Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
It's interesting you should mention the Dribys. I have just spent the best part of two weeks of intense research on them and the Papworths. One branch of the Dribys did, indeed, have a royal connection by virtue of a marriage with a Tateshall (not sure what the modern spelling might be here), but not the branch that produced Alice de Driby, the wife of Anketil (or Anketin or, as his wife and children probably called him, Antony) Mallory II.
This Alice's real ancestry is more interesting, in that her mother Amy Gaveston was an illegitimate daughter and only surviving child of Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall and for a time Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He was definitely not royal, either, but his true career, as revealed by the records of the time and not as distorted by the squeamishness of the historians of succeeding centuries trying to avoid the implications of his personal relationship with the king, was extraordinary for both what he accomplished and represented. Had he been born noble, he would had a far longer and less controversial career. Had he been born royal, he would have been revered as a "great" king, much in the manner in which Frederick the Great of Prussia is in Germany. His real sin with regard to the times in which he lived was not his or the king's sexual
preferences, but the fact that he had been born to too low a station in life for people to tolerate, not just what he was given, but what he accomplished.
The Dribys themselves, I can now trace with a reasonable certainty of accuracy to within 20 to thirty years after the Norman Conquest. They were a very respectable Lincolnshire gentry family that, until, Alice de Driby married herself into nobility never rose above their class.
At the same time, I have been working on the Papworths and, though there are names to be filled in, if they ever appear in the records, they can, thanks to the regularity of succession to English manorial properties, be traced with almost as much accuracy as I have been able to achieved with the Papworths. I have also taken them (though in the female line) to about 20 years after the conquest. They were a family that may not have been one of the original gentry families, though they kept rising to that status. They never rose into the nobility. This does not mean that they were uninteresting.
Papworth St. Agnes gets its name from Agnes Papworth who was said, in one source I read, to have been one of the many mistresses of Henry I and who, living into well into her 80s, was the Lady of Papworth in her own right, passing it on to her grandson in the mid-1100s. She held Papworth directly of the king by virtue of providing for the perpetual support of two paupers otherwise unable to provide for themselves. Apparently, as she grew older, both her reputation and her good deeds increased, as, after her death, her manor of Papworth became know as Papworth Anneys ("Annis" as an affectionate form of Agnes) in English and Papworth Agnetis in Latin. By the end of the 15th century, people assumed the Agnes concerned must have been St. Agnes because of the good deeds the Lord of the Manor was charged by royal charter to do. Thus, the Later Mallorys mistakenly hyper-corrected the past by calling the manor Papworth St. Agnes, not realizing the name came from an ancestress who, though definitely not a saint, was, in her reaction to the times in which she lived, a much more interesting creature.
Notify Administrator about this message?
Followups:No followups yet |
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/mallory/messages/2731.html | ||
 |
Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|