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

Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Maine : "or Mayenne, from Mayenne in Maine, a powerful baronial house, of which Walter de Mayenne occurs in 976 (La Roque, i. 159, 160). Judael of Mayenne had a vast barony in Devon 1086, and his family long continued there. In 1165 Walter Fitz Juel de Mayenne (de Meduana) held a barony of twenty-one knight's fees in Kent."—The Norman People. Judael appears in Domesday as Judhel de Totenais, so named from his barony of Totness. "Nothing is known of this person but that he possessed the baronies of Totness and Barnstaple, which intimates that he was high in the Conqueror's favour."—Lysons. M. Delisle mistakes him for one of the house of Toeni. He was probably grandfather of the Juhel de Meduana who witnesses one of the Empress Maud's charters to Geoffrey de Mandeville. Dugdale mentions a Walter de Meduana "amongst these who were witnesses to the grant, made by William de Braose to the monks of S. Florence at Salmure (Saumur) in France, whereof King William the Conqueror and Maud his Queen were some of the number." He also speaks of the other Walter, who lived in the time of Henry II., and upon the assessment made upon the marriage of the King's daughter, certified to a barony of twenty knight's fees de veteri feoffamento and nine de novo. He cannot have been fond of campaigning, for the only further notice of him to be met with is, that he was fined in 1171 for not joining the expedition to Ireland, and again in 1186 "in regard he was not with the King's army at Galway." Nothing more is known of him than that he married the widow of Roger Earl of Hereford, who survived him and enjoyed his inheritance. But there must be some mistake in the name, for there is no Roger Earl of Hereford to be found in the Bohun pedigree.

Nicholas de Meduana, of Dorset and Somerset, occurs in the Great Roll of the Pipe of first Richard I. According to Lobineau, "Juhel de Mayenne, Seigneur de Dinan" in 1197, bore on six escutcheons six mullets pierced of six points; a coat entirely different from any of those borne by the English families of this name. One of them—the Maynes of Teffont-Ewyas, claim, by Burke's account, to descend from "Joel de Maine, of King's Nymet, temp. Hen. I.:" another, settled in the neighbourhood of Stirling since the commencement of the fifteenth century, received the title of Baron Newhaven in 1794, but it expired with its first holder. This Sir William was the sixth son of William Mayne of Powis, co. Clackmannan, the husband of three wives and the father of twenty-one children, "in whose house the cradle is said to have rocked for fifty years." I need scarcely add that the family is not extinct, though Powis passed through one of his granddaughters to the Alexanders.