Mede, Isabel

[Mead8.FTW]

From the Berkeley Manuscripts, by John Smyth (1567-1640)

The wife of this lord Maurice was Isabel daughter of Philip Mead Esq. and of Isabel his wife; son of Thomas, son of Thomas Mead, descended of the ancient family of Meads of Meads place in Fayland in the parish of Wraxall near Portbury in the county of Somerset, where anciently they had continued; whom this lord married in the thirtieth year of his age, about eighteen months after his father''s death, she then a widow and mother of three children, who all died very young.
At the time of this her second marriage, her father was an alderman of Bristol & at divers times mayor there; and for her dowry, besides her personal estate, she brought to this lord her husband (then a younger brother) divers lands in Somersetshire, and others in Thornbury in Gloucestershire (where this lord then also had other lands both of his own purchase and of the gift of his elder brother) and a lease of the said Meads place for one and twenty years; and was after one of his executors, as his will shows.
This lady Isabel had one only brother called Richard Mead, who first married Elizabeth, and after married Anne daughter of Thomas Paunsfoot of Hasfield in Gloucestershire Esq., a family of antiquity inferior to none in that county (this of Berkeley excepted), but his issue dying very young without issue, about the third of Henry the seventh [i.e. about 1488], this lady Isabel became heir to divers manors and lands in the County of Gloucester, and to divers messuages and tenements in Bedminster, Fayland, Ashton, Wraxall, and Middle Tykenham, in the County of Somerset.
She was a virtuous lady and evermore content with better or harder fortunes, and what goodness and disposition she was of in her last widowhood, after this lord her husband''s death, may be conceived out of these few relics of her many devotions.
The 29th of May, 1514, in the 6th of Henry the 8th, (amongst other liberalities) she gave to the Prior of the friar hermits of the order of Saint Augustine in London the sum of 72 £ 13 s 4 d towards the repair of their house, grown ruinous with age; for which they bound themselves and their successors in a full chapter to say on the seventh of November the exiquies of the anniversaries of her and her husband, to be sung with note by all the convent in the choir of their church: and the morrow after, a Mass of requiem at the high altar by all the convent for the souls of the said lady and her husband and her husband the lord Maurice.