My Story: Discovering the Medieval House of Neville
- Mar 9, 2025
- 15 min read
Updated: Jan 29
My story starts many years ago when I was eleven, standing in the modest bungalow home of my sweet, genteel grandmother while she was talking to my mum. I was hanging around, and I clearly remember her talking of the fine Neville family that we were related to. They had been in the Domesday Book; there was a letter from Oliver Cromwell; there was a Family Bible, a Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and she told of how the family fortune had been lost through two (or three) recent marriages. They married down, is how my grandmother phrased it.
Now, this conversation must have made a deep impression on me, because I have never forgotten it.
Even though within seven years I would be passionately obsessed with Arthurian literature from medieval manuscripts (13th century Tristan and Iseult by Beroul was just the beginning!), and Thomas Hardy's novel about a young woman with medieval noble ancestry, Tess of the d'Urbervilles had quickly became one of my favourite books, by then these thoughts of the ancient Neville family were lying as dormant as a stone medieval knight on his tomb.
I loved medieval literature. I loved the Pre-Raphaelite painters who painted scenes of passion from the old legends. But I had an art career and a busy life, and while thoughts did pop into my head sometimes - when I watched the play Richard III I grinned to myself, Granny! when I saw Anne Neville - I really didn't think that much about it.
We visited Durham one time - I didn't know it was the seat of the Neville family with prominent members entombed in the Cathedral. We stayed in a hotel, and my family were watching a tennis final on tv in one room, and I was sat in the other, transfixed by what just happened to be on the tv in that room. It was the sensational Hollow Crown BBC production of Richard II.
I was mesmerised.
I was so mesmerised, when I was studying as a mature student on Oxford University's fantastic Foundation Certificate in English Literature course, I studied the deposition scene for an essay. I translated Middle English for another. In another life I knew I would have liked to have been a medievalist, immersing myself in the stories and legends of people of long ago.
Of course, I was mesmerised too by Kyoto. As always, I was drawn to the ancient literature, and the 11th century history. I read several of the core Japanese texts in translation, and one of the aspects that fascinated me was that power-house family behind the Imperial throne. The author of The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu herself was from this family - the Fujiwara. They plotted to marry their daughters to emperors so that they could wield power from behind the throne as grandfathers.
Once Japan had reopened after its closure during the pandemic, one of the first places I went to see was Kōfuku-ji in Nara, because I was intrigued to see where the Fujiwara centred their power; where they moved, where their tutelary was.
The Fujiwara occupied a position in the Heian-era Kyoto court which was similar to the king-making medieval Neville family in England.
I was fascinated by the refined Kyoto courtly ways, just as I had been so drawn earlier in my life to the chivalry and courtly manners of England.
I began to tentatively look into some of the family stories that I remembered, searching the internet. I found our Victorian Neville family living in the house that my grandmother spoke of: Buckingham's. It's a name for a house that had always intrigued me as it sounded so connected to the aristocracy of the past.
It was only recently that I actually searched for an image of the house where my great-great grandmother played as a child. It's a beautiful, historic farmhouse now, but it began to dawn on me, that if this was marrying down, what had our ancestors lived in, in the past?
I wrote to a local historian in the area where my kindly grandmother had lived, and where I discovered there was once a manor called Little Hallingbury that had Neville history.
After much research, I discovered that Hugh de Neville, right-hand man to King John, present at the signing of the Magna Carta, and owner of Little Hallingbury Manor, was an ancestor, but not a direct one.
The historian was kind: she forwarded me information about the Neville family of Raby Castle near Durham, and recommended a book by Charles Young called The Making of the Neville Family.
I read about the 13th century Norman Isabel Neville whose name was chosen by her son over the Saxon-sounding name of his father. He took the name, Geoffrey FitzRobert de Neville, and he was the First Baron of Raby Castle.
I wondered at the middle names of my grandmother and her Neville grandmother which might have been a family name handed down: Isabella.
And then, one day, when I was early to meet a friend for coffee in town, I popped into the bookshop next door and began leafing through Dan Jones' book Plantagenets. There was a map of England showing the strongholds of noble families across the country, and there were the Neville's over much of it. My attention was drawn to the Neville's of Suffolk.
Finally, my husband exhorted me to get on Ancestry! And I did, and my extraordinary family, who had lain dormant for all those decades, unrolled before me like a glittering medieval manuscript. They began to awake, and their stories make wonderful reading!
Of course it takes triple-checking facts, months of head-numbing attempts at understanding, and lots of researching transcribed manuscript documents. But with the help of three essays published in The Genealogist by our clergyman ancestor who researched our family just before the First World War, and with two wonderfully generous local historians based in Clavering and Lavenham, within months I had a dazzling view on my forebears where one year ago I had shadow and space.
