The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. II.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.
Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Lovell : "Asceline, Seigneur of Breherval, and Lord of Castle Cary in England, was a vassal of William de Breteuil. Goello or Goel was the surname which Asceline usually assumed, derived from a noble Breton barony,[1] but the designation of Lupellus, or young Wolf, had been bestowed upon him in consequence of his savage temper, common to the whole family. Through his son William, softened into Lovell, the name became hereditary. 'Lovell, our dog,' was his lineal descendant. Lovells of Castle-Cary, Lovells of Tichmarsh, Percevals, Egmonts, Beaumonts, and Somersetshire Gurneys, the second line of Barewe Gournay (where the walls of the old manor-house are partly standing)—all come from Asceline. By ill usage and torture, he compelled his liege lord to grant him his daughter Isabel, with £3,000 of Dreux currency. During three months Breteuil was kept in duresse, ironed, chained, plagued, and starved, without yielding: till at length the livres and the lady were extorted by an ingenious mode of torture. In the depth of winter, Asceline fastened him to the grating at the bleak top of a tower, unclothed, save by a poor, thin shirt: he was thus exposed to the whistling, biting, bitter winds, while water was poured upon him abundantly and continually, till he was sheeted with ice. This anguish Breteuil could not resist: he consented to the terms proposed, endowed Isabel in the church-porch, and gave her away."—Sir Francis Palgrave.
The father of Asceline was Robert de Breherval, one of the eight sons of Eudo, Count of Brittany, who held the castle and barony of Ivery, in Normandy, by the service of three knights' fees. He came to England with the Conqueror, and fought at Senlac; but soon after returned home and died a monk in the Abbey of Bec. Ascelin, surnamed Gouel, and Gouel de Percheval, appears in Domesday as a large landowner in Somerset, where he held the barony of Castle-Cary. He had three sons: the eldest, Robert, died s. p. in 1121: William, the second, succeeded him; and John, the youngest, was portioned in the manor of Harptree, and in consequence took that name, but afterwards changed it to Gournay. From him descended the Barons of Harptree Gournay.
William Gouel de Percheval had both the Norman and English estates; and inherited, with his father's turbulent and ungovernable temper, his nick-name of Lupellus, or Louvel, which was ever after used by his posterity. His life is one long record of different rebellions. First, he took up arms, with his father-in-law, Waleran of Mellent, against Henry I.; "and fighting stoutly on his part in that notable skirmish, near the Borough of Turold, where Waleran was utterly vanquished and made prisoner: being taken in his flight by a Peasant, gave him his Armour for liberty to escape; and having so done, cut all his Hair according to the mode of an Esquire; by which means he passed unknown to a Ferry upon the River of Sene, where he gave his Shoes to the Boatman to carry him over, and so at length got bare-foot to his own house."—Dugdale. Next, with other Somersetshire barons, he espoused the cause of the Empress Maud, and was twice besieged in his castle of Cary: first in 1138, when it was taken by King Stephen: and again—but on that occasion unsuccessfully—by William de Tracy in 1153. "It is probable that from this time the castle fell to ruin and decay; for little more is heard of it in the succeeding reigns, and at present the spot wherein it stood is hardly known to the inhabitants of the town; being marked only by an intrenched area of about two acres, called the Camp, in which implements of war and bolts of iron have frequently been dug up."—Collinson's Somerset. He left five sons: 1. Waleran, Lord of Yvery in Normandy; 2. Ralph, and 3. Henry, who were successively Lords of Castle-Cary; 4. William, ancestor of the Lovels of Tichmarsh; and 5. Richard, who retained the original surname of Percheval or Perceval, and was the ancestor of the Earls of Egmont. See Perceval.
The barony of Castle-Cary descended in regular succession to Richard, third of the name and last of the line, who had the custody of the Dorsetshire castles of Corfe and Purbeck, and was summoned to parliament as a baron by Edward III. in 1348: but, as both his son and grandson died before him, left no heir save his granddaughter Muriel, who carried his title and estate to her husband, Nicholas Lord St. Maur.
The younger branch of the Lovels (the posterity of William) were of longer continuance and greater account in the world. They were seated at Minster-Lovel in Oxfordshire, and exchanged their paternal coat for that of the Bassets, with whom they had intermarried. Tichmarsh was acquired through Maud Sydenham, a great Northamptonshire heiress, in the time of Henry III. One of the family, Philip Lovel, was Treasurer of England during the same reign: but was accused and brought to trial by the barons for having taken bribes from the Jews to exempt them from tallage, and being "put from that high trust," and heavily fined, died of grief and vexation in 1258. His nephew John, who served in the Scottish wars, and first had license to castellate Tichmarsh, was summoned to parliament as Lord Lovel of Tichmarsh in 1299; and his descendant, the fifth Lord, acquired a second barony through his wife Maud, granddaughter and heir of Robert de Holland, Lord Holland. To these, the next but one in succession, Sir William, added a third and fourth, by his marriage with Alice, in her own right Baroness D'Eyncourt and Baroness Grey de Rotherfield; and both his sons followed their father's example. John, the elder, eighth Lord Lovel, married Joane, only sister and heir of William, second Viscount Beaumont, who brought him her brother's barony of Beaumont: and William, the second, married Alianor, only child of Robert Lord Morley, and was summoned to parliament as Lord Morley. (See Morlei.) John's son, Francis, in addition to the accumulated baronies he thus inherited, received the title of Viscount Lovel on the accession of Richard III. Though his father had been throughout a staunch Lancastrian, rewarded for his services to Henry VI., and forced to fly for his life on the landing of the Duke of York, the son became the bosom friend and counsellor of the Yorkist king, and was one of the hated favourites denounced in the old distich:
"The Rat, the Cat, and Lovell our Dog,
Govern all England under the Hog."
