The Conqueror and His Companions

The generosity of my site visitors continues to bookstoree me. Whereas a couple years back, I had presented some dozen entries from this out-of-copyright material on the men who were with William the Conqueror when he came to claim England, thinking that was all I could do because the NYPL's copy is in such bad shape that I can't photocopy more from it, now the work can be uploaded in its entirety. The first batches of additions came in August 1999 when Fred Curry generously supplied photocopies from his volumes of all the pages I was missing. Still, I was slow to get to the remaining scanning and correcting. Now, October 2000, Michael Linton of New Zealand has emailed me scanned and corrected text in ascii format, ready to encode in my own style and upload. He plans his own Conquest site -- you can be sure to find the link here whenever it's up -- but nevertheless offers all this work to my pages! There are small bits I've yet to format and work in but soon it will all be here -- with great thanks to Michael and Fred! By the way, Michael and his wife Gillian make jerseys (sweaters) on hand operated knitting machines, in the hand framing method which has barely changed since the knitting machine was invented by William Lee of Lincolnshire in 1596, and you can see their work online.
Mr. Planché reviewed existing sources and tried to improve upon the accuracy of what he found; there is more recent research arguing many of the questions that come up in these texts, and you should be sure to search for current views rather than take these texts as fact; this is but a starting point for those trying to trace Norman ancestors. Check Medieval English families on the internet from Chris Phillips for more pages on these names. There's the Gen-Medieval discussion list, and the new research of COEL (Continental Origins of English Landowners). See my online bookstore for good recent sources!
If reusing this material, now in the public domain, please do cite the original 1874 source.
And if you like what I've put on my site, please respect the effort expended, be ethical and link to me; don't paste my webpages into your own.