The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. III.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.
ADDITIONAL NAMES GIVEN BY DUCHESNE.
Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Talybois : Here again we come upon a nick-name, clearly alluding to some long-forgotten feat of wood-craft or swordmanship. There is no saying whether, in a former age, Mr. Gladstone might not have been handed down to posterity as Taille-bois.
Four of the name—variously rendered in Domesday as Tallebosc, Talgebosc, and Tailgebosch, possessed estates in England in 1086. Ivo held a barony in Lincoln and Norfolk: Ralph and his daughter were likewise tenants in chief in Lincolnshire: and William an under tenant in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. The lion's share of these domains fell, as will be seen, to Ivo, who was Lord of the whole district of Hoyland or Holland. Nothing is actually known of them except that they were Angevins,[150] and in one county history I find Ivo credited with the title of Earl of Angers, which certainly did not belong to him. He is chiefly important as the first husband of the mysterious Countess Lucy, whose much-disputed birth and parentage there is not sufficient evidence now remaining to determine. She certainly was not what Dugdale and all the older authorities make her out to have been—a sister of the great Saxon Earls Edwin and Morcar: the dates conclusively disprove this "amazing chronology." Mr. Planche shows that—supposing Ivo Taillebois to have died in 1114-15, as said—Lucy of Mercia would probably have been sixty years old at the very least, when "she became, hardly a month after the decease of her husband, the wife of that illustrious young man, Roger de Roumare, son of Gerald de Roumare," to whom she is said to have borne a son, William. Her father died in 1059; she was married previous to 1071, and was not then an heiress. After the second marriage (when between sixty and seventy years old) she is put down as taking a third husband, "by whom she had a small family." She survived this third help-mate, Ranulph de Bricasard, Earl of Chester, by about twenty years.
But if not Earl Elfgar's daughter, she was nevertheless of the royal blood of Mercia, for her descendants the Earls of Chester claimed kinship with it in her right. "Mr. Nichols has made it clear in the Lincoln volume of the Archaeological Institute (255) that she was a kinswoman at once of William Malet and of the Sheriff Thorold, the alleged brother of the famous Godgifu" (better known as Godiva) "who appears as Ivo's antecessor in p. 351 (Domesd)."—Freeman. Were there not in reality, as he plausibly suggests, two Countesses Lucy, mother and daughter?
Ivo Taillebois, the first husband of this centenarian heiress, was a great prince in Lincolnshire, holding his court with all due pomp and splendour
at his castle of Spalding. He was actively engaged in the warfare against Hereward, by whom he was once taken prisoner; and among other devices for subduing the Isle of Ely, a witch was, by his advice, placed in a wooden tower commanding the contested causeway, to try the effect of her spells. But Hereward was not to be daunted by witchcraft; he contrived to set fire to the structure, and burnt the poor pythoness in her tower. Ivo was a liberal benefactor of Spalding Priory, not only confirming the grants of its founder, his antecessor Thorold the Sheriff, but adding valuable gifts of his own, and bestowed it as a cell on an Abbey in his native province, St. Nicholas of Angiers. He thus incurred the undying hostility of his neighbour, Abbot Ingulphus of Croyland, who laid claim to its jurisdiction, and brands him in his Chronicle as a tyrant and a spoliator.[151] Numerous and grievous are the charges brought against him. Some monks from Croyland that had previously joined the community at Spalding were displaced by others brought over from Angiers; he wrested from the Abbot a great part of his demesne: maimed and cropped his cattle, and hunted them with his dogs into the deep waters of the fens, where they were drowned. Ingulf further declares that he was outlawed in the latter part of the Red King's reign, and "does not mention his ever being restored to favour. Yet it is certain that his influence was very considerable in the early part of Henry I.'s reign; for in 1107 he prevailed on the King to confirm the grant of the manor of Spalding to the monks of his favourite Abbey in Anjou. About 1114, he died of a paralytic stroke, and his widow, within one month, re-married Roger de Roumare. He left no issue: but his estate, being his wife's inheritance, came with her to the first Earls of this county."—Allen's Lincolnshire. He had survived the sole issue of his marriage with the Countess Lucy, Beatrix, the wife of Ribald of Middleham, brother of Alan, Earl of the East Angles. In this, Peter de Blois piously recognizes the special interposition of Providence. Ivo and Lucy's "only daughter, who had been nobly espoused, died before her father; for that evil shoots should not fix deep roots in the world, the accursed lineage of that wicked man perished by the axe of the Almighty, which cut off all his issue."
