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

Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Newmarch : from the castle of Neumarche in Normandy, which, about 1060, was seized by Duke William, to the prejudice of its inheritor, Geoffrey de Newmarch. (Ord. Vitalis.) Geoffrey's son Bernard was one of the Conqueror's companions-at-arms, and witnesses one of his charters to Battle Abbey. He obtained his share of the spoil—a Welsh principality—by his own good sword; for, as Freeman expresses it, "he used a soldier's licence to appropriate the territory of Brecknock." The history of its conquest is thus narrated:

"Bernard Newmarch came to this district, according to the Annales Cambria, in 1091, in pursuit of Rhys-ap-Tewdwr, ruler of 'the right hand part'—a phrase which is the exact equivalent of the old Welsh Deheu-barth—and at Brechenauc Rhys-ap-Tewdwr was slain. It is said that Maenarch had ruled Brycheiniog in peace, and that his son Bleddyn-ap-Maenarch was ruler when the Normans arrived. Fitz Hamon had just taken possession of Glamorganshire, and now Newmarch conquers Brycheiniog. He approaches Brychan's stronghold, the Gaer, from the North, but, finding the place too strong, makes as if for the Eppynt Hills along a ridge parallel with the river Eskyr. The British troops were on the opposite side, where the lane called Heol-y-Cymry runs in the same direction.

"It is stated by Jones (History of Brecon) that Newmarch, unaware of the presence of the Welsh troops, crossed over through a wood, called after the event Cwm-gwern-gad, now corrupted into Cwmgwingad, that the Welsh rushed upon them with fury, but that the Normans, with better discipline, stood firm against the onset, and in the end won the field. The Welsh were dispersed, the brave Rhys-ap-Tewdwr slain near a well called to this day Ffynon-pen-Rhys; and Bleddyn-ap-Maenarch also fell. With this defeat ended for ever the British lordship of Brycheiniog. Newmarch immediately settled down as lord of the district, adding one more to the redoubtable Lords Marchers. He moved the seat of government from the spot where Brechan and his successors had dwelt—the Gaer on the Esk, now a knoll crowned with stately trees—and built his castle near the confluence of the Honddu and Usk, a place which probably even then was called Aberhonddu. Of the existence of a town or even of a village on this spot before Newmarch's conquest we have no information, so that the town of Brecknock and its castle must be viewed as the creation of the Norman freebooter."—Nichol's Counties and County Families of Wales.

Bernard lost no time in parcelling out the lands of his new province among the followers that had helped him to win it; and established himself so firmly at Brecknock "that no efforts of the natives could dislodge him." His position was further strengthened through an alliance with a Welsh princess, Nesta, the daughter of Griffin-ap-Llewelyn. "By marrying a Welsh wife he took the most likely course to reconcile his vassals to the rule and exactions of a foreigner. Crushed to the dust by the iron heel of the conqueror, robbed of their inheritance in kind to feed his pampered men-at-arms, subject to constant insult and frequent injury from a contemptuous and cruel soldiery of foreign speech and foreign manners, it was still some small consolation to the warm though sinking heart of the Welshman that in the frowning castle of Aberhonddu there was one lady of the blood of the Cymry, though it might be one of the line of Trahaern the Usurper, and herself of more than doubtful morals, she was still the descendant of Anarawd, son of that Rhodri the Great who, two hundred years before, was King of all Wales, and deemed 'the pride and protector of the Cymry.'"—Ibid.

Yet it was through this same Welsh wife, whose Royal blood was to reconcile his unwilling subjects to their thraldom, that his son's connection with Wales was severed. Her life was shamelessly profligate; and the son, Mael, as he grew to manhood, was stung by the sense of his mother's dishonour. "For," says Dugdale, "taking notice that his mother did play the Adultress; watching one night for her Paramour, he maimed him grievously, and then let him go with shame. And that this Act of his so enraged his Mother, that, in revenge thereof, she made her address to the King, and publickly took her Oath, that this Mael her Son was not begotten by her Husband, but by another with whom she had at that time private familiarity. Moreover, that the King thereupon took occasion to bereave him of his whole Inheritance; and caused Livery to be made of it to Sybil her Daughter, whom she affirmed to be the child of her Husband, and that he married her to a noble Knight of his Court, called Miles, the son of Walter Constable of Gloucester. Which Miles was afterwards by Maud the Empress advanced to the Earldom of Hereford." Countess Sybil had five sons, but they all died s. p. and the county of Brecknock and Gower-land were conveyed by the second of her three co-heiresses to Philip de Braose.

It is satisfactory to know that Nesta had qualms of conscience. Her husband, whose confessor was a monk of Battle, had given some land and a ruined church near Brecknock to the Abbey; and she, "being sick," added a part of her own inheritance in Herefordshire. With these and other contributions in lands and tithes, the church was restored, and a Priory founded as a cell to Battle Abbey, which in process of time became a flourishing community.

Adam de Newmarch, presumably a kinsman of Bernard's, "though how-allied to him," says Dugdale, "I find not," appears as a benefactor of Nostell Priory at its foundation in the time of Henry I., and held Whatton in Nottinghamshire and other lands in Yorkshire of the Honour of De Gand. Next comes another Adam (no doubt his son) for whose custody William de Newmarch paid,£93 16s. in 11O0. This William held a barony in Hampshire, which when "he afterwards fell into the infirmity of Leprosy," was transferred in 1204 to Godfrey de St. Martin. His former ward was at that time a knight, and Lord of Whatton, where he was followed by four generations of successors, till, through the daughter of the last heir, they were amalgamated with another line seated at Bentley in Yorkshire. Of this latter house was a second Sir Adam, who was twice summoned to Parliament, first by Henry III. in 1260, and four years later by the insurgent barons. He had been taken prisoner when "advancing his Banner against the King at Northampton," and deprived of his estates, those in Lincolnshire being granted to William de Gery, and those in Yorkshire to Robert Foliot. But the victory of Lewes retrieved his fortunes, and though again captured at Kenilworth, "yet had he the benefit of that favorable Decree called Dictum de Kenilworth." His son, in 1314, received a writ of military summons, and had free warren in all his Yorkshire demesne, where the next heir, Roger, obtained a weekly market and yearly fair at the capital manor, Wymersley. Roger's son Ralph married Elizabeth de Newmarch, the heiress of Whatton, and was the father of the last male heir, Robert, whose daughter Elizabeth carried the whole inheritance to John Nevill of Althorpe in Lincolnshire. "The said Elizabeth, her grandmother, overliving her Son Robert, had," says Thoroton, "a mind to disinherit her," but did not succeed. These Newmarches bore Argent five fusils in fesse Gules: five fusils in fesse being, we are told, the coat of the Bec-Crespins and Grimaldis.

This by no means completes the list of collaterals. There was a William de Newmarch of Northumberland, dead before 1130 (Rot. Pip.) and a Henry de Newmarch, who held a barony of nearly seventeen knight's fees in 1165 (Lib. Niger); and in one of his charters to the Monks of Bermondsey, speaks of his grandfather Winebald, and Winebald's sons, Roger and Milo, as former benefactors of the Abbey. His brother James had succeeded him in 1204, but did not very long survive; as in 1215 the estates lying in Berkshire, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire, were divided between this last lord's two daughters and co-heirs, Isabel, the wife of Sir Ralph Russell, and Hawise, first married to John de Botreaux, and then to Nicholas de Moels. Cadbury was the head of this barony.