Sir John Blount, Knight of the Garter, was the elder son and principal heir of Sir Walter Blount of Elvaston, and a soldier of distinction in the service of the Lancastrian crown during the French wars of Henry V. He served as Governor of Calais, was admitted to the Order of the Garter in 1417, and met his death at the siege of Rouen in August 1418 – an honourable end to a career which continued the family’s unbroken tradition of loyal service to the English crown.
He died without male issue, and the Derbyshire estates passed to his younger brother Thomas.
Career
Following his father’s death at Shrewsbury in 1403, John Blount succeeded to the family’s Derbyshire estates centred on Elvaston and Barton Blount, and continued the martial tradition of his father under both Henry IV and Henry V.
During his service in the Calais command he was besieged in a castle of Aquitaine by a large French army and succeeded in defeating it with a significantly smaller force – an action recorded by the chronicler Walsingham in his Ypodigma Neustriae, with some sources dating the engagement to around 1412, when a French army commanded by a Marshal of France was repulsed.
In recognition of his military service, John Blount was nominated to the Order of the Garter and installed in 1417, occupying stall number 129 in the Garter lists. His stall plate at Windsor bore arms incorporating the Ayala quartering inherited from his Spanish mother, Doña Sancha de Ayala. He was present at the siege of Rouen (1418–19), one of the great operations of Henry V’s Norman campaign, and was killed there in August 1418.
Family and succession
Sir John died without male issue, and the estates passed to his younger brother, Sir Thomas Blount, seated at Elvaston, Derbyshire. A separate genealogical tradition holds that a further brother, James, was the ancestor of the Blounts of Grendon, Orleton and other Herefordshire branches.
His birth date is uncertain: the estate record follows the conventional c. 1388, though the chronology of his father’s marriage by 1374 has led some scholars to prefer a date in the range c. 1375–80. No freely accessible modern biography of Sir John survives independently of the records of his father; the heraldic Garter list is the clearest authority for the 1417 date of his investiture.