Some corrections and additions to the Complete Peerage: Volume 12, part 2: Wake

WAKE

Volume 12, part 2, page 302 (as modified by volume 14):
He [John Wake (d. 1300)] m., before 24 Sep. 1291, Joan DE FIENNES.(c)
Note c:
Cal. Patent Rolls, 1281-92, p. 445. See John Parsons, Geneal. Mag., vol. 20, 1982, p. 336.

J. C. Parsons [The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290 (Toronto, 1977), pp. 44-46] suggested that Joan was a daughter of William de Fiennes [d. 1302] by Blanche, daughter of John of Brienne (d. 1296). The marriage must have taken place well before 1290, by which time Joan had at least two children [ibid., p. 45].

The basis of the identification is that Joan is one of a group of four "damsels" of the chamber who appear frequently throughout Queen Eleanor's wardrobe account book for 1289-90 and in one entry are described as kinswomen of the queen. She is described in a medieval pedigree roll as the daughter of William de Fenes, a Count of Spain [cited originally by Complete Peerage, volume 12, part 2, p. 302], just as Margaret, the wife of Edmund de Mortimer of Wigmore, is described in the Fundationis et Fundatorum Historia of Wigmore as the daughter of William de Fendles of Spain [cf Complete Peerage, vol. 9, p. 283]. Parsons therefore suggested that Joan was "almost unquestionably" a daughter of William de Fiennes (the queen's second cousin) by Blanche of Brienne (whose father John was the queen's first cousin), and that her family had been assumed to be Spanish because of their kinship to the queen.

[Item last updated 13 July 2004.]