Wilby in Suffolk is flat, featureless and sparsely-populated, with a fine old church, a handful of cottages and a few scattered farmsteads

Most English families are lucky to trace their line back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and mine is no exception. John ‘Wilbie’ of Colchester was described as a yeoman and it was the emigration of his son Thomas to Cornwall, in 1647, that turned us into West Countrymen – Poldarkian characters who in the eighteenth century combined hard farming on the county’s bleak north coast with a little light wrecking. In default of other evidence, can the surname itself tell us about our earlier origins?

The names ‘Wilby’ and ‘Willoughby’ seem always to have been interchangeable, and to have been borne by a number of distinct and unrelated families to indicate their place of origin. There are villages called ‘Willoughby’ in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire, and others called ‘Wilby’ in Norfolk, Northamptonshire and Suffolk.

Thus the remotest ancestor of the earls and dukes of Ancaster and the lords Willoughby de Eresby, Willoughby de Broke, Willoughby of Parham and Middleton was a certain William Willoughby of Willoughby-in-the-Marsh, Lincolnshire, in the time of Richard I. With their roots firmly in that county, they were entirely unconnected to Willoughbys originating in, say, Norfolk or Suffolk.

The various ‘Willoughbys’ and ‘Wilbys’ were etymologically distinct, too. The Lincolnshire Willoughby is called ‘Wilgebi’ in Domesday Book, a combination of the Old English wilig, for willow, with the Old Scandinavian byr, for a settlement or homestead. The name describes, picturesquely but prosaically, a ‘farmstead by the willows’.

The Wilbys, on the other hand, are called ‘Wilebi’ in Domesday, and are the byrs, or homesteads, of one or more men called Willa, who presumably were Viking marauders of the Danelaw period (A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-Names, (Oxford, 1991); P.H. Reaney, A Dictionary of British Surnames (1976), pp.383, 385.) As Wilby in Suffolk is the closest of the three villages to Colchester, I believe my ancestors to have originated there, and very probably to have included the eponymous Willa himself.

When might Willa, my putative ancestor, have arrived in England, and what sort of man was he?

Belying the urbanity of his current-day descendants, Willa was, no doubt, irredeemably uncouth, but charming enough for the first Mrs Willoughby

The Viking raids, the memory of which is seared on our national consciousness, had been sporadic at first. The coming of the Vikings in 793 had been announced, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by ‘immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine followed, and a little after that, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne.’ After 835, raids are regularly recorded in the south and west. The attacks soon escalated into a full-scale invasion, with a ‘great army’ landing in 865. It proceeded to conquer Northumbria (867), East Anglia (869) and – reinforced in 871 by a ‘great summer army’ – most of Mercia (874-7). Wessex itself barely escaped after a series of bloody battles in 871, but in 878 was occupied by the Danish king Guthrum, who had surprised Alfred, the new king of Wessex, at Chippenham.

Forced into hiding in the Somerset marshes, Alfred returned to win a decisive victory at Edington. The vanquished Guthrum now accepted baptism and agreed to withdraw, becoming ruler in 880 of the short-lived kingdom of East Anglia. In a subsequent treaty, Guthrum and Alfred, who had beaten off attacks by a third ‘great army’, fixed the boundary between the English and Danish spheres of influence on the line of Watling Street, between London and Chester. The old Saxon kingdoms to the north and east of this line, including East Anglia, disappeared for ever. This was to be the ‘Danelaw’, a wild, politically-fragmented area that was, for the time being, beyond the sphere of any English king.