He was appointed Constable of Wallingford, Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and Chief Butler of England: but all these evanescent dignities passed away with his master's brief reign; and his after fate was strange and pitiable. After the rout of Bosworth, he fled for sanctuary to St. John's, Colchester; and thence, hunted from place to place, he at last made his way to Flanders, and betook himself to the court of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the late King's sister. She greeted him kindly, and employed him on the expedition sent over to Ireland to uphold the counterfeit Duke of York, Lambert Simnel; from whence he came back to England with John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and fought under him at the disastrous battle of Stoke. From this point a certain mystery hangs over his fate. He was last seen, after the battle, swimming his horse across the Trent; but it was said he could not gain the further side, on account of the steepness of the banks, and that both he and his horse were swept away by the current. There was always, however, a report in the country that he was not drowned, but had succeeded in making good his landing, and sought refuge in some hiding-place, where he lived for a long time, but in the end was left to starve to death. This tradition, which is alluded to by Lord Bacon, was curiously confirmed by a discovery made in the first years of the last century. "On the 6th of May, 1728," writes Mr. William Cowper, Clerk of the Parliament in 1737, "the present Duke of Rutland related in my hearing, that about twenty years before, viz. in 1708, upon occasion of new laying a chimney at Minster Luvel, there was discovered a large vault underground, in which was the entire skeleton of a man, as having been sitting at a table, which was before him, with a book, paper, pen, &c.: in another part of the room lay a cap, all much mouldered and decayed. Which the family and others judged to be this Lord Lovel, whose exit has hitherto been so uncertain." It would thus appear that he had gone straight to his own house, and shut himself up in a hidden, chamber probably contrived for some such emergency, trusting his secret to a confidential servant who had either forgotten or betrayed him and there, mewed up like a rat in a hole, he had been suffered to die by inches, in all the lingering agonies of starvation.
He had no children, and all his honours fell under attainder. One only—the barony of Beaumont—was restored in 1840 to a descendant Of his elder sister, Joan, the wife of Sir Brian Stapleton of Carlton in Yorkshire.
"Benham-Lovell, in Berkshire, took its name from this family; it was held by the service of keeping a pack of dogs (canum deynectorum) at the King's expense for the Royal use."—Lysons.
The Lovells are also found in Scotland, and had crossed the Border at an early date, for in 1183 Henry Lovell granted some of his land at Hawick to the prior and canons of St. Andrew's. Hawick in Roxburghshire was their ancient residence; thence they removed to Ballumbie, in Angus, which they held till about the middle of the sixteenth century. Thomas Lovel witnesses the foundation charter of the Maison Dieu at Brechin in 1267. "Eva, quae fuit uxor Roberti Lovel" did homage for lands in the counties of Aberdeen, Forfar, and Roxburgh in 1296: and, much about the same time, "Agneys, qu fu la femme Henry Lovel," performed the same service for lands in Roxburghshire. James Lovel is recorded as one of the Angus barons who fell at Harlaw in 1411. Alexander, the son of Richard Lovel of Ballumbie, is said to have married Catherine Douglas, who was in the Convent of the Black Friars at Perth, when King James I. and "Walter Straton, the kyng's chalmer chyld," were murdered by the Earl of Athole and his associates. This lady was maid of honour to Queen Joanna, and it is said by an old writer that, on hearing the approach of the regicides, and with a view of allowing the king time to escape, she "put hir arme in the hole where the bolt suld have bene for baste, bot the upstriking of it brak hir arme."[2]—Memorials of Angus and the Mearns. Andrew Lovell, in 1572, "was denunceit rebell and thairfor put in ward." After this, but few traces remain of the family. Ballumbie had passed into the possession of Sir Thomas Lyon of Aldbar. "Some of the family became burgesses in the neighbouring town of Dundee: and the last notice of them, as landed proprietors, occurs in 1607, when Sibylla and Mariota were served heiresses-portioners of their father, James Lovell, in the lands and fishings of Westferry and 'the Vastcruik, alias Kilcraig,' on the north of the Tay, which probably goes to show that the family failed in co-heiresses."—Ibid.
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