BOSTOCK HISTORY:

THE ANCIENT FAMILY AND TOWNSHIP

Main Page Early Family History

 

ADAM II BOSTOCK (c.1330 - 1372)

The next generation of the main line has, as lord of the manor, Adam de Bostock, who is for the purposes of this work Adam II. He was probably born about 1330 -1335. He is rarely found in contemporary documents, perhaps because he spent much time on military service in France and Spain. An Adam Bostock is known to have served in Gascony in 1356/7. On 26 May 1357, an order was issued to the Black Prince�s administrators in Cheshire to cause charters to be made out in favour of Adam, as the Prince had granted him a life-time release from performing the service of leading beasts, seized on behalf of the Prince for debt to Middlewich for onward transport to Chester Castle. Others who held tenements in the township of Bostock were however still required to perform this service. 

According to Leycester�s pedigree, Adam was knighted by the Prince of Wales at the battle of Najera, fought in Spain on July 1367. If this is so he served alongside the famous hero of the Hundred Years Wars, Sir Hugh Calveley, whose marvelous effigy is to be seen at Bunbury parish church. 

Adam married Margaret, a daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Wettenhall, alias Kingsley, lord of Wettenhall, Acton and Dorfold. She and her sisters were made heirs on the death of the last surviving male representative, Richard, who died childless in 1370. The other daughters married into the families of Arderne, Hinckley and Manley. At the time of her brother's death Margaret was already dead; as the other daughters were then aged about 21 she must have died young.


The arms of Wettenhall, alias Kingsley

Adam himself did not live to any great age for his inquisition post mortem was taken in 1373. It recorded that he died on Friday, 26 February 1372. It tells us that he held a house and grounds with one ploughland in Little Stanthurle (Little Stanthorne) valued at 46s 8d., and that he had granted the manor of Bostock, held of the St Pierre family, to the vicars of Davenham and Weaverham in trust until his 8 years old son Adam should be 24 years old. A proviso stated that Adam's brothers William and David succeed to the manor should the young Adam die early. The manor was valued at 60 marks (�40). A fresh inquisition, held in 1387 recorded that Adam III, on the day he died, held the manor of Bostock from Walter de Cockseyne of Kidderminster; he having married an heiress of the St. Pierre family: Adam was then aged 20. 

Most of the pedigrees, that have been published of the Bostock family show Adam and Margaret as having a number of male children: Adam, David, Thomas, Richard and Nicholas. However, it seems that they can have had only a couple of children, as Adam the eldest was born about 1367 and Margaret was dead by 1370 and even assuming that Adam remarried, of which fact there is no evidence, he only lived for a further four or five years. The persons quoted in the pedigrees were probably the brothers of Adam II and not his sons. When considering the wording of the inquisition and the entail in favour of Adam� s brothers William and David, it would seem that Adam II died leaving only one son, and perhaps a daughter or two. 

Of the so-called brothers the following may be true. David Bostock married an heiress of the Dee family and founded a family that settled at Churton (or else it was the David of the earlier generation). William Bostock resided at Huntingdon and had a son also named William who in 1433 was said to be sixty years of age and the husband of Alice Mulneton whose daughter and heiress married a member of the Cotgreave family. Thomas de Bostock was an archer of the livery of the Crown in the service of Richard II in 1398 who, in that year, gave evidence against the Abbot of Vale Royal on a charge of impoverishing the Abbey�s lands. Richard de Bostock, described as armiger in 1398, was later styled 'Sir Richard' when he received an annuity from the king for his services. He had sons William, who had letters of protection in 1394, and Richard who, in that same year, became a monk at Vale Royal: Sir Richard died in 1417. Nicholas, who appears in Ormerod�s pedigree, lived at Mobberley and had a son John. 

Before leaving this generation it is worth repeating the facts of Adam II�s parentage. All pedigrees state that he was son of a William Bostock, but it is quite clear that this is not so. Adam de Bostock II who held the manor from the heirs of the St. Pierre family according to the inquisition of 1372 was, according to the document of 1354, son of another Adam, who was son of Adam, whose widow Matilda sued John de St. Pierre, her husband's lord, for dower in 1350. A succession, therefore, of three first-born sons named Adam, who were lords of the manor of Bostock.

 

� Tony Bostock 2007