What have I learned? Every story that you ever heard as a child will turn out to be true. The Irish family who came to London and changed their name? Check! The possibility of having twins? Check! The captain of a ship sailing out of Brixham? Yes - he was Cornish and based in Plymouth! And these Neville's, what of them?
Well.
When I watched Shakespeare's Richard III and thought Granny! when I saw Anne Neville - it turns out that it was true. We're related to Richard III too, and Edward IV, which means we are related to those little Princes in the Tower through their grandmother, Cicely Neville, known as the Rose of Raby.
And when I was riveted by Ben Whishaw playing Richard II, unkinging himself before Henry Bolingbroke, future Henry IV? My ancestors supported the deposition. They would very likely have been part of the discussion to have him removed. In that scene in the play I can imagine them now, in the room. Our ancestor William, youngest son of Ralph Neville and Alice Audley, who married Elizabeth Waleys in Suffolk, served Richard II. He is our direct line through my father up to the Neville's of Raby Castle.
When I studied the Shakespeare play Two Noble Kinsmen and it's source text, Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, I didn't know about my ancestor's friendship with Chaucer. I like to wonder, as he was a renowned knight of mettle, if he was the inspiration for the Tale!
His son John resided at Aspall Manor, where the Suffolk Cyder is now made, although John Neville's moated manor is long gone.
He was married to Agnes Glanville, who had become part of the powerful Sackville family through her first husband John. The Glanville's, Sackville's, and Neville's shared the manors and priory of Debenham and Aspall, medieval families intermarrying to maintain their status.
Searching back through Agnes Glanville's ancestry, it's clear that the Glanville family and Sackville (Sauqueville) family intermarried. Both Norman families, their ancestry goes back to the Viscount of Saint-Sauveur and his beautiful chateau. His ancestor it is claimed is the apparently legendary Viking Malahulc, from Oppland, Norway!
This is fascinating - on the side of my grandmother's father I have only just discovered we have Óláfr Guðrøðarson, King of Man and the Isles and Norway's Harald III!
And I am reading the Orkneyinga Saga which tells of the doings of our 10th century earls of Orkney including the fantastically named Thorfinn 'Skull Splitter' Torf-Einarsson!
It is interesting that Agnes Glanville, widowed wife of John Sackville, was then married to John Neville. It seems likely that this marriage was a power match between these ancient noble families.
George, the son of John and Agnes, maintains the Suffolk manor houses, but grandson Henry Neville is found, in the second half of the 15th century, in the major trading hub of London.
Henry was a member of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, who owned a wharf called the Galley in St. Botolph's, London.
Ships bringing Spanish iron for the bowyers to make their weapons unloaded here, and Henry was a founder of the Ironmongers Hall which was originally near Fenchurch Street.
The ironmongers were merchants invested in ships, with a wharf and servants to aid the landing of the goods. It was not solely iron.
They had a religious foundation, connecting to the Mystery Plays with the crucifixion owing to the use of iron nails, and gifting funds to the poor of the parish.
They were well-regarded in the main, governed by rules which included the wearing of identifiable livery, they rose to significant heights in the city (in the time of Richard Whittington). It was a good life I think.
During the Wars of the Roses, they supported the Yorkist cause, declaring Henry VI unfit to rule. They contributed to a loan delivered to the ‘mene of the Erle of warwik’, Richard Neville, to support the Yorkist cause.
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as Warwick Kingmaker, was in a strong position, and of course eventually his sons Edward (IV) and Richard (III) became kings of England. Their cousin Henry Neville is almost certainly of this company who lend him money, and the Spanish iron may well have been used for weapons in the Wars of the Roses, as Henry's cousins battled for the Crown.
Henry's son John may well have been his apprentice, as the records show him following in Henry's footsteps. He is listed as a member of the Company of Yremongers in 1538, and perhaps knew the poet John Donne's father, who was also apprenticed as an Ironmonger around this time.
Our ancestor was Henry's younger son, William, and his grandson Roger, whose life spanned the Tudor years from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. The Neville's of Raby were Catholic, to the degree that they eventually had their property and lands seized by the Crown owing to a plot to remove Elizabeth I. I do wonder what Roger's life may have been like in these years of religious fear and persecution. Roger died at Gilbert Neville's Naylinghurst Hall.
In the late 17th-early 18th century, there's Edward, a successful malthouse and brewery owner; and his brother great uncle Isaac who did very well out of the wool trade in beautiful Lavenham. His ledger stone in cathedral-like Lavenham church features the heraldic arms of the Suffolk Neville's.
Generations of my dad's family lived in Long Melford and Lavenham, alongside Margaret Neville, who was married to Crécy hero John de Vere and lived in the Lavenham house that was used as Godric's Hollow in the Harry Potter movie franchise.