Yet here once more we are left in a dilemma; for the fact from which the moral is drawn is by no means certain. The register of Cockersand Abbey, Lancashire, distinctly states that Ethelred or Eldred, ancestor of the Barons of Kendal, was the son of Ivo Tailbois, a great benefactor of St. Mary's, York. (Mon. ii. p. 636.) He is presumed to have been born of a previous marriage (though Mr. Ellis pronounces this "most unlikely"): or it may have been another Ivo Talbois who was his father, and bestowed on St. Mary's all the gifts detailed in the Monasticon. Dugdale, however, concludes in favour of their identity, and is duly followed by the county historians. "In tracing the barony of Lancaster, we find the founder of this illustrious house to have been Ivo de Tailbois of the House of Anjou, who, in virtue of his marriage with the sister of the Saxon Earls, Edwin and Morcar, seconded by the favour of his prince, obtained a large portion of the north of Lancashire, and as much of Westmorland as comes under the designation of the barony of Kendal. The Richmond Fee, the Marquis Fee, and the Lumley Fee, formed portions of this barony; and William, the great-great-grandson of Ivo de Talbois, first caused himself, by Royal license, to be called William de Lancaster and Baron of Kendal before the King in Parliament."—Bain's Lancashire. According to another authority (Nicolson and Burn's Westmorland) the barony never belonged to Ivo at all. It had been originally vested in Roger de Poitou; and it was not till 1106, or five years after his forfeiture and banishment, that it devolved, by Royal grant, on Eldred. His descendant, William Tailbois, took the name of Lancaster as Constable of Lancaster Castle, and was the father of a second William, who was Steward of the Household to Henry II. I have purposely omitted the pedigree given by Dugdale, which crowds in four generations; for it seems chronologically impossible that Eldred, living in 1106, should have been the great-great-grandfather of the man who presided over the household of a prince whose reign ended in 1189.
The first William de Lancaster married the widowed Countess of Warwick, Gundreda de Warrenne; and is gratefully commemorated as the benefactor of many religious houses, above all of Conyngshead Priory in Lancashire, of which some assert that he was the actual founder. William II. (above mentioned) was his only son, and the last of the line. He is recorded to have given Henry II. "30 marks that he might have a duel with Gospatrick the son of Orme his kinsman"; but for what cause and with what result we are left in ignorance. This Orme, a younger son of Ketel, second Baron of Kendal, was the founder of a family that survived in the male line till 1790, the Curwens of Workington in. Westmorland.
William II. had taken to wife Helewise de Stuteville, and left a daughter, named after her mother, whom Cosur de Lion, not long after his coronation, gave in marriage to Gilbert, son of Roger Fitz Reinfrid, one of the Justices of his Bench. Helewise brought her fortunate husband the whole Barony of Kendal with all its ancient forest rights and great feudal privileges, which were confirmed to him anew by charter: and King John further granted him the custody of the Honour of Lancaster for life. But his line, too, was doomed to collapse. His one legitimate son, William de Lancaster, died s. p., and the barony was divided between his two daughters, Helewise de Brus and Alice de Lindesey. A third sister, Serota de Multon, had died without children. The Brus' had for their share the Marquess and Lumley Fees; and the Lindeseys the Richmond Fee.
Gilbert had, however, a bastard son, Roger, married to a Northumberland heiress, who was a baron by writ in 1299; but he, again, left no issue.
A branch of the first Barons of Kendal remained seated at Cliburn, named from them Cliburn-Talebois; but after the time of Henry V. we no further meet with the name of Talebois. It ended in a daughter, Elizabeth, married to Robert le Franceys of Cliburn."—Nicolson and Burn's Westmorland.