The Gokstad Ship, now at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo

Ocean-going Viking longboats could accommodate about thirty men, or even fewer if horses, camp followers and enslaved captives were on board, so the number of settlers would not have been excessive. (A ninth-century example of such a ship, discovered in a royal burial mound at Gokstad in Sweden, is largely of oak and is 75 feet 5 inches long, with a keel of sixty feet. It has seating for 32 oarsmen.) The typical raiding fleet after 850 comprised 150 to 250 ships. Yet the impact of the Viking settlement of the Danelaw endures in aspects of our law and language, including much everyday vocabulary (anger, blunder, gift, leather etc.), and even personal pronouns like they, them and their. (James Campbell ed., The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982), pp.132-4, 147.) Moreover, the place-names of the former Danelaw are, to this day, predominantly Scandinavian, proof of the permanence and extent of the Viking settlement. It has been pointed out, for example, that to the north of Watling Street there are some six hundred place-names ending in -by – and scarcely one to the south of it. (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.38.)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers (e.g. under the years 876, 877 and 880) to the ‘sharing out of the land’ by the Viking army and their proceeding ‘to plough and support themselves’ (Michael Wood, Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (London, 1987), p.129). New lords were thus imposed on the native peasantry, and new neighbours who spoke a foreign tongue. Many of them are identifiable, for ‘the former abodes of Grim, Biorn, Thor, Guddar, and Haco go by the names of Grimsby, Burnthwaite, Harroby, Thoresby, Guttersby, and Hacconby’ (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.52), to cite only a few examples.

As long as they were compliant, they may have interfered little with the indigenous population, cultivating virgin land in outlying areas rather than ousting them from existing farms. It is noticeable that many of the ‘-bys’, including that of our Willa, have no church attached to them in 1086, suggesting that they stood apart from the main settlements. In parts of East Anglia, the Vikings spread themselves rather thinly. In Suffolk there are only ‘a few scattered Danish names, chiefly near the coast – such as Orford, Thorpe, Barnby, and Lowestoft’ (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.42), and Willa was daring indeed to have penetrated so far into English territory.

Intent on turning their swords into ploughshares, the colonisers relied for their security on standing armies that were garrisoned in the main towns, and were generally unmolested by the disgruntled English. Their status, however, was privileged, their descendants, many still with Scandinavian names, standing out as free men (sokemen) among the enserfed peasantry of Domesday. Indeed, it is remarkable that the largest concentration of the sokemen in Domesday Book – who comprise only fifteen per cent of the entire population – is in those eastern counties. (Wood, Domesday, pp.129-30, 142, 149.)

Filed teeth on a Viking skeleton - an unimaginably painful process

Belying the urbanity of his current-day descendants, Willa was, no doubt, irredeemably uncouth. In battle, he would have worn a coat of mail and a plain, conical helmet, but his appearance may have been distinctive in other ways. There is evidence of the sea-rovers enjoying their reputation as louche outsiders, like modern-day punks or Hell’s Angels, whose demeanour alone is unsettling. They wore shoulder-length hair and beards. Some were tattooed from head to foot, others filed and decorated their teeth; some even wore dark eye make-up to make themselves look all the more outlandish and frightening (The Vikings: Life and Legend, ed. Gareth Williams et al. (London, 2014), p.80).

The annual Horn Dance is an immemorial custom at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire. The horns are reindeer antlers and one has been carbon-dated to the eleventh century. They are evidence of Viking settlers' sending home for their herds

Willa was, quite possibly, a frenzied, homicidal maniac, like the berserkir of later tradition, crazily biting his shield while preparing for battle. The Vikings, moreover, were pitiless in their assaults on the English. When raids from Scandinavia were resumed in the late tenth century, marauding bands of sea-rovers preyed at will on the populace, setting fire to the houses of the English, feasting on their cattle, killing anyone who dared oppose them (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 991). Powerless even to defend their own homes, the English thegns were forced to witness the rape of their womenfolk, sometimes by a dozen Vikings in turn. People watched helplessly as gangs of their fellow Christians were driven to the ships by two or three seamen to be sold as slaves (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, in English Historical Documents, I (1955), ed. David C. Douglas, pp.857-8). It is too much to hope that Willa would have handled his victims any less roughly. (I am neither proud nor ashamed of my Viking ancestry: are we not all descended from the rapists and murderers of the past?)

Willa may have been the younger son of a lordly family, fated, like so many Scandinavians, to be a wanderer, but with a significant following of his own. The imperative for all was seek out their kinsfolk and connections and to attach themselves to a community, with the great hall of a benevolent lord at its heart – a place for feasting, gambling, gift-giving and entertaining, and for the recitation of heroic poems. Willa must have re-created this for himself at Wilby, perhaps on the site of the present moated manor-house, Wilby Hall, but a key ingredient for his happiness was lacking:

The man has now

laid his sorrows, lacks no gladdeners;

he has a hoard and horses and hall-carousing

and would have everything within an earl’s having

had he my lady with him.

