THE CHETWYNDS OF INGESTRE BEING A HISTORY OF TH.AT FAMILY FROM A VERY EARLY DATE BY H. E. C}tEftWYNJ)-STAPY~TON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR LONDON LONGMAN S, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK : 15 EAST 16th STREET 1892 .All rights re,ert:ed LOKl>ON: B.BAl>BtTRY1 ~GNEW, & CO. LIKD., l'BtNTE:BS, WBITEFRI.a\BS -.•.:· I~ ···:·.. ··... •. C' 'j' J-::, T,' ~::--, •. \. _f I f-j_ /\. J , l , 188() PREFACE. THE CHETWYNDS OF lNGESTRE are descended from a Shropshire family now almost extinct in that county, who when surnames first came into use took their name from the manor or place in which they lived. Adam de Chetwynde is the first of whom we find any record, his name occurring in a Forest Roll of the year 1180. He is the common ancestor of every one who bears or ever bore the name of Chetwynd. From the reign of Henry II. to the present time, there have been twenty-three generations in the male line. The Princess Godiva, widow of Leofric King of ~Iercia, was Lady of_ the AI an or of Chetwynd in Saxon times, and of one other small manor in Shropshire. At the Norman Invasion Duke "\Villiam gave her lands, and a great part of the county besides, to Earl Roger de Montgomeri, who had been one of his lieutenants at the Battle of Hastings. At the· Domesday Survev one· Turold, a Norman, was the Earl's undertenant at " Chetwynd and in certain other manors ordinarily kno\vn as the Fee of Chetwynd, of which Chetwynd was the chief n1anor. We shall find reason to believe that Adam de Chetwynd, re­ taiI1ing nearly the whole of Turold's manors, was also his lineal descendant in blood. After five generations of Chetwynds had passed away the whole of their estates in Sh~opshire and at W eston-juxta-Standon in Staffordshire (which they bad subsequently acquired by marriage) went away to the Peshalls by the marriage of their heiress, on which the parent stem of Chetwynd in Salop came to an end about the year 1344. VI PREFACE. Happily, son1e eighty years before this a cadet of Chet­ "'ynd had founded a second House in the adjoining county of Stafford, by the marriage of Philip, the second son of John, son of Adam, ,vith Isabella de Mutton, the heiress of Ingestre. For more than five hundred years Philip's descendants were Lords of Ingestre. From 1263 to 1767, fourteen genera­ tions, the inheritance never once passed into the female line, and but for an unfortunate breach of the entail, Ingestre would still be the property of the Chet,vynd family. During this long period they added other estates, either by marriage or by purchase, the most important of which was Grendon in Warwickshire. This second line, beginning with Sir Philip in 1263, terminated at the death of the fifth of that name, created Viscount Tartas in Gascony, in 1444, when his uncle, John Chetwynd of Alspath, or Meriden, co. Warwick, was proved to be his heir, though John and his descendants were kept out of possession at Ingestre and Grendon for no less than sixty years, by the long survival of Sir Philip's widow. It ":-as not till 1505 that John's great-grandson came into possession. This third line came to an end in 1693 at the death of Walter Chetwynd of Ingestre, commonly known as "the Antiquary ; " who, dying ,vithout surviving issue, bis estates were divided between the two principal sur­ viving branches of his family. Ingestre and the Staffordshire property had been entailed on John Chetwynd of Rudge~ as the representative of an earlier branch descended fron1 Anthony, a younger son, tenp. Henry VIII., and from him the Viscounts are derived ; while Gren don and the "\V arwickshire estates went to the descendants of 11homas Chetwynd of Rugeley ; Brocton on Cannock Chase (which had been purchased· by the Antiquary) passing under his will to another branch of the Rugeley family. In 1800 Grendon and Brocto1i became •• .FREF.A.Cl. 'Vll united in the person of Sir George Chetwynd, the first Baronet. At the death of the second Viscount ,vithout surviving male issue,. Ingestre and most of the Staffordshire estates \vere found to be settled on his daughter and her husband, a younger son of Lord Chancellor Talbot, from whom they passed to the Earls of Shrewsbury and Talbot. The etymology of a name is often the only clue to the early history of a place that can be got. Detailed histories have often been raised on no better foundation. In the present case several derivations of the name of Chetwynd have been suggested. Mr. Eyton, the learned and pains­ taking historian of Shropshire, would have derived it-as he has