Michael Linton's Bayeux Tapestry: 1066 - A Medieval Mosaic and Puzzles

Bondeuile :

from the castle of Bondeville or Bonneville in Normandy. There is a Richard de Bondeville entered on the Dives Roll; and in 1165 the son of Robert de Bonavilla held lands in York.—Liber Niger. "In 35 Hen. III., William the son of Nicholas de Bonvile, having all accoutrements prepared at the King's charge, solemnly received the honour of Knighthood, on the Festival of our Saviour's Nativity, the same year: and, upon his Father's death in 49 Hen. III. had livery of his lands, lying in Com. Somers."—Dugdale. To him succeeded a second Nicholas, who died in 1294: but after his another hiatus occurs in the pedigree; and we only take up the broken thread again in 1378, when we find Sir William de Bonvile, Sheriff of Dorset and Somerset, and some years later, of Devonshire. He had considerable possessions in the West country, and a residence at Exeter, where he founded a Hospital for twelve poor men and women. He was followed in 1408 by his grandson and namesake, a soldier of renown in the French wars, who inherited another Somersetshire estate from his cousin John de Bonvile of Meryat. He first took the field in the retinue of Thomas Duke of Clarence, under the victorious banner of Henry V.: then, as Seneschal of Acquitaine, was retained to serve his successor with twenty men-at-arms and six hundred archers, and "merited so well for his services "that he was summoned to parliament as Lord Bonvile of Chuton in 1469. A few years afterwards he was constituted Constable of Exeter for life, and Lieutenant of Acquitaine. But he and his house perished, like so many others, in the havoc of the ensuing Civil War. He was a zealous partisan of the House of York: and none among all the fortunes that "withered with the White Rose," underwent so cruel and instantaneous a collapse. Within a space of less than two months, three generations of Bonviles—the last heirs male of their lineage—had been swept away, and the name which he had made glorious existed no more. His eldest son William had married the heiress of Lord Harrington, and was the father of another William, who inherited his mother's barony, and took to wife a daughter of the Earl of Salisbury, Lady Catherine Nevill. Both son and grandson were slain before his eyes at the battle of Wakefield, on the last day of the year 1460, and in the month of February following, his own grey head fell on the scaffold. He had been one of the Yorkist barons in whose custody Henry VI. had been placed when he was taken prisoner at Northampton, thus incurring the bitter hostility of the Queen: and at the second battle of St. Albans, "when the rest of the Lords (who then also being there, were entrusted with the like custody of that King), fled away to their party, he would have withdrawn himself, had not the King assured him that he should receive no bodily hurt." But though he had surrendered on the faith of this Royal promise that his life should be spared, it was not kept: for "Such," continues Dugdale, "was the indignation of the Queen towards him, that they rested not till they had taken off his Head."

One little great-grand-daughter was thus, by "a very singular and almost unparalleled course of descent," left to inherit his great possessions, Cecily, in her own right Baroness Bonvile and Harrington, then a child of ten years old. She was given in marriage by Edward IV. to the eldest son of his Queen, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and was the great-grandmother of Lady Jane Grey. Her second husband was Lord Henry Stafford, a younger son of the second Duke of Buckingham, who was created Earl of Wiltshire in 1509, but by him she left no children.