So we are not surprised to discover from a twelfth-century court poem, The Husband’s Message, that the settlers would often send home for their womenfolk, once they had established a safe homestead on which to raise a family (Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (London, 1970), pp.19-20). So I imagine the first Mrs Willoughby as a Dane, rather than a local girl, who had crossed the North Sea on a ship loaded with her dowry and her lord’s reindeer herd, never once looking back to the land of her birth.

Appendix: The two Wilbys – relevant Domesday extracts (from Domesday Book (Penguin, 2003), pp.1219 and 1254):

Lands of Robert Malet in Suffolk: ‘In Horham 1 free man, Aelric, by commendation [a form of vassalage] holds 1 carucate of land … In Wilby Leornic holds 20 acres which the same Aelric held. 1 bordar [a cottager, a peasant of lower economic rank than a villein]. It is the same valuation. It is 12 furlongs long and 4 furlongs broad …’

The fief of the Bishop of Thetford in Norfolk: ‘In Wilby, 1 free man with 10 acres … In Wilby, 1 free man by commendation and soke [a specific right of jurisdiction enjoyed by a lord][held] 40 acres. Then as now 1 bordar.’

See also http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/cuttings/the-uniqueness-of-rupert-willoughby/.

The moat at Wilby Hall, which perhaps occupies the site of Willa's homestead

Stopham Bridge. Until the nineteenth century, the Barttelots took it upon themselves to maintain both the bridge and the main road.

Stopham is a tiny parish near Pulborough, in West Sussex. It has fewer than a hundred inhabitants, but reeks with history and has more than its fair share of important buildings.

The River Arun is crossed here by a spectacular fourteenth-century seven-arched stone bridge, with a pleasant pub (the White Hart) at one end, and Stopham House, formerly known as ‘La Ford’, or Ford Place, at the other. Before there was a bridge, the atte Forde family controlled the ferry crossing.

Manor Farm-house is next to the church at Stopham. The Barttelots rebuilt the ancient seat of the Stopham family in about 1485, but abandoned it in 1638 in favour of Ford Place, their house by the river. Apart from the ivy, Manor Farm-house has changed little since this Victorian engraving.

The heiress of the atte Fordes married into the eponymous Stopham family, whose manor-house was adjacent to the eleventh-century church. The eventual heiress of that line, Joan de Stopham, married, in 1395 or 6, John Barttelot, and their descendants – baronets since 1875 – have been squires ever since, including three recent generations of Coldstreamers who have kept the estate in guardsman’s order.

The manor-house is said to have been re-built by the Barttelots in about 1485, but they had abandoned it by 1638, removing everything but its firebacks. Their old home reduced to a farm-house, the then squire, Walter Barttelot, installed his family in the mansion of their female-line ancestors on the riverbank, the former Ford Place, which he, or his father, appears to have modernised.

Stopham House - the former Ford Place

Undeniably grand and imposing and set in pretty parkland, the Stopham House of today is a singularly ugly confection of rebuilds and additions (1787, 1842, 1865, 1887 and 1898) that conceal within them a hall and some adjoining rooms from the Tudor period. It has been divided into nineteen flats, and the squire has retreated to a more manageably-sized house on the hill, an attractive 1950s pastiche of the Queen Anne style.

The church, abutting the green and a cluster of estate cottages with their distinctive burgundy livery, is positively bursting with Barttelot memorials. The monumental brasses, set into the Sussex-marble floor of the nave and chancel, are the largest and ‘most complete series of sepulchral brasses in the county’. The oldest has portraits of John Barttelot, who died in 1428, and his wife Joan de Stopham. The newest commemorates ‘Captain Charles Barttelot, 1738’. Later generations of Barttelots are never to be forgotten in the marble monuments that cover the walls.

There are also stained-glass windows depicting members of the family and their heraldry, including, on the north wall, a window of three lights, apparently removed from the old manor-house in 1638, on which two of the Stopham lords are depicted in Tudor garb. The White Ensign worn by H.M.S. Liberty, commanded by a Barttelot at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, was laid up here, and so, in 1985, were the regimental colours of the First Battalion the Coldstream Guards, whose commanding officer was the present squire, Colonel Sir Brian Barttelot.