Margaret, sister of Warwick Kingmaker who aided those other Neville's, Edward IV and Richard III to the throne: would she have known my Neville ancestors? When Richard III and wife Anne Neville visited Lavenham Manor as Lords of the Manor, did they know one another?
The Raby Castle heraldic device is a wonderful family crest: a white saltire cross on a red shield. The Suffolk Neville device is a blue shield with three birds in gold, rising. I love this - I've been a birdwatcher since I was very small, and so it seems good to me!
At Raby Castle, in the Catholic chapel, there are portraits of the notable one-time residents of the castle. There is John the heir, looking dashing in his armour, and his son Ralph alongside his second wife Joan of Beaufort.
Joan was the niece of Richard II, daughter of John of Gaunt. Shakespeare gifts John one of the most beautiful speeches in our literature about England.
Ralph Neville had twenty-two children by two wives: his first wife Margaret Stafford, and his second wife Joan of Beaufort. Conflict between the adult children of Ralph Neville's two wives is at the heart of the English Wars of the Roses.
Imagine my surprise, when I decided to explore my mother's side of the family too, travelling up the family tree from my Gallipoli-fighting great grandfather. Not a direct line like a fired Crécy arrow like my father's, but once I had locked onto the Strickland family of Cumbria's Sizergh Castle I had the feeling that at any moment one of them would marry a Neville - and then it happened! Walter Strickland marries Catherine Neville of the Thornton Bridge line which goes up to Raby.
There was a Strickland ancestor who led the field at Agincourt, carrying the banner of St George. And there was another Strickland ancestor who was married to Agnes Parr, great aunt of Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII.
My mother is descended from Beauchamp's, and Mortimer's, going all the way up to the illegitimate daughter of King John, and his father King Henry II, and his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine. And she's descended from John Neville, the heir of Raby Castle, and his son Ralph Neville and first wife Margaret Stafford, whose son Ralph married Joan de Beaufort's daughter Mary Ferrers, great granddaughter of Edward III.
Now, when I look at my history-story-stuffed family tree, I can see that not only are we related to the youngest Raby Castle Neville son in a direct line through my father's maternal grandmother, we are also related to the eldest Raby Castle son and heir, John, through my mum's maternal grandfather.
I loved reading about John Neville here:
...the troops under Duguesclin and Anjou marked time on the frontiers of Gascony, where they met with unexpected resistance. The following year [1378], the government in London sent an energetic lieutenant to Bordeaux, John Neville of Raby, who had no difficulty in restoring the situation. He contained the invaders' inadequate forces, recovered several fortresses from them, organized punitive raids, and even repulsed a raid by the Castilians on Bayonne. The French reconquest was definitely halted, and it was not resumed.
Lines of Raby Castle Neville's pop up five times across my family tree.
The last one I discovered was when I traced my dad's mum's father's family. There was Eleanor Neville, married to Henry Percy, son of Henry 'Hotspur'. Eleanor's father is my already-ancestor Ralph, 1st earl of Westmoreland.
This time we're related to the Raby Castle Neville's through Ralph's second wife Joan Beaufort. Joan was the daughter of John of Gaunt who was brother to Richard II and the son of Edward III.
I also traced my dad's mum's father's family back to the medieval family of William Greville. He was married to another Thornton Bridge Neville: Margaret Neville.
And, what a coincidence! William Greville's grandson, also called William, lived in the incredibly beautiful medieval house which I regularly walk past on Chipping Campden High Street.
He was a medieval wool merchant, just like my great uncle Isaac Neville in that Suffolk wool town, Lavenham.
I didn't know that every time I walk up to town to take our Zusetsu parcels to the post I am walking in the footsteps of my ancestors!
My dad's mum's father's side of the family is extraordinary. Among the Stewarts, Earl's of Orkney, Viking kings, Percy's and Neville's and Greville's are a fascinating Tudor couple - Lady Anne Somerville who was married to Edward Grant. They owned a moated manor house called Northbrook (or Norbrook) just north of Stratford upon Avon.
Edward Grant and his wife Anne Somerville were Recusants - Catholics in a time of fearful Protestantism. Anne's nephew John was married to Margaret Arden of nearby Park Hall.
About this time (Oct. 1583) John Somervill a furious young man of Elston in Warwikeshire of late discovered and taken in his way coming with full intent to kill the Queenes Majesty (whom God long prosper to raygne over us) confessed the treason and that he was moved thereunto in his wicked spirit by certain trayterous persons his kinsmen and allies and also by often reading of certain seditious books lately published: for the which the said Somervill, Edward Arden, a Squire in Park Hall in Warwikeshire, Mary Arden his wife (father and mother-in-law to the sayd Somervill) and Hugh Hall, priest, being with others before indicted at Warwike were on the 6th of December arraygned in the Guild Hall of Loudon where they were found guilty and condemned of high treason.
