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

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

Raimond : "Giraldus Raimundus" appears in Domesday as a mesne-lord in Essex: and the name continued there till about 1272, when John Reimund is found in the Rotuli Hundredorum. At the same date the family was numerous in Kent. Their original seat was at Raymond's, near Rye. They "were for a great length of time Stewards to the Abbot and Convent of Battel for their lands near this place; and it is probable that it was once the original stock from which the Raymonds of Essex, Norfolk and other counties, derived their extraction. The family was extinct here before the thirty-sixth year of King Henry VIII."—Hasted's Kent. They probably removed from their old home when they lost the hereditary Stewardship of Wye at the dissolution of the monasteries. It was a post of great dignity and trust; for the Royal manor of Wye was by far the most splendid of the gifts conferred by the Conqueror upon his Abbey. According to Lambarde, it comprised the fifth part of the whole county of Kent; "appertaining to it were twenty hundreds and a half": and it was held from the Crown "with all its liberties and Royal customs, as freely and entirely as the King himself held them, or as a King could give them." It enjoyed all the "maritime customs" owned by the Crown at Dengemarsh, which formed part of the soke of Wye, including the right of wreck; and no Royal edict was ever issued to the sheriffs and justiciars of Kent respecting the affairs of the Abbey without an especial direction that "they should preserve all the Royal liberties and customs of the manor of Wye."

From this Kentish stock Philipots, in his Villare Cantianum, concurs with Hasted in deriving the Raymonds of Essex. Their first move, however, appears to have been to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, where we find Philip Raymond, in the sixteenth century, married to a county heiress who brought him Essendon. Their great-grandson John (who was living in 1627) bought Belchamp-Walter of the Wentworths, and transplanted the Raymonds to this new home in Essex, where they still flourish. No doubt it was unwittingly that they thus returned to the county in which the name had originally taken root at the Conquest. The next heir, Oliver, served as knight of the shire in the two parliaments summoned by Cromwell in 1653 and 1656, and was the happy father of twenty-one children. His eldest son, St. Clere, married against his consent, was cut out of the succession, and became "a haberdasher of hats in London" : but the inheritance was restored to his grandson. The direct line failed in the next following generation, and Belchamp-Walter passed to a collateral branch that is still represented.

Another was seated at Little Coggeshall Hall in the same county; of whom James Raymond is mentioned by Morant in 1768. They bear Sable a chevron between three eagles displayed Argent; on a chief of the second, three martlets of the first.