The present seigneurial house is deceptively modern, having been built in the 1950s

As a Victorian scholar observed, the Barttelots of Stopham have been ‘remarkably stationary both in place and condition’. It is more than likely that they descend from the Norman, Ralph, who held the manor at the time of the ‘Domesday’ survey in 1086. Stopham was one of numerous manors in Shropshire and Sussex granted by William the Conqueror to his close associate, Roger Montgomery. Roger had been keeping the peace at home at the time of the Conquest, but had been rewarded for his patience with the earldoms of Arundel and Shrewsbury. He in turn had distributed various manors among his own followers. Stopham was allotted to one Robert, who sub-let it to Ralph.

The first recorded lords after Ralph are Brian de Stopham (dead by 1236) and his son who, significantly, was also called Ralph. It has been pointed out that Brian de Stopham was a nephew of Brian de Insula or de l’Isle (the ‘isle’ in question being the Isle of Wight), a mighty Norman baron, and that their coats of arms (three crescents and a canton) were identical. At the time of his death in 1271, Sir Ralph de Stopham also held the manors of Bradford Bryan and Blandford Bryan (now called Bryanston) in Dorset, both of which took their names from Brian de l’Isle.

The north window, Stopham Church, with fanciful ancestral portraits. The Barttelots removed it from their old house in 1638

The senior Stopham line ended in an heiress who married William de Echingham. Joan, the eldest daughter and coheiress of William de Stopham and wife of John Barttelot, was no doubt descended from Sir Ralph through a junior line, but it is impossible to prove the connection, pedigrees extending back to that period being in any case a considerable rarity. (C.J. Robinson, ‘Stopham’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, XXVII (1877), pp.37-68; J.H. Round, ‘The Stophams, the Zouches, and the Honour of Petworth’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, LV (1912), pp.19-34; Joan Masefield, Stopham Remembered, Stopham, 1991.)

As for the Barttelots, in spite of the fanciful claims of a sycophantic Elizabethan herald, they were probably of English rather than Norman descent, their name being a diminutive of Bartholomew. They are first recorded at East Preston in 1295 and served successive earls of Arundel as counsellers and men-at-arms. John Barttelot was both Treasurer of the Hospital that Earl Thomas had founded at Arundel and an executor of his will.

His eldest son by Joan, ‘John Bartlett le puysne of Stopham’, was one of the ‘armigeri’ (esquires) who accompanied the earl across the Channel for the Agincourt campaign. Described on 28 September as being on ‘leave’, it is possible that he had contracted dysentery at Harfleur and that he been invalided home with the earl and others of his retinue, in which case he may, unfortunately, have missed the battle. (William Durrant Cooper, ‘Sussex Men at Agincourt’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, XV (1863), pp.127, 129.)

It was said in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the Barttelots could ride from Stopham to Horsham without leaving their own property (Robinson, ‘Stopham’, p.40). If some of this land had indeed been held continuously by their line since the Ralph of Domesday Book, theirs would be a remarkable record of tenure, matched only by the Manners at Belvoir, the Luttrells at East Quantockshead, the Dymokes at Scrivelsby and a mere handful of other families (A.R. Wagner, English Ancestry, Oxford, 1961, pp.28-9). As it is they are the oldest gentry family in Sussex, now that the Pelhams, Wests and Ashburnhams have either died out or relinquished their ancestral estates. It is fitting that the motto of such a family is ‘Mature’.

Preparing for their weekly target practice at the butts, the men of the parish are believed to have sharpened their arrows on this pillar at the back of Berwick Church

The Westgates of Berwick. I recently visited the little tucked-away church at Berwick, near Lewes, to inspect Duncan Grant’s lovely murals, but it was the scarred lower stones of the tower arch, at the back of the building, that most caught my imagination. According to St Michael and All Angels, Berwick, East Sussex: A Guide to the Church and 20th Century Bloomsbury Murals that is available at the church, the grooves that pit the stones are ‘thought to have been cut by the sharpening of arrows. Archery practice was made compulsory on a Sunday after church by Edward III. The “Westcatts of Berwick” are on the Rolls of Archers at Agincourt and “Westgates” still live in the parish.’ The humble Westgates would in that case be at least as old as the Barttelots, with an equally long record of continuity in a single place. I note that, 600 years ago last month, a ‘John Wescot’ was an archer in Lord Arundel’s train, John Barttelot’s companion-in-arms (Cooper, ‘Sussex Men at Agincourt’, p.131).