Ivo Taillebois—evidently a cadet of the same house, was Chamberlain to Robert de Vipont, Lord of Westmorland, in the time of King John, and in 1206 obtained the Royal license to marry the widow of William Bardolph, Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of William Fitz William, Lord of Cokedale in Northumberland. Among other possessions, he held Hurworth-on-Tees, co. Durham, in her right; and their son again married an heiress. The next, Lucas, Sheriff of Northumberland in 1300, was the grandfather of Henry Tailboys, whose wife Eleanor, daughter and heir of Gilbert de Boroden, brought into the family the lion's share of the great heritage of the Umfrevilles. Her mother, Elizabeth de Umfreville, was the only daughter of Robert Earl of Angus, by his first wife Lucy, sole heiress of William de Kyme, the last baron of that name. Elizabeth's own brother, Gilbert, second Earl, died in 1381, having survived his son and the eldest of his two half-brothers, neither of whom left children, and another half-brother, Sir Thomas, succeeded to the estates. He transmitted them to his heirs; and it was not till the lineage died out in 1436, that, by virtue of an old entail, the principal part reverted to Elizabeth's great grandson, Sir Walter Tailbois. He inherited the castle and manor of Harbottle, the manor of Otterburn, and the lordship of Redesdale in Northumberland, with the castle and seigneurie of Kyme in Lincolnshire, which, unaccountably enough, had passed to Earl Gilbert's half-brother, though he was not the son of the heiress of Kyme.[152] It was a noble possession in every sense of the word; but was lost by attainder within the next twenty-four years. Sir Walter's son Sir William, titular Earl of Kyme,[153] was a faithful partisan of the Red Rose, and followed its waning fortunes with unflinching loyalty to the last. He was with the Earl of Somerset on the disastrous day at Hexham Levels, when the Lancastrians, encountering the Yorkshire army under Lord Montagu, fresh from its victory at Hedgely Moor, were put to utter rout. He fled to the fastnesses of his own wild country of Redesdale, but was taken prisoner, and beheaded at Newcastle in 1461. He had been attainted in the preceding year.
Eleven years after his execution, however, his son Sir Robert was restored in blood by the clemency of Edward IV. (though Harbottle remained vested in the Crown): and the next heir, Sir George, served as Sheriff of Northumberland in 1495. He married Elizabeth Gascoyne, and was the father of four sons, of whom John and Walter died s. p., William became a priest, and Gilbert was summoned to parliament as Lord Tailbois of Kyme in 1529. There can be little doubt that he owed his elevation to his wife, Elizabeth Blount, "the beauty and mistress-piece of the time," who had been a paramour of Henry VIII.'s in the early days of his "freshe youthe." She had a son by the King, born ten years before, a, fine promising lad on whom honours had been heaped from his very infancy. He was Duke of Richmond and Surrey and Lord High Admiral of England at the tender age of six, Warden of the Scottish Marches at eight, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at eleven! Men supposed him to be reserved for an even loftier destiny, as his father was said to contemplate his nomination as successor to the throne, which the Act of Succession, passed in 1536, was intended to facilitate. But he died—it is believed of poison, a few months afterwards.
Gilbert Lord Tailbois only survived his writ of summons by a single year; and at his death left three children who successively inherited the barony. The two sons died young—the last of them in 1540; and their sister Elizabeth Lady Tailbois, though twice married, left no posterity. Her first husband was Thomas Wimbish of Norton in Lincolnshire: the second Ambrose Dudley Earl of Warwick, the brother-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. "On her death, the barony created by the writ of summons to her father became extinct: but such interest as he had in the ancient barony of Kyme devolved in abeyance between his three sisters, or their heirs representative: of which sisters, Elizabeth married Sir Christopher Willoughby; Cecilia married first William Ingleby of Ripley in Yorkshire, and secondly John Torney; Anne married first Sir Edward Dymoke, and secondly Sir Robert Carr. In the partition of the lands, the old castle of Kyme came into the Dymoke family, and long continued in it, till in the last century it was alienated into the possession of strangers.
"It is here to be observed that Mr. Wimbish, having married the daughter and heir of Gilbert Lord Tailbois, claimed to be jure uxoris Lord Tailbois; but upon solemn argument, the King himself being present, it was resolved—
"That no man, husband of a baroness, in her right should use the title of her dignity until he had a child by her, whereby he should become tenant by curtesy of her barony.
"On this occasion it is said that the King moved this question, viz.: 'If the crown of England should descend to his daughter, whether her husband should use the style of England?'"—Banks.
The name continued in the co. Durham, where "a younger branch of Tailbois of Hurworth is said to have held Thornton from marriage with its heiress; but I am unable to trace the descent with any accuracy. The last Tailbois of Thornton (who married a daughter of Barnes, Bishop of Durham) died a prisoner in Durham gaol in 1606."—Surtees' Durham.