William Shakespeare was an Arden of Park Hall through his mother Mary, and it is suggested that this crisis precipitated the downfall of William's father John. In Stephen Greenblatt's book, Will in the World, he suggests that John Shakespeare was a Catholic - a document was found hidden between the rafters and the tiles of Shakespeare's Henley Street home, signing his necessity to have Catholic prayers offered for him after his death as he made his way through Catholic Purgatory. Were William's undocumented years spent as an able tutor to a nearby Catholic family?
Decades later, Northbrook was a meeting house for the Gunpowder Plotters, and our ancestor John Grant was recruited by Robert Catesby to be a member of the Plot. He had received a letter from Catesby inviting him to a meeting in Oxford at the Catherine Wheel inn, where he swore an oath and was then told of the plan.
Northbrook played a key role in the uprising, located as it was central to the midlands - an ideal place to store arms and ammunition and recruit rebels.
Northbrook was torn down when the Plot to blow up Parliament and the King was discovered, and John Grant met a terrible end in the Tower of London.
Conclusion
My family history is like walking backwards through the history of the British Isles. It's all there - the wool merchant great uncle; the ironmonger merchant in medieval London, the noble family of Norman extraction owning lands and castles being caught up in a Catholic plot against the reigning monarch.
There is the great grand-uncle who was hauled off to the Tower, having been recruited by Robert Catesby for the infamous Gunpowder Plot.
There are Norman chateaux, and Viking ancestors waging sea battles off the Hebridean coasts. There's an ancestor exchanging words with Oliver Cromwell, a humble Victorian shoemaker, Plantagenet kings, a hay baler, and a Victorian gas stoker with five children to support.
And I feel very Neville. I feel a sense of sparkly wonder that this huge family, who had remained as a few unquestioned phrases in the back of my mind for decades, are vibrantly occupying their spectacular place in English history and in my imagination.
Shakespeare's History Plays have taken on a whole new meaning, as I begin to understand the role that many of my ancestors played in key moments of English medieval history.
I was thrilled, when watching the 2019 movie The King (based on Shakespeare's Henry V), to see a loyal knight riding a white horse robed in red with a white saltire accompanying the king to the field at Agincourt. He is named Westmoreland and he is my Neville ancestor Sir Ralph de Neville, who was first married to Margaret Stafford, then Joan Beaufort, and whose children were at the heart of the devastating Wars of the Roses.
He is pictured again below, with his children by Margaret. His son, our ancestor Ralph will be here too. (There are a lot of Ralph's in our family tree!)
I'm filled with wonder that the story that my sweet, kind grandmother told was true. The Neville's are mentioned in the Domesday Book. A 17th century cousin, Henry Neville, was a supporter, but critic, I believe of Oliver Cromwell, and was in correspondence with him. The Family Bible? There is a very beautiful Neville Book of Hours kept at Berkeley Castle, which includes this dazzling illustration of the powerful medieval Neville family.
My story is a lot like Danny Dyer's on the BBC ancestry programme Who Do You Think You Are? It's very similar to the show with Courteney Cox too. She researches her ancestor Roger de Mortimer who held the power behind the throne while Edward II was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle. He's our ancestor too, through his daughter Katherine.
And I've learned that having these stories in your ancestry isn't even that unusual - take a look at the link below!
We all, most of us, have family stories. What are yours?
Cathy
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Further Interest
There is a fascinating lecture online, which I recently saw through the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, where it is suggested that the UK's Victorian-era medievalism influenced a resurgence of interest in samurai culture in Japan: Samurai, Knights, and Nationalisms: The Middle Ages in Modern Japan.
Sources
John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallott
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival Were Fed with the Sanct Grael; but Sir Percival’s Sister Died by the Way
The Met: Shoren-in Sonjun Shinnou, Tale of Genji
Charles R. Young, The Making of the Neville Family in England: 1166-1400, (Boydell Press).
British Library, Luttrell Psalter
IMDB: Scenes from The King (2019).
Scene from the BBC The Hollow Crown.
Illustrations of Ironmonger livery in: Penelope Hunting, The Ironmongers Company, a History.
The Grevel Family: Chipping Campden History
Photo of De Vere House, Lavenham, (and for info about guest accomodation): the De Vere House website.
This is Durham, Raby Castle
Photo of Lavenham Guildhall by SuffolkEditor73, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133651086
Photo of Saint-Sauveur le Vicomte, Wikimedia.
Knight on a stout Pony, National Museum of Scotland
Image of John Grant, Wikipedia
Stow's description of Somerville and Arden, The Family of Somerville, p.74, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://fmg.ac/phocadownload/userupload/scanned-sources/tgb/Vol13-PDFs/S-3956.pdf
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, How Shakespeare became Shakespeare, (Bodley Head).
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