13. LANEMAN-BLAKEMORE

Sampson Tree 

JOHN LANEMAN and JOHANE BLAKEMORE (13)

 

JOHN LANEMAN. In 1594 Anthony Fouke married Rebecka Laneman in the North Devon village of Rose Ash. The Rose Ash registers only go back to 1591, so we shall not find Rebecka’s baptism.

Although we do not have a record of her parents in the Rose Ash register, there is a promising marriage in Bishops Nympton in 1559 for John Laneman of Aisheraphe (Rose Ash) and Johane Blakemore. John Laneman would have taken Johane back to Rose Ash to raise their family. These may well be Rebecca’s parents.

Anthony Fooke’s mother was Peternell Blakemore of Bishops Nympton, so Anthony and Rebecca could be cousins.

There was another Rebecca Laneman in Rose Ash, who married in 1603. This latter marriage suggests there were at least two Lanemen men raising families in Rose Ash in the late 16^th century.

A month after Anthony married Rebecka, Jane Laneman married William Meare.

Agnes Laneman married John Paine on 12 Jan 1594/5.

John Laneman married in 1599.

Jane Laneman alias Croker married in 1600.

These could be the children of either John and Johane Laneman or of the other Laneman couple.

.

JOHANE BLAKEMORE. Since she married in Bishops Nympton, a village 3 miles north-west of Rose Ash, this is likely to be her home parish. The Bishops Nympton registers begin in 1556, too late for Johane’s baptism.

Their marriage date of 1559 was the year after the accession of Elizabeth I. We should expect this couple to have been born in the 1530s, during the reign of Henry VIII. They would have seen the break with Rome and the formation of the Church of England. Much of the country’s infrastructure of Reformation, the secular arm had to slowly fill the gaps.

They saw the short-lived reign of  the boy king Edward VI, with more vigorous Protestant reforms under Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. But the country swung back to Roman Catholicism under his sister Mary. Elizabeth tried at first to steer a moderate course, but attacks by Catholic powers and the Pope’s decree that she should be executed drove her to persecute English Catholics, who were regarded as traitors. We do not know where the sympathies of the Lanemans and the Blakemores lay, but they seem to have conformed to Church of England practices.

We have not found a burial either for John or Johane.

[1] https://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/05/07/86/5078680_31e16019.jpg