HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES or THE FAMILY OF PLUMPTON OF PLTJMPTON, COM. EBOR. THE family whose domestic history, during portions of the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries, is brought into such prominent notice through the preservation of the present correspondence, derived its surname from the vill of Plumpton, situate within the parish of Spoffbrth, in the upper division of Claro wapentake, west riding of the county of York, three miles distant from the town of Knaresborough. At the time of the Great Survey of England in 1086, of which Domesday Book is the record, the vill of Plontone a in Borge~ »cire,h which had belonged entire to Gamelbar under the Anglo • * Plumie is a woody place, and to this day a clump of trees is called a plump in the north. (See Glossary to Reginaldi Monachi Dunelm. Ubellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtuiibut, published by the Surteei Society, 183S.) k The wapentake of Borge-scire was so called from AM-burgh (Burc in Domesday), the capital of this shire or district from the time of the Romans. It is also in one place in Domesday,/. 379, a. 1, called the wapentake of Gereburg, this prefix being evi- CAMD. HOC. 4. b X HISTORICAL NOTICES Saxon dynasty, was, in as much as regarded the auzerainte of the fief, divided between two Norman followers of the Conque- ror, viz. William, from Percy in the Departement de la Manche, a seigneurie owned by the great Norman family of Paynell, of whom he was probably the feudatory; and Gislebert, apparently a member of the no less powerful house of Tesson, who ruled the tract of country in the Departement du Calvados, known as Le Cinglais, of which Thury-Harcourt is the capital. In this man- ner the territory of Plumpton came to be divided into two manors respectively held of the honours of Perci and Vesci, the latter being the local surname of another Norman family, on one of whose members, named Ivo, the escheated fief of Gislebert was eventually bestowed.0 We learn further, from the same in- dently a remnant of the British name Caer, by which all walled burghs were designated. The place of assembly was in a Berewick belonging to it, named Clare-tun, about four miles distant from the burgh, where, as usual, an artificial mound or hoh was raised, called from the tun, Clare-hoh : by a pleonasm, this spot has now the name of Claro-hill. Claro grew eventually to be the name in common use, when the burgh was no longer the capital of the shire. c Vassy (Vaacie in Wacej is a commune of the Departement du Calvados. In Domesday the orthograghy is Veci, and there also in place of Tesson we read Tison. Taitson, among the Normans, signified a badger; and that this was the sobriquet given to the lords of Cinglais is proved by their deeds, in which the name is often lathiized Taoco. Much wider variations than these were, however, common in writing the Bame proper name, the scribe having to trust solely to his ear for catching rigbtlj the sound of the name as pronounced to him, the subscription of the personage him- self to the document being simply a cross mark. It is absurd to suppose, as later genealogists have done, that the Great Standard Bearer of England under King Wil- liam, by which title of office Gislebert names himself in his charters, was of Anglo- Saxon parentage. The pretended marriage of Ivo de Vescy with the heiress of Tyson, which has hitherto passed current with our Baronagiaas, is merely the traditional his- tory resorted to in the time of Edw. II. to explain the descent of the baronies of Mal- ton and Alnwick ; such late genealogies, unless confirmed by contemporary evidence, must ever be received with extreme caution. It is certain, moreover, that Gislebert Tison left a son and heir named Adam, who in 31 Hen. I. rendered account to the Exchequer of the debts of his father, and of a fine not to plead for his lands until the OF THB/AMILT OF PLUMPTON. XI valuable record, that the manor in the Percy fee alone retained its value undiminished from the time of Edward the Confessor, the fee of Gislebert Tison in these parts having been laid waste, for the purpose, no doubt, of fortning the royal chace, which acquired the name of " Knaresborough Forest."d A portion of the land son of Nigel de Albini (i. e. Roger de Mowbray) was a knight. The grand-daughters and heirs of Adam married into the families of Constable of Flamborough and Beau- Toir; and from the heads of these families, as well as from Mowbray and Vescy, the monks of Selby deemed it requisite to obtain charters of confirmation to secure to them the possession of the tithes and advowson of the church