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- The younger son of William Fortescue and Elizabeth Beauchamp was John Fortescue (died after 1432), of Sheepham in the parish of Modbury, Captain of the captured Castle of Meaux,[7] during the Hundred Years' War, ancestor of the Fortescues of Filleigh and Weare Giffard in Devon (see Earl Fortescue) and of the Fortescues of Buckland Filleigh, Devon (see Earl of Clermont). These three prominent seats of the Fortescue family were all inherited by the marriage of Martin Fortescue (d.1472) (son of Sir John Fortescue (c.1394-1479) (And Grandson of this John) of Ebrington in Gloucestershire, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, 2nd son of John Fortescue, Captain of Meaux) to Elizabeth Densyll, daughter and heiress of Richard Densyll.[8]
Foresque.org
Sir John Fortescue, (born c. 1385, Norris, Somerset, Eng.-died c. 1479, Ebrington, Gloucestershire), jurist, notable for a legal treatise, De laudibus legum Angliae (c. 1470; “In Praise of the Laws of England”), written for the instruction of Edward, prince of Wales, son of the deposed king Henry VI of England. He also stated a moral principle that remains basic to the Anglo-American jury system: It is better that the guilty escape than that the innocent be punished.
Fortescue became chief justice of the King’s Bench in 1442 and was knighted the following year. After the defeat of Henry VI’s Lancastrian army at Towton, Yorkshire (March 29, 1461), he fled with Henry to Scotland, where Fortescue probably was appointed lord chancellor of the exiled government. From 1463 to 1471 he lived in France at the court of Henry’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, where he helped to educate Prince Edward to rule England in the event of a Lancastrian restoration. Returning to England, he was captured at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, during the final defeat of the Lancastrians (May 4, 1471), submitted to the Yorkist king Edward IV, and was allowed to retire to his home.
Unusual for its time, De laudibus depreciates the Roman-derived civil law and eulogizes the English constitution, statutes, and system of legal education, while offering suggestions for reform. It was probably the first book about law written in a style so simple and lucid as to be comprehensible to the layman.
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1397 - 1479 (94 years)
