extortions in 1376 and on those set up to deal with unlawful assemblies throughout the south-western counties in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt; and he was among those chosen to deal with attacks on the bishop of Exeter’s property in 1380 and 1384.
The burden of such work lightened in the last years of Richard II’s reign, and although Bonville made a loan of £100 to the King in October 1397, this may not have been an entirely voluntary move, given the prevailing political atmosphere. He took the precaution of obtaining two pardons in the following year. Of course, advancing age might well be the reason for his inactivity during this period, although two exemptions from public service, one of them granted by Henry IV in November 1399, were not enough to free him from all duties, and the new government leaned heavily on him. Beginning as a commissioner to inquire into the possessions of Richard II and his adherents in six counties, Bonville soon found himself involved again in public work.
He was summoned as one of four knights from Somerset to attend the great council of 1401, made a loan of £200 to the Crown in 1403 and another of £40 later, and worked on commissions of array in the west to provide men to put down the Welsh rebellion. The payment of the duke of York’s retinue was a later concern, but in June 1407 he found that he could not complete this particular task, then being at home and too ill to ride. By this time Bonville had served the Crown for more than 40 of his 75 years.
A man of Bonville’s standing required few tangible rewards for his services. Nevertheless, he held the hundred of Stone (Somerset) from 1378 to 1386 and again after 1388, and also the custody of the hundred of Winfrith Newburgh (Dorset), both by royal grant. But clearly the steady and rapid growth of his landed holdings and wealth owed more to personal initiative, as revealed by innumerable transactions to which he was party between 1360 and his death, than to trifling marks of royal favour. Accretions by marriage and purchase made him one of the most prominent landowners in the west. The core of his estates were those he inherited from his father, some time before his first return to Parliament in 1366, and his sister, Margery, gave up her interest in them to him later.
They comprised several properties in east Devon (notably Shute itself, the family seat) and Somerset (including the manor and advowson of Sock Dennis), as well as half the manor of ‘Geffreyston’ in Pembrokeshire. Through his first wife, Margaret d’Aumarle, Bonville obtained Woodbury and two other manors and an advowson in Devon. Stapleton-by-Martok and lands in Somerton (Somerset) were inherited in the 1360s from his kinsmen the St. Clares (one of whom he was accused of murdering in 1365).
He also acquired Thurlbear and Tatworth in the same county, the latter perhaps by purchase from Sir John Chideock†. Bonville’s first wife was the cousin of Sir John Merriott† of Merriott, Somerset, and it was from him that he acquired in 1372 the manor of Bradford by Wellington as well as lands in Devon. After Merriott’s death in 1391 Bonville obtained a royal grant of the lands and marriage of his only daughter, but she died in 1394 whereupon Bonville’s wife and her sister Elizabeth, wife of Sir Humphrey Stafford I*, inherited the Merriott estates, which included the manors of Merriott, Great Lopen and Great Stratton.
The growth of Bonville’s estates may be charted from the numerous settlements which he made on his children, while something of his rise in status is suggested by the differences between two early wills. Bonville was already a rich man by the time he made his first surviving testament on 11 Aug. 1369, before going abroad with John of Gaunt; he mentioned a ‘hamper of silver’ kept at Woodbury and required that his children be advanced ‘according to their estate’, which meant that his two eldest daughters should be married to men with land worth not less than £40 a year. Yet in another will, made just six years later, Bonville insisted that these two girls should take husbands worth 100 marks p.a., leaving their younger sisters to marry into the ranks of the £40 landowner.
Bonville made elaborate arrangements for the marriages of his children: one of them, Elizabeth, was wedded to Thomas Carew, heir to the extensive Carew estates in Devon, a match which involved Bonville in several transactions with Carew’s stepfather, Sir John Merriott; Thomas married Sir John Stretch’s* daughter, Cecily, and John gained the hand of Elizabeth, daughter of John Fitzroger of Chewton, the heiress of substantial properties including half of the manor of Selling in Kent, which inheritance was committed to Bonville in 1382.
It was this last daughter-in-law’s mother, Alice, whom Bonville took as his second wife not long before his death. She, who had already outlived four husbands, brought him all his Cornish property as well as more land in Somerset. Besides forming useful connexions with Merriott, Stafford and Stretch, Bonville struck up friendships with Guy, Lord Bryan (whom he asked in one of his early wills to be the guardian of his daughters), and Bishop Brantingham of Exeter. Unlike his grandson in later times he also appears to have been on convivial terms with the Courtenays, and, indeed, he even received livery from the earl of Devon, in 1384-5. No reliable contemporary valuation of Bonville’s estates has survived, but the estimates given at his inquisition post mortem suggest an income of well over £300 a year. That his lands and heir were committed after his death to Edward, duke of York, for the payment of not less than £1,000, is an indication of Bonville’s importance and wealth.4
Of even greater significance is Bonville’s last will, dated 13 Aug. 1407, in which bequests in money alone amounted to over £1,230. The Bonvilles had been benefactors of the Cistercian abbey of Newenham near their home at Shute ever since it had been founded in Henry III’s reign, and it was naturally there that Sir William wished to be buried, before the High Cross in the monastic church. He left £40 to the abbey, and another £40 was assigned to the rebuilding of the frater in the abbey at Glastonbury. His bequests to the friars in six west country towns totalled £35, while the nuns of the priory of White Hall in Ilchester profited by a gift of £10.
