The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. I.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.

Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Dodingsels : or De Odingseles, from Flanders. It seems doubtful whether this family came over at the Conquest. The first mention I can find of it is in the reign of King John, when Sir Hugh de Odingsels, a Fleming by birth, and "a man of great note in his time," married Basilia, the daughter and co-heir of John de Limesi, one-half of whose barony she received at its partition in 1213. She and her husband paid a sum of five hundred marks for livery of this inheritance, lying in the counties of Hertford, Oxford, Worcester, Suffolk, and Warwick. In 1229 "he attended the King in person to the siege of Bytham Castle in Lincolnshire with considerable forces." He and his descendants were seated at Long Ichington in Warwickshire, held in capite by the service of finding a soldier for forty days in the King's army. "From this Hugh, by Basilia," says Dugdale, "sprung two very eminent and worthy families, of which the chief resided at Ichinton till our fathers' memory; and that the other, which had Solihull and Maxstoke, continuing not many descents, was by heirs female transplanted into other stocks." The latter had ended as early as Edward I.'s time with Sir William de Odingsells, who married Ela, daughter of William Longespee, second Earl of Salisbury, and left four sisters as his co-heiresses. The eldest married Sir John de Clinton.

The elder branch, which lasted three hundred years longer, lapsed into abject poverty. "About the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's tyme, John Odingsells, betaking himself to extravagant courses, put a period to this antient and flourishing Family, and dyed in a miserable condition; for having first mortgaged this Lordship of Ichinton to Sir John Throgmorton (as I have credibly heard) he became so poor, that had not one Harewood, formerly his Tenant, taken him into his house out of pitty, he had dyed in the street."—Dugdale's Warwickshire. Pirton Doddingsells, in Hertfordshire, which remained in the family till 1513, keeps the name; and a branch was seated at Trusley, in Derbyshire, from the time of Edward I. till the middle of the fifteenth century. "The heiresses married Coke and Piper."—Lysons.