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

Prepared by Michael A. Linton
-------*--------
Return to Index

Turuile : from Turville (one of nine Seigneuries that bear the name in Normandy) near Pont-Audemer, "derived from Torf de Torfville (La Roque, Maison d'Harcourt, ii. 1927), from whom descended Geoffrey de Turville 1124 (Ord. Vitalis, 880; Mon. i. 519, ii. 309), who had grants from the Earl of Leicester and Mellent in England."—The Norman People. Raoul de Tourneville is on the Dives Roll; and Roger de Turville held Weston-Turville, Bucks, of Bishop Odo (Domesday). Another manor in the county is called from him Turville. In Leicestershire they are "one of the ancientest families in the shire"; seated at Normanton-Turville from the time of Henry II., and still flourishing in a junior branch at Husbands Bosworth in the same county. Ralph de Turville, in 1297, held four and a-half knights' fees in Normanton, Brokenhall Park, Thurleston (where several monuments to the family yet remain), Croft, Walton, Over-leigh, Sywddeby, Seithby, and Saxilby, and granted the church of Croft (or Craft) to St. Mary's Abbey, Leicester. His grandson Richard, about the year 1400, married the heiress of Sir William Flamville, and thus obtained Aston-Flamville, which was granted by Richard's descendant in the fourth generation, Sir William Turvile, to his second son George, the ancestor of the existing family. This Sir William was one of Henry VIII.'s Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Leicestershire. John, his eldest son, carried on the line of Normanton-Turvile, afterwards transplanted to Thurleston, which ended in the last century with Edward Turvile, Rector of Thurleston, whose only child, Elizabeth, died unmarried in 1776, and lies buried in the vault at Thurleston.

Aston-Flamville, the seat of the younger branch, was alienated in 1746 by Carrington Turvile, who had lost his only son some years before, and desired to be buried by his side in the old church of the English nuns at Brussels when he himself died in 1749. His nephew William inherited their present home, Husbands Bosworth, with other manors in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, as heir-at-law to Mary Alathea Fortescue, in 1763.

Some of the name were seated in the former county as early as the reign of Henry II., when Geoffrey Turville is styled of Adston, and William Turville held Helmdon of the Fee of Leicester. Of this latter line the last male heir was Sir Nicholas Turville of Helmsdon, living 1296-1315, whose heiress, Sarah, married Sir Thomas Lovett of Liscombe, Bucks.