http://www.1066.co.nz/library/battle_abbey_roll1/subchap165.htm

Clerenay: or Clarvays, as it is more correctly spelt in Duchesne's copy, from Clerfai, Clarefay, or Clairfait, near Avesnes. Godric de Clairfait, supposed to be the son of the Ketelbern or Chetelber mentioned in Domesday, who was living in Yorkshire during the reign of Henry I., was the ancestor of the Fitz-williams. His son, William, became the second husband of the great heiress Albreda de Lizours; and, according to Hunter, "was one of the most considerable persons in these parts of England before his marriage with Albreda. It can scarcely admit of a doubt that he is the same William de Clairfagio or de Clairfait who appears in one charter as Albreda's husband, and whose full description was Willielmus de Clarofagio filius Godrici." He was Lord of Elmley before she brought him Sprotburgh and Plumptre; and had himself been previously married; for some time before 1156 he and Alicia de Tanai his wife jointly founded Hampole Priory (Mon. i. 831). His daughter by her married one of the Tillis. He took part with Stephen; and in 1142 we are told by John, Prior of Hagulstad, that he had escaped from Randolf, Earl of Chester, and betaken himself to Tickhill Castle. Albreda, who survived him, brought him a daughter and a son, William Fitz William, who is represented, on horseback and armed cap-a-pie, on the seal affixed to a charter which he granted to the monks of Byland in 1217. Collins says that he married Ella, daughter of' Hameline Earl of Warren; but an inspeximus of Hampole recognizes a charter of his confirming an annual rent of 20s. for a pittance to find oil for the lamps burning day and night at the tomb of Maud, formerly his wife, who had been buried in the church of the monastery."—Ibid. He joined the barons who rose in arms against King John, though he returned to his allegiance under Henry III.; and his son Thomas, who succeeded not many years after the accession of the latter, and continued in possession through nearly the whole of that long reign, also fought on the baronial side at the battle of Chesterfield, where he was taken prisoner in 1266. His wife was a Bertram heiress; and "his son is more frequently found as Sir William Fitz Thomas than as Sir William Fitz William; for as a surname that does not appear to have been adopted till the son of a Sir John Fitz William, about a century later, called himself Fitz William.—Ibid. His son, another Sir William, was hanged at Pontefract in 1322, having been" with the Earl of Lancaster at Burton when he disputed the passage of the river with the King, and afterwards at the fight of Boroughbridge, where he was taken prisoner. Sir William, the father, was then still alive, and according to Dugdale, had summons to Parliament in 1327, but Nicolas says the summons was not to Parliament, but to attend the King with horse and arms."—Ibid. It was certainly never repeated to the next heir, John, who died of the pestilence in 1349.

One of John's younger sons, Edmond Fitz William, was the father of Sir Richard, who married the heiress of the Clarells, and settled in their old home at Aldwark. Sir Thomas, the next in succession, soared to a higher flight of fortune, for he was matched with the fourth of the five great heiresses that shared the princely possessions of the last Marquess of Montague, Lady Lucy Nevill, who brought him Cowdray as her portion. According to Collins, they had a family of three sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Thomas, and his brother John both fell at Flodden Field; but the other, Sir William, was the brilliant Earl of Southampton that figured so gallantly in the reign of Henry VIII. He was first knighted for good service at the siege of Tournay, being then one of the esquires of the body to the king,[125] and rapidly advanced in the favour and estimation of his master; for we presently find him Vice-Admiral of England, Captain of Guisnes in Picardy, and sent with the Duke of Norfolk to arrange a marriage for the King's daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, with a young French prince. In 1536, being then Treasurer of the Household, a Knight of the Garter, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Admiral of England, Wales, Ireland, Normandy, Gascony, and Acquitaine, he received his Earldom, and was afterwards named Lord Privy Seal. He died at Newcastle in 1543, while on his march to Scotland, leading the van of the English army; and to mark the esteem in which his memory was held, his banner was borne on in its place of honour throughout the ensuing campaign. He had married Anne Clifford, a sister of the first Earl of Cumberland, but left no children, and Cowdray passed to his half brother, Sir Anthony Brown. (See Browne.)