The St John arms in a window of Stanton St John church, Oxfordshire

Alone among noble families, the St Johns (Lords St John of Bletso and Viscounts Bolingbroke) descend from a Domesday tenant-in-chief – a landowner who, in 1086, held his estates directly from the King.

Their male-line ancestor, Hugh de Port, was an obscure Norman knight in the service of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, the younger half-brother of William the Conqueror, from whom he held a modest three ‘knight’s fees’ – just enough land to support three knights. Hugh was a retainer of sufficient prominence to witness a pre-Conquest charter of Duke William, but it was as a participant in the Conquest of England that his fortunes were transformed.

A club-wielding Bishop Odo (second from left) 'cheers on the boys'

Hugh is likely to have held a command under Odo, who assisted at the invasion of England with his own squadron of knights. Not notably pious, Odo was conspicuous on the field of Hastings, ostensibly ‘preparing for the combat with prayers’, but quite probably berating the English with his club and, at a key moment in the battle, re-animating a demoralised contingent of Bretons, an incident that is depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry (‘Here Bishop Odo, holding his club, cheers on the boys’).

Described as ‘a man of eloquence and statesmanship, bountiful and most active in worldly business’, Odo was the outstanding beneficiary of the Norman Conquest, receiving by 1067 the earldom of Kent (comprised of about 200 manors in that county and a further 300 elsewhere, as well as the wardenship of Dover Castle), and sharing with William fitz Osbern the vice-regency of the kingdom during William’s periodic absences abroad.

It is thought that, while in Kent, Odo commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry (decidedly a work of English craftsmanship) as an adornment to his cathedral. There are three depictions of him on the Tapestry, and illustrations also of the knights Wadard and Vital, who appear to have been his retainers. Hugh, their companion-in-arms at Hastings, does not appear, but his accumulation of spoils, hardly less spectacular than that of Odo himself, is a measure of the considerable favour in which he was held.

Sherborne St John, Hants.

In the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, Hugh received from Odo the under-tenancy of thirteen manors in Kent and of a further thirteen in Hampshire, as well as one of the wards of Dover Castle. By the time of the ‘Domesday’ survey (1086), he had acquired an additional fifty-five manors in Hampshire, including Basing, Sherborne and Portsea, as tenant-in-chief – holding them directly of the King – and indeed was the most important lay tenant-in-chief in the county. A scattering of manors in four other counties spread his influence as far as Herefordshire.

In many of these manors Hugh installed his own retainers as sub-tenants, men like Roger of Escures, who has given his name to the village of Nately Scures, near Basing. Escures is three kilometres south of Port-en-Bassin in the Calvados, which was obviously Hugh’s native town.

Hugh had proved himself indispensable to William as much as to Odo. Conspicuously favouring ‘new men’ to give effect to his will, the King made him Sheriff of Hampshire; and in 1085, by which time Odo was in disgrace and languishing in prison, had Hugh beside him when holding court in Normandy.

Hugh was married to a lady called Orence but had become a monk by the time of his death in 1096 – a wise precaution in view of the orgy of killing and expropriation in which he was implicated. His former patron, Odo, also died in that year, having reinvented himself as one of the spiritual leaders of the First Crusade. Hugh’s son Henry and grandson, another Hugh, were the founders of Sherborne Priory on their Hampshire estate and still clung in 1133 to the three knight’s fees in Normandy – Fontenelles, Commes and Létanville, all close to Port-en-Bassin – which they continued to hold of the Bishop of Bayeux.

The younger Hugh’s son, Adam de Port, married Mabel, heiress of Orval and through her mother of the St Johns, another Norman line, originating at Saint-Jean-le-Thomas in the Manche. The family of Port was known thenceforth as ‘St John’. The name still attaching to some of their former holdings, such as Sherborne St John in Hampshire and Stanton St John in Oxfordshire, their memory is indelibly etched on the English landscape.

[Complete Peerage, article ‘St John of Basing’; Lewis C. Loyd, The Origins of Some Anglo-Norman Families (Leeds, 1951), pp.79, 97; David R. Bates, ‘The Character and Career of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux’, Speculum, L (1975), pp.1-20; David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (London, 1964), p.297; The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. R.H.C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), pp.124, 164; The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, IV, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1973), pp.114-18.]

