Any internet search for the family of Richard III will
swiftly turn up sites that claim that his eldest sister was called Joan, born
in 1438, but died young. At the time of writing this includes Richard duke of
York’s Wikipedia page; geni.com (which locates Joan’s birth in York); and ‘the genealogy nut’ (claiming she was born and died in Yorkshire). Joan also appears
in countless online family trees. Amy Licence recently argued that Richard’s
mother, Cecily duchess of York, must have accompanied her husband to France in
1436 because Joan would have been conceived while Richard duke of York was
there. Earlier this year, a Richard III Society branch newsletter speculated
that Joan was born in Howden where Cecily’s mother (Joan Beaufort) is known to
have lived.
Yet there is not a single record of Joan of York’s existence
before the later twentieth century.
Richard III had four sisters - Anne, Elizabeth, Margaret and
Ursula - as well as seven brothers. All of these (but not Joan) are named in
two key fifteenth-century documents: the Clare Roll and the Bede Roll of the
Fraternity of St Nicholas. Some of them also appear with their places and dates
of birth in the Annales attributed to
William Worcester, and in a fragment published by J A Giles in his compilation
of sources: The Chronicles of the White
Rose of York. The twelve names also appear in royal genealogies such as
that in Harley Roll C 9 (produced 1472-3 and illustrated here) as well as the sixteenth-century
genealogy that I mentioned in my last post. None of these documents mention
Joan. Moreover, the Clare Roll specifically states (in both its Latin and
English versions) that Richard III’s eldest sister, Anne duchess of Exeter, was
born after a time of 'longe bareynesse'. Anne was born in 1439. All of this
indicates that there was no such person as Joan of York, sister of Richard III.
Where did all these references to Joan come from then? It
appears that she was created by a slip of the pen. After some searching I
discovered a website that gave a source for Joan – Alison Weir’s Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete
Genealogy. I had not read this book but had been impressed by the breadth
of the author's research for her biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Katherine
Swynford, so I contacted her to ask if she could tell me her source for Joan. She
explained that it was a genealogy written in the 1960s, but she had since
concluded that no such child existed and Joan would not be appearing in her new
edition of the Genealogy. Perhaps the
compiler of that first genealogy had the family trees of Richard III’s mother, Cecily
Neville, to hand as they were writing – most of these give Cecily’s eldest
sister as Joan. It would have been an easy slip to transfer this name to
another line. Among the multitude of tiny details each historian juggles, some
such slips creep into every work. Unfortunately, it takes far longer to correct
the historical record than it does to introduce one error, especially if that
error has excited the interest of website writers.
J L Laynesmith
Image:
detail from British Library Harley Roll C 9 membrane 19 (source: British
Library, made available to the public domain). Genealogy showing Edward IV’s
descent. The branch next to Edward IV (the final crowned circle) shows the
king’s place as the third child in a list of all twelve of his parents' children, beginning with
Anne duchess of Exeter on the left.
(For further details of manuscripts and books mentioned in this piece
see J L Laynesmith, Cecily duchess of
York, published July 2017)
