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

Engaine :

from Engen or Ingen, near Boulogne: a baronial name, that has travelled down to our own times under an English disguise as Ingham. "There are many places in England," says Morant, "named Gaynes, Engaines, D'Engains: one, for instance, near St. Neots in Huntingdonshire: another at Taversham in Cambridgeshire:" two, I may add, in Essex, Colne-Engaine and Gaines, held by Sir John Engaine in 1271 by the service of keeping the King's greyhounds; and one in Herefordshire, Aston Engen, now Aston Ingham. The original seat of the family was, however, at Senelai (Shenley) in Buckinghamshire, held in capite by Richard de Engen or Ingaine in 1086, with Redinges in Hunts. (Domesday). Another Richard, his descendant, Baron of Blatherwick in Northamptonshire, is entered in the Liber Niger as the tenant of Paganus de Dudley in Bucks, and held Pytchley by the sergeantry of destroying all "wolves, foxes, martrons and other vermin, in the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Oxford, Buckingham, Essex, and Huntingdon."^[2] He was the founder of Finshed Priory, and married a daughter of the Earl of Oxford, Sara de Vere, by whom he left at his death, in 1208, two sons, both of which were engaged with the insurgent barons. Richard, the eldest, who died single in 1215, had thus forfeited his barony; but Vitalis, the other brother, received back his inheritance at the accession of Henry III. and obtained a rich wife, Rose, one of the three co-heiresses that divided the great Welsh Honour of Montgomery. He was the father of Vitalis, Henry, William, and John. Vitalis died young; Henry, who succeeded him in 1244, and fought on the barons' side at Evesham, was never married; William had no children; and thus the whole inheritance devolved on John. John's successor and namesake, was summoned to Parliament from 1299 to 1321, but again had no heir, and was followed in 1322 by his brother Nicholas, who died two months after him, leaving two sons. The elder, according to the strange fatality that persistently attended the first-born of this house, again was without posterity. The second, another John, seated at Dyllington in Huntingdonshire, was a baron by writ in 1342, and the father of the two last male heirs that bore the name, John and Thomas. Both died s. p., John in his life-time, and Thomas, second Lord Engaine, in 1367. His great estates, lying in the counties of Huntingdon, Northants, Buckingham, Rutland, Oxon, Leicester, and Bedford, fell to their three sisters, Joyce de Goldington, Elizabeth de Pabenham, and Mary Bernak.

In addition to this baronial house, there were other families of the name. Ansfrid de Cormeilles, who held Aston in Herefordshire in 1086, was succeeded there by the Engaines, or Inghams, who continued in possession till the latter years of the fourteenth century. William de Inghayn presented to the rectory in 1306; and his son Simon, who adopted the name of his manor, was the father of Thomas, High Sheriff of the county in 1351. With Thomas's son Roger the line was brought to a close.—Duncomb's Herefordshire. In Cumberland Ralph de Engayne obtained the manor of Isal from Alan, the son of Earl Waltheoff, and married a great heiress, Ibria de Estrivers (see Travers), who brought him the barony of Burgh-upon-Sands, and the hereditary Forestership of Cumberland. Both passed to his only child Ada, who had two husbands, Sir Simon de Morville, and Lord Vaux of Gillesland. Sir Simon, we are told, was well stricken in years when he married her; and Ada's wanton fancy strayed to one of his squires, a comely Saxon youth, named Lyulph. But Lyulph, like another Joseph, was a loyal servant, deaf to the blandishments of his amorous mistress; and Ada, infuriated at finding herself scorned and rejected, played the part of Potiphar's wife, and charged him with attempting the very crime she had vainly solicited him to commit. Her husband, as credulous as Potiphar, implicitly believed her story; but here the analogy ends, for the Christian knight proved far crueller than his heathen prototype had been. Not content with a mere sentence of imprisonment, he ordered the unhappy squire to be thrown into a "leadful of scalding water," and actually boiled alive. Hutchinson, who retails this shocking story, bids us, however, remember, in justice to Ada de Engayne and her old husband, that it is borrowed from a monkish chronicler, who would assuredly endeavour to blacken their characters, for no better reason than that they were the parents of Sir Hugh de Morville, abominated by the Church for the murder of Thomas a. Beckett (see Morville).

The name of Engayne had not died out with Ada's father; for his grandson Sir Hugh granted to Gilbert de Engayne—evidently a kinsman—the manor of Clifton in Westmorland, where his posterity continued till the reign of Edward III. The daughter of the last male heir, another Gilbert, married William de Wybergh.

Though the Engaines became Inghams in Herefordshire, they had no connection with the Norfolk family of that name, which also attained baronial rank. Their arms were entirely different. The Engaines bore Gules a fesse indented between seven cross-crosslets, four in chief and three in base Or.

Chalmers, in his Caledonia, states that "Berengarius de Engain, a noble Anglo-Norman, was one of the followers of Earl David, to whom he gave lands in Scotland after his accession to the throne." Berengarius was a benefactor of Jedburgh Abbey.