Over £54 was set aside for the provision of requiem masses immediately following Sir William’s death and a further £40 for the saying of prayers during the ensuing two years in the churches on his manors of Shute, Merriott and Woodbury, besides the £110 assigned to the poor who came to his funeral or prayed for his soul. The sum of £85 and 62 quarters of wheat were to be doled out to his poor tenantry, and 100 marks expended on the upkeep of roads and bridges in his lordships in Devon and Somerset. Bonville’s executors were to retain £200 for the purchase of a royal licence to amortize land of the annual value of 50 marks for the foundation of a hospital for the poor in Comb Street, Exeter, to the maintenance of which all his rents in the city were to be applied.
Personal bequests to members of his family, his executors and servants came to about £530. Bonville was well enough to make the journey to Wells for the parliamentary elections held in October that year, but died on 14 Feb. 1408. His neighbours, Sir Thomas Brooke* and John Stretch*, acted as supervisors of his will, which was proved by Bishop Stafford at Crediton on 24 Mar. Bonville’s heir was his grandson, (Sir) William II*, who was to be summoned to Parliament as Lord Bonville in 1449.
Fox Linage
The de Vaux family came to England from France. A common ancestor was Harold de Vaux, Lord of Vaux, in Normandy, having for religious purposes conferred his seigneury upon the abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen, came into England accompanied by his three sons, Hubert, Ranulph, and Robert.
[John Burke, History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. IV, R. Bentley, London, 1834, p. 100, Martin, of the Wilderness, Family of Vaux]
Links from the past Lord Hubert de Vaux, Lord of Gilsland, is my 25th great grandfather. His daughter Beatrix follows my Isaacson lineage, his son Robert de Vaux, appears to follow this Fox lineage.
Francis Fox of St Germans was the progenitor of a vast clan of people called "Fox", notable in many fields of enterprise, science and the arts. He was an early convert to the Quaker faith, to which many of later generations were also true.
Burke, in his History of the commoners, states "that the numerous families of Fox at present residing in the West of England sprang from one common ancestor, a Francis Fox, who married 1646, Dorothy Kekewich." Tradition represents him to have come from Wiltshire (it is said from the parish of Farley or that of Pitton), somewhere in 1645, during the commotions of the civil war. He is stated to have been descended from the same family as the celebrated Sir Stephen Fox, ancestor of the Earls of Ilchester and the Lords Holland. It is likewise handed down that he was one of seven or eight sons, and that others of the same family also came into Devonshire and Cornwall, settling at Plymouth and Looe, but left no sons who survived.
After marrying in 1646 he lived at Catchfrench, a 16th-century manor house belonging to the Kekewiches. Catchfrench is about three miles (5 km) from St Germans, where Francis was a clothier. It is about the same distance from Menheniot, where George Fox held his first Cornish meetings. George Fox brought the Quaker message to Cornwall in 1655 and it was then or a little later that Francis and his family joined the Society of Friends.
His son, also Francis, married Tabitha Croker in 1686. They had three sons and four daughters. Their progeny settled and were successful in business and the professions in Wadebridge, Wellington and Brislington in Somerset, Exeter, Plymouth and Kingsbridge in Devon.
Children of first marriage of George Fox of Par to Mary Bealing Edward Fox (born 1719) of Wadebridge, married Anna Were (1719–1788). They had nine children, including
• George Fox (11 July 1746 - 22 June 1816) of Perranarworthal near Falmouth, Cornwall, merchant
• Thomas Fox (17 January 1747/8–29 April 1821) of Wellington, Somerset (woollen manufacturer and banker) See below.
• Edward Fox (13 December 1749 – 8 April 1817) of Wadebridge, Merchant.
• Robert Were Fox (1758–1872) of Wadebridge (not to be confused with his son, Robert Were Fox (1792–1872) or his cousin or cousin's son, both also called "Robert Were Fox").
Children of George Fox of Par's second marriage to Anna Debell
• George Croker Fox the First (1727/8-1781) See Fox family of Falmouth.
• Joseph Fox (1729–1784) See Fox family of Falmouth.
The Falmouth Foxes are descended from two grandsons of Francis and Tabitha Fox: George Croker Fox (1727/8-1781) and Joseph Fox (1729–1784). George's descendants became prosperous merchants and were influential in the development of education, the arts and sciences in the town. Two of their number wrote fascinating journals, during the 19th century which were published in the 1970s. Joseph and many of his descendants were physicians.
James Fox and Justinian Fox set sail for America back in 1686, James' brother Francis Fox, Jr., had just married Tabitha Croker. His first wife, Joan Smith of Plymouth, had died two years before, leaving him with five small children to raise. Tabitha was a good catch for a Quaker cloth maker from a very small town in Cornwall ...
Justinian Fox was the son of James Fox, they were great uncles of Mary Fox.
Her family were Quakers, and settled in America.
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