Joan Leche

Family

Joan Leche, born about 1450, was the daughter of Denis Leche of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, and his wife Elizabeth, whose surname is unknown. She had three brothers whose names are known, Henry, Thomas and John. John entered the priesthood, and was vicar of Saffron Walden, Essex, from 1489 until he died on 8 November 1521.

Career

At some time between 1470 and 1475 Joan Leche married Thomas Bodley (d.1492). Bodley's family was from Devonshire, and although the exact connection has not been established, he was of the same family as Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library, and bore the same coat of arms, 'Gules, five martlets argent on a chief indented or three crowns azure'. Bodley was by occupation a tailor, and had a brother, Richard (d.1491), a London grocer. Both brothers and their families lived in the parish of St Botolph Billingsgate, and both died within months of each other, leaving young children.

Joan Leche had two sons and two daughters by Thomas Bodley:

Thomas Bodley left an estate of £1000, of which his wife, Joan, was entitled to a third, and his children another third, according to the custom of the City of London. Sutton considers it likely that she continued to run her late husband's business.

About March 1495 she remarried. Her second husband, Thomas Bradbury (c.1439 – 10 January 1510), was in his mid-fifties, and she herself was in her forties. The Bradbury family had come from Ollersett, Derbyshire, to Braughing, Hertfordshire, and from thence to Littlebury, Essex, near Saffron Walden, where Joan Leche's brother was vicar. Bradbury was one of four brothers, and had not been married before. He was a well-off London mercer and Merchant Adventurer, and at the time of the marriage took on her son, James Bodley, as an apprentice.

After the marriage the family lived in the parish of St Stephen Coleman Street, and Bradbury embarked on a public career which he appears to have avoided during his bachelorhood. He was elected to Parliament in 1495, served as warden of the Mercers in 1496, and was one of the two Sheriffs of London in 1498. In 1502 he was Master of the Mercers' Company, and an alderman of the City of London. Barron and Sutton attribute Bradbury's involvement in public office and in the affairs of his Company at this period to his wife's influence and to the likelihood that she was able to 'take full charge of his business in his absence', thus enabling him to devote time to these other pursuits. In 1509 he was elected Lord Mayor, but his term in office was brief. He made his will on 9 January 1510, requesting burial in the chapel of the parish church in St Stephen Coleman Street, and died on the following day. His passing was noted in Arnold's Chronicle. There had been no issue of his marriage, and Thomas Bradbury's heir was his nephew, William Bradbury (d.1550) of Littlebury, son of his eldest brother, Robert Bradbury.

His widow inherited a mansion in Catte Street in London and several manors and annuities, as well as the residue of Bradbury's estate, including his mercery business, which she appears to have sold, although not until after her son James Bodley, a mercer, had died in 1514. In his will James appointed his mother overseer, bequeathing her a pound of saffron in recompense.

After Bradbury's death his widow endowed a perpetual chantry for his soul and the soul of her first husband, Thomas Bodley, in the church of St Stephen Coleman Street. This was a major undertaking, involving the purchase of lands whose revenues would fund the chantry in perpetuity. Within a year of Thomas Bradbury's death his widow had purchased the necessary lands, and had agreed to give the Mercers' Company her mansion in Catte Street to use as their Company hall in return for their agreement to act as trustees. As Sutton points out, this arrangement had certain advantages for Lady Bradbury; in 1511 the Mercers held their annual banquet at her mansion at her request, noting that it would be more 'chargeable' than was usually the case because of the 'Company of Gentilwemen that she myndeth to have'. This innovation of having wives present at the Mercers' annual banquet continued for some years, at least until 1525.

In 1513 Lady Bradbury, her brother John Leche, vicar of Saffron Walden, and her son, James Bodley, were involved in obtaining a form of self-government for the town of Saffron Walden through the founding of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, and Lady Bradbury also contributed funds towards reparations of the town's church. After the death of her brother, the vicar, in 1521 Lady Bradbury carried out a project which he had long contemplated, the setting up of a grammar school in the town. Within a year of his death Lady Bradbury had found a schoolmaster, whose salary she paid herself until she had arranged, by 1525, for the endowment of the school. One of the school's students in the early 1560s was the writer Gabriel Harvey; in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), the satirist Thomas Nashe claimed that while there Harvey was known as a 'desperate stabber with penknives'.

During her widowhood, Lady Bradbury doubled the inheritance from Thomas Bradbury which had been her jointure, purchasing the properties in Middlesex which endowed her chantry as well as several manors, including Willingale Spain, which partly supported her school in Saffron Walden, and Black Notley. She made her last will on 2 March 1530, and died near the end of that month. She was buried beside her second husband.

The perpetual chantry founded by Lady Bradbury went the way of other church lands during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but some of the properties still remain with the Mercers' Company, and are known as Lady Bradbury's Estate in Covent Garden. The school she founded in Saffron Walden is still in existence; it is currently known as Dame Bradbury's School.