Stanton St John Church, Oxfordshire

Heraldry on the restored tomb of Archbishop Scrope in York Minster

It is the agreeable and, I think, unique custom of the Harrogate Decorative and Fine Arts Group to invite visiting lecturers to contribute to their scrap-book. On Monday 20 January I lectured to them on the Bayeux Tapestry, in the elegant setting of the Cairn Hotel. I expected the ballroom to be cleared at any moment in readiness for the next thé dansant. My talk was not short of references to North Yorkshire, which, apart from anything else, was the scene of Harold Godwinson’s triumph in 1066 over the Viking army at Stamford Bridge. Here, then, is a summary of such references as my offering to the society.

The Cairn Hotel, Harrogate

The Bayeux Tapestry, completed within a decade of the Battle of Hastings, is wonderfully revealing of the life of the time. Harold Godwinson and other nobles are, for example, inseparable from their hawks, a detail that written histories tend to omit. Moreover, the artist is strictly accurate in his depiction of the hairstyles of the day. The smart, military haircuts of the French knights are contrasted with the shoulder-length hair and wispy moustaches of the English.

A Norman with facial hair stood out from the crowd. One such was William de Perci, the founder of Whitby Abbey, who was known (in the Norman dialect) as als gernons – ‘with the whiskers’. Since the fifteenth century, generations of William’s descendants, who became earls and then dukes of Northumberland, have been christened ‘Algernon’ in his honour. Undoubtedly the most famous ‘Algernon’ was the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose grandmother was a Percy.

In a scene of Harold feasting in his manor-house at Bosham, Sussex, his retainers use traditional drinking horns. These were prized possessions of the English nobles, often chased with gold and silver and jewels. Usually of ox-horn, they had a design fault: one was obliged to drain them before putting them down. The cup-bearer was constantly in attendance, napkin in hand, to recharge them, and there were endless pledges and toasts. As a result, the English nobles became rapidly inebriated. They were renowned for it.

Incidentally, they would not have been drinking ale or even wine, which was somewhat of a luxury, but mead, which is made from honey. Domesday Book is evidence of immense honey production in England, fuelling the demand for this drink.

The Horn of Ulphus

York Minster happens to possess the only horned cup that, to my knowledge, survives from that period. It is known as the Horn of Ulphus. The eponymous Ulf was a Viking who, about 1030, made a gift of it to the Minster, along with a grant of land. He is said to have poured a libation of wine over the altar as a way of marking his donation. A particularly fine example of such a cup, the Horn of Ulphus is not, in fact, an ox-horn but an oliphant – carved from an elephant’s tusk. It is thought to have been a product of Amalfi in southern Italy, where there were ready supplies of ivory. The animal motifs are, moreover, copied from Syrian and Babylonian designs. An early Frith postcard shows it hanging from a hook on the panelled wall of the Vestry, where it was no doubt kept for centuries. It is now displayed, more reverentially, but less in the original spirit of the gift, in a glass case in the Treasury.

Finally, North Yorkshire is the heartland of the Scropes, one of the most prominent British families of Norman descent. Unusually, they were already settled in England at the time of the Conquest, their ancestor, Richard FitzScrob, being one of Edward the Confessor’s Norman favourites. They had no doubt met during Edward’s twenty-five years in exile in Normandy, while Cnut and his son held sway in England. Richard seems to have built Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire, one of a number of pre-Conquest outposts against the Welsh. Presumably of the ring-work (ditch and palisade) type, these were the earliest true castles in England. They are an innovation otherwise associated with the Norman Conquest.

York Minster

The Scrope family motto, Devant si je puis (‘Forward if I am able’), is a sardonic allusion to their name. Scrob means ‘crab’ in the Norman dialect. Establishing themselves in Wensleydale in the 12th century, Scropes distinguished themselves on the Crusades and in the Hundred Years War, were regularly summoned to medieval parliaments as barons, and have produced five Garter knights, as well as an Archbishop of York in the person of Richard Scrope. My obituary of a recent head of the family, Simon Scrope (1934 – 2010), can be read on The Daily Telegraph website – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7607958/Simon-Scrope.html.