WELBORNE FAMILY.
In Burke's Extinct Peerage it is stated that John de Lacy, first Earl of Lincoln, died A.D. 1240, leaving one son and two daughters. The latter were removed, in the twenty-seventh year of Hen. III., to Windsor, there to be educated with the daughters of the king. One of these sisters, Lady Maud de Lacy, married Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; but I can find no mention of either the name or marriage of the other. Am I correct in identifying her with "Dorothy, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln," who married Sir John Welborne (see Harl. MSS. 888. 1092-1153.)? The dates in the Welborne pedigree perfectly correspond with this assumption.
Another question relative to this family is of greater interest, and I should feel sincerely obliged by any answer to it. Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, married Eleanora, daughter of King John, and had by her five children. The fourth son is called Richard in Burke's Royal Families, vol. i. p. xxiii.; and the report is added, that "he remained in England in privacy under the name of Wellsburn." In the Extinct Peerage, the name of the same son is Almaric, of whom it says: "When conveying his sister from France, to be married to Leoline, Prince of Wales, he was taken prisoner with her at sea, and suffered a long imprisonment. He was at last, however, restored to liberty, and his posterity are said to have flourished in England under the name of Wellsburne." Is it not to be presumed that the above Sir John Welborne (living, as he must have done, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and allying himself with the great family especially protected by Henry III., uncle of the De Montforts) was himself the son of Richard or Almaric de Montfort, and founder of that family of Wellesburne, said to have "flourished in England"? The De Montforts no doubt abandoned their patronymic in consequence of the attainder of Simon, earl of Leicester, and adopted that of Wellesburne from the manor of that name, co. Warwick, in the possession of Henry de Montfort temp. Ric. I.
The only known branch of the Welborns terminated (after ten descents from Sir John) in coheiresses, one of whom married in 1574, and brought the representation into a family which counts among its members your correspondent
Ursula.