Lady Godiva's other Shropshire manor at Chetton, from the Anglo-Saxon " Cot-" and " ton," an enclosure or town of huts-had he known what to do with the second half of Chet-wynd. But against this derivation we are told on high authority that it is impossible to get "Chet" out of "Cot." A learned Professor of Anglo-Saxon has kindly furnished me with the following very plausible derivation, w~ich I cannot do better than give in his own words :­ " 'Catewinde,' the Domesday form," he says, "is a perfectly correct Anglo-Norman spelling of a Saxon name. Cate (in two syllables) or Ceatta is clearly the name of a person, and either of them would pass regularly into 'Chet,' the suffix e or a generally denoting an agent or a person who does something. Phonetically, it is possible that Cate or Ceatta meant a chatterer, a nickname, as so many names are known to have been in early times. The word Chat is of great antiquity. 'Wynd,' or 'Wind,' might have its usual sense in Scotch, i.e., a lane, alley, or turning, and just as the word 'alley' is derived from the French oJler, to go, so 'wind' ••• Vlll PREFACE. may be derived from the Anglo-Saxon ivinrlan, to turn." Chat's turning, or Chat's corner, seems to give a very intel­ ligible view of the locality, if we consider its positi9n halfway between the two county to,vns. of Salop and Staffordshire, at a point . where an ancient forest track has for centuries branched off at right angles to the north, through a dip in the hills, to the old market-to,vn at Drayton. With the greatest deference, however, to such high authority, I would venture to su bstit~1te in place of the '' Saxon Chatterer,'' the name of the great Bishop of Lichfield, the Patron Saint of so n1any parish churches in the Midland Counties, whereby Chetwynd and Chetton would represent respectively " St. Chad's corner," and the "town of St. Chad." The name of the family was in later times variously ,vritten Chetewinde or Chetewynde, Chetwyn or Clietwin, and sometimes in Tudor times, Chatwen or Chatwin. Mr. Eyton's persevering researches have probably collected nearly all that is to be kno,vn of the Shropshire family. Our Ingestre pedigree is for the most part a copy of Walter ·chetwynd's, in ]1is "MS. notes for a History of Pirehill Hundred." It differs in some respects from Dugdale's, though they probably worked upon it together. But Walter outlived the Herald, and his pedigree w·as the result of larger experi­ ence with additional evidence. Nearly._ every step is proved fro1n the Ingestre Chartu1ary. It is more difficult to clothe the dry bones of the Family '11i·ee. We have no letters or papers, and very fe,v wills of an early date. Wills of the 15th and 16th. century are often the most interesting of all con­ temporary documents. When the testator dictated his ,vill to a scribe in his own \Vords, he would begin with an expres­ sion of his religious belief and his hopes of a future life, and then go 011 to catalogue and describe all that _he held most . IX precious among his ,vorldly possessions, ,v hether it "rere of silver plate, or parcel gilt, or pe,vter-tester beds, or hangings of new and costly materials. But the Chet,vynd Wills of this period are nearly all lost, and the very few that remain at Lichfield are in a n1ost tattered and neglected condition. The ·sooner some competent person can be got to copy them the better. Fortunately the later wills are in safer keeping at .Somerset House. "'vValter Chetwynd's Pirehill MSS. will, I hope, be published ere long. 'l1he Assize Rolls of Stafford­ shire,-another fruitful source of interest to the genealogist, - have been admirably translated and edited by General the Hon. George ,vrottesley for the William Salt Archreological Society. rl'hey abound in neigh hours' quarrels, thefts and homicides, but the county is rather out of the way of great · historical events. Other 1nembers of the same society have edited and illustrated ~lonastic Records and private Chartu­ laries with no less advantage to the student of fan1ily history. Dugdale, in his History of "\iV arwickshire, has preserved so1ne of the most notable occurrences of the family, mostly ftn"nished to him by Walter Chetwynd himself. Erdeswick and Steb­ bing Shaw have also done good service, though the history begun by the latter was p1·ematurely cut short by his early death, before he had even co1umenced the Hundred of Pire­ hill in which Ingestre is situate. Plot's history is principally valuable for his collection of drawings of old houses as they appeared in the seventeenth century.