of Elveley (Kirk-ella), which they had of the gift of Gislebert Tison. Malton was crown land at the time of the survey ; but it is not improbable that the defence of the castle of Alnwick, in the turbulent district north of the Tyne, was undertaken by this great military officer, and that he made it the caput of his barony. The influence of Robert de Mowbray, the first Norman Earl of Northumberland, may have in that case drawn him in to share in his rebellion, which ended in the expulsion from their seigniories of many Norman barons, whom the Chroniclers omit to name. Under Henry I. he was restored to grace, and re-instated in the possession of Holme-upon-Spaldingmore and of some portion of his lands in Yorkshire, which he transmitted to his heirs ; but the suzerainty of the escheated honour was retained by Nigel de Albini and Ivo de Vesey, between whom it had been already divided by William Rufus. Even this result appears not to have been obtained without contracting heavy debts in the maintenance of a pro- tracted suit. * Sir Henry Ellis observes, in his notes to the Index of Tenants in capite in Domes- day, that the lands of Gislebert Tison, consisting of twenty-nine manors, were evi- dently forfeited upon the ravaging of Yorkshire: ten had belonged to Gamelbar, and one to Gamel. Of tax which had belonged to Gamelbar, it is said, " Has terras habet Gislebertus Tison, sed wastae sunt omnes: tantummodo Biletone redd. iii. sol. redd." Of several manors in Craven no estimated value is given. These six manors are, however, all parcel of the forest of Knaresborough, and in a mountainous and barren tract of country. If they were ravaged by the Conqueror's army in vengeance to a rebellious people, then his forbearance seems most extraordinary, sparing the fertile country nearer to his line of march, and turning aside to spend his fury on these wilds. The love of the Norman princes for the chacepieed not be dwelt upon ; and Domesday furnishes ample proof that entire wapentakes or hundreds were converted from arable into wood and pasture, in order to give " scope and verge enough." The ancient sectional division of the north riding of Yorkshire, called wapentake of Girlestre, gave name to the forest of Galtres, which included within its vast circum-. ference great* part of that wapentake, and of the adjoining ones of Bolesford and XU HISTORICAL NOTICES was, however, permitted to be afterwards cultivated, upon pay- ment of a rent of five shillings; but before the devastation, this manor, equally with the other, had been worth twenty shillings. The mesne-tenant in the vill of Plumpton in 1086, is named Eldred in Domesday; but this Anglo-Saxon occupant cannot, from. existing evidence, be presumed to have been the ancestor of the family who had afterwards the local surname. Before the first Sunday in Lent, in the year 1168, William de Percy made a return of the knights enfeoffed of his honour, both of ancient feoffment of the time of Henry I. that is, up to the year of his death, and of new feoffment since Ms death, with their nomenclature, in order that those who had not yet done liege homage, and whose names were not written in the roll of the King, might come in and do it before that Sunday. Of the knights newly enfeoffed, he names, " Nigellus de Pluntona de I. milite." e The earliest deed, among the ancient evidences of the family existing in 1612, was, it may be presumed, the one en- rolled in the pedigree of Plumpton, as entered in the book of Richard St. George, Norroy, in his Visitation of Yorkshire; it contained a grant of a tenement and two acres of land in Plump- ton from Nigellus de Plumton to Gamel, son of Elewin, his marshal, and had a seal attached to it with the impression of a knight on horseback holding a drawn sword, the name being cir- cumscribed/ Of another deed of this first progenitor, containing Annesti, till its outskirts were in later times gradually lessened by successive disaffo- restments. At the time of its formation, the places of assembly for the men of the wapentakes were necessarily removed without its limits, Girlestre to Birdforth, and Bolesford, where was a ford across the river Fosse, to Buhner; from these latter places the wapentakes now take their names. * * Liber Niger Scaccarii. Hearne, 1774, edit, altera, vol. i. p. 317. f The copy of this deed was numbered 20 in the Plumpton Cartulary, but the page containing it has been almost entirely eaten away by mice. A marginal note, how. ever, remains, indicating its context: "Nigellus de Plumton Gamelo filio Elewini— i domum, i acram in Lafrinwic, i acram in Sabberchdale in Plumton," The names OF THE FAMILY OF PLUMPTON.