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

Sent Albin :

from a place so named near Evreux: another West-country family. Mauger de St. Albyn witnessed the foundation charter of Barnstaple Abbey in the time of the Conqueror, and his posterity remained for many generations in Devonshire. Their earliest recorded residence was Pickwell, in the parish of George Ham, where Sir Mauger de St. Albino was seated in the latter days of Henry III. "This knight and his lady are interred in the church, under a fair monument of free stone, with their representations neatly cut; and he lying in his armour makes show of large stature, something more than ordinary. The inhabitants report from their ancestors that he was of giant-like stature, and therefore named Major St. Aubyn, mistaking Major for Mauger or Maugis, a common name in those days. He was of so great and extraordinary strength that he was able to cast a huge main stone a very large length. The stone is yet there to be seen, and the throw marked out by two erected monuments yet extant, and the stone is so weighty that two strong men of this age are but able to lift it."—Gilberts Cornwall. In 1280, it appears by a charter that Stephen de St. Aubyn possessed Hengestridge (now written Hentsridge), where he lived, and that the bezants of the family coat were then on a cross, as the Cornish branch bears them, while the Somersetshire St. Aubyns have them on a bend. Baldwin, his descendant, was in 1369 settled at Paracombe, of which the manor and advowson were still retained in the last century by the St. Aubyns of Alfoxton. About a hundred years later John de St. Aubyn transplanted the family into Somersetshire by his marriage with Joan Popham, who, on her death in 1493, devised Alfoxton to their son, who has transmitted it to a long line of successors.

Clowance, "for many ages the seat of the Seyntaubins" in Cornwall, had been acquired somewhat earlier by Geoffrey de St. Aubyn, through his wife Elizabeth Kymyel: "from whence downwards we look upon this Family as Cornish."—Wotton's Baronetage. Yet it seems evident that they had been settled in the county at least during one generation; for Sir Guy de St. Aubyn was Sheriff of Cornwall 2 Richard II., and married a co-heiress of the old house of Sergreaulx, Seriseaux, or Ceriseaux. But this Alice Sergreaulx re-married Richard Earl of Oxford, and passed away her possessions to the children of her second husband. Fifth in descent from Geoffrey was Thomas, Carew's "Mr. Saintabin, whose very name (besides the Conquest roll) deduceth his first ancestours out of France. His grandfather married Greinville; his father one of Whittington's heirs, on which latter estate he, in a long and peaceable date of years, exercised a kinde, liberal, and never discontinued hospitality. Himself took to wife the daughter of Mallet, and with ripe knowledge, and sound judgment, dischargeth the place which he beareth in his country."—Survey of Cornwall. His grandson John married the heiress of Francis Godolphin of Trevenege, and bought from the Bassets, who had been greatly impoverished by the Civil Wars, the picturesque hold of St. Michael's Mount in 1660. The next heir, created a baronet in 1671, was the first of five successive Sir Johns, several of whom again added to their estates by marriage. About the beginning of the last century, the third Sir John St. Aubyn took to wife Catherine Morice, who eventually inherited from her brother Sir Nicholas Stoke Damarell, "now by far the most valuable manor in the West of England."^[51] For more than six centuries it had remained an obscure hamlet, while the neighbouring vill of Sutton had developed into the burgh of Plymouth, "a naval port of resort of the first rank." But it had no dockyard. "Until 1690, the royal ships at Plymouth were wholly dependent upon the accommodation of private yards. William of Orange saw the need of remedying this state of things soon after he came to the throne, for plans for 'a dock in the Hamoaze' were prepared in 1689; and in the following year a little creek was utilized in the construction of the first basin and dock. This was the germ from which has grown the great naval arsenal of the West, the works of which now all but monopolize, in one form or another, the water-side for miles along the eastern shores of the Tamar estuary."—Worth's Devon.

The last and fifth Sir John St. Aubyn died in 1839 without legitimate issue. The old home at Clowance was then inherited by the son of his sister, Mrs. Molesworth; and the representation of the family passed to the descendants of the younger son of John St. Aubyn, and the Godolphin heiress, in whose favour the title was revived a few years ago. With it, by virtue of an old entail, they hold the golden manor on which stands the town of Devonport, and still dwell

"Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Numancos and Bayona's hold."

Furthermore, on the occasion of Her Majesty's Jubilee, June 21, 1887, the title of Lord St Levan was conferred upon Sir John St. Aubyn.