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

Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Leded : originally Laidet. Guiscard Laidet and N. Laidet are to be met with in the Norman Exchequer Rolls of 1180-95: and we find the same Christian name, as Wischard, repeated in England at about that date. This Wischard Ledet, in 1204, had a suit with Elias Foliot for West Warden in Northamptonshire, which he held in right of his wife Margery, daughter and heir of Richard Foliot, and of another Margery, who had inherited Ramerick from her father Richard de Reinbudecourt or Reincourt. It was a great barony of thirteen and a-half knight's fees, for which he paid scutage in 1211, and passed, on his death in 1221, to his only child, Christiana. She was twice married: first to Henry de Braibroc, and secondly to Gerald de Furnival. By Henry de Braibroc she had two sons, of whom the elder, named after his grandfather, Wischard, took the name of Ledet, and transmitted it to his son Walter. But in the latter it again became extinct; for he left only two co-heiresses, Alice, the wife of William Latimer, summoned to parliament by Edward I. (see Latimer); and the other married to his brother John. The Barons of Ward on bore (according to Burke) Or a bend within a bordure Gules bezantee.

The name is three times entered in the Testa de Nevill. We there find Robert Ledet holding three parts of a knight's fee of Warin Fitz Gerald's Berkshire barony: Joan Ledet, a tenant of Richard de Montfichet in Essex: and Cecily Ledet, who held a knight's fee of old feoffment in Beckingham and Sutton, Lincolnshire, of Gilbert de Gaunt. There is a John de Leddrede who witnesses the foundation charter of Bisham Priory in the time of Ed. III. (Mon. Angl), but I think he must have belonged to a Somersetshire family whose coat, a chevron between three talbots' heads erased, was entirely different from that of the Northamptonshire house.