Sir John Vachell of Coley (fl. 1309) 

John Vachell was the member of the family who first anchored the Vachell name to Coley. He came from a prosperous Reading background: his grandfather Walter Vachell appears in thirteenth-century records as a merchant and juror, and his father, also John, was a wool trader and legal officer attached to Reading Abbey. By the early fourteenth century the Vachells were already substantial burgesses with interests in Tilehurst and Burghfield.

In 1309 John purchased around ninety acres of land at Coley from Thomas Syward of Reading. That transaction marks the beginning of the Vachell association with the hillside above the Holy Brook where the later Coley mansion would stand. Ten years later he added further land in Tilehurst, turning what had been a peripheral holding into a compact estate on the south-western edge of the town. From this point onward it becomes meaningful to speak of "John Vachell of Coley". John played a role in national politics as well. He sat as knight of the shire for Berkshire in the Parliaments of 1324 and 1330, and later sources style him "Sir John Vachell", suggesting he was knighted during his career. A royal licence granted in 1347, allowing him to maintain a private oratory, implies that by then he presided over a substantial gentry house, either in Reading or at Coley. He lived through the great crises of famine and plague that struck mid-fourteenth-century England and appears to have died without surviving children. By the 1380s the Coley and Tilehurst lands had passed instead to his brother Nicholas and then to Nicholas's son William, from whom the later Coley line is directly descended.

In heraldic tradition the Coley branch carried the English motto "'Tis better to suffer than to revenge", later connected—probably apocryphally—to stories of violence in the early fourteenth century. Whatever its exact origin, the motto reflects the family's long involvement in law, administration and the careful management of conflict. For the present Lord of Coley, Sir John Vachell of Coley is therefore not a direct ancestor but a very early kinsman and founder of the family's connection with the Coley estate; the direct line runs through his brother Nicholas Vachell and Nicholas's son William Vachell of Coley.

Sources (selected)

• Ounsley, M. (2024). "Consolidation: The Vachells, 1309–1410." Coley Notebook (blog).
• Ounsley, M. (2024). "It is better to suffer than to revenge." Coley Notebook (blog).
• Crawfurd, G. P. (1893). "The Vachells of Coley." Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 3, 87–92.
• Metcalfe, W. C. (Ed.). (1901). The Visitation of Berkshire in the Years 1532, 1566, and 1623. Harleian Society.