The elder line, that remained seated in Yorkshire, had ended some thirty years before with a Sir William Fitz William; and the estates went to his two daughters, Marjory, married to Thomas Suthill (and then through her only child Elizabeth to Sir Henry Savile): and Dorothy, the wife of Sir William Copley, whose descendants still hold Sprotborough. "When the male line of the Fitz Williams became extinct 8 Hen. VIII., the nearest male heir was the descendant of Ralph Fitz William, described as Captain of Salva Terra, a French castle committed to him in the reign of Henry VI. These, for three generations, carried on a war with the heirs general for the possession of Sprotborough; and the evidence they collected was transcribed in 1565 by Hugh Fitz William in a MS. volume still preserved by the family. On the title page is the figure of a woodman, with a scroll proceeding from his mouth, bearing these lines,

"No marvell though I be wode,

Which am berevid of lande and goode."—Ibid.

This Hugh, who accuses Sir Henry Savile of having burnt "three great Bagges of evidence of the Fitz-Williams," devoted much time and labour to the investigation of his pedigree, "the which," he says, "accordith with th' olde and newe Testament, to mayntayne antiquity, nobility, and birthright." But he lived in the days of the imaginative Elizabethan heralds, to whom we owe so many fanciful genealogies; and the one produced for him, duly certified by the three Kings of Arms, and subscribed by eleven gentlemen of his blood and name, does no discredit to its parentage. It makes his ancestor Fitz-Godric, who fought for Stephen in 1135, a cousin of Edward the Confessor's, and sent by him on an embassy to the Duke of Normandy, at whose court he remained until he returned with the expedition of 1066 as Marshal of the invading army, receiving a scarf of honour for his gallantry at Hastings. "Among the archives at Milton is a scarf of fine lawn edged with silver, in which the successive heirs to the house are enveloped when presented for baptism, with which has descended a tradition that it was given by the Conqueror from his own arm at the battle of Hastings to the first of the Gens Gulielmiadum who was his Marescallus exercitus."[126]—Ibid. It seems an unlikely garment for William to have worn over his hauberk of mail; and "we need hardly look in the Bayeux Tapestry to prove that the Duke who knew so well how to wield his mace of iron did not cumber his arms with any frippery of scarves on the day of the great battle."—Freeman. To aid this violent transposition of time, Hugh and his genealogists take sundry liberties with the dates. They alter that of the charter granted to Bywell by Albreda's son William from 1217 to 1117 (vide Hunter); and entirely ignore the fact that Albreda brought Sprotborough as her dower, asserting that it had belonged to her husband's two immediate predecessors.

One of these ancient Lords of Sprotborough set up a cross on the marketplace, bearing the following hospitable inscription:

"Whoso is hungry and list well eate,

Let him come to Sprotburgh to his meate;

And for a nyghte and for a daye

His horse shall have both come and hay,

And no man shall aske him where he goith away."[127]

The last line is suggestive; and it should be observed that entertainment for man and beast is only proffered during twenty-four hours, lest the host should be made responsible for the good behaviour of the stranger whom he had welcomed to his house. "It carries us back to the times of our early Norman kings, if not to a period before the Conquest, when among the laws respecting hospitality, a very important virtue in a rude state of society, there was one which regulated the time during which a man might take up his residence as a stranger in a place distant from his own domicile. In the laws of the Conqueror it is expressed thus: 'Nemo alterum recipiat ultra III. noctes nisi is eum illi commendaverit, qui ejus fuerit amicus:' which was plainly copied from one of Canute: 'Nemo alterum suscipiat diutius quam tres dies, nisi ille cui antea servivit eum commendaverit.' Blount has preserved a curious Saxon fragment on this subject:

'Forman night, uncuth;

Twa night, guest;

Third night, awn hynde.'

The meaning of which is, that if a stranger rested only one night, he was to be regarded as a man unknown; if two nights, he became a guest; but if three nights, he was to be considered as an inhabitant, and the master of the house was to be answerable for him as for the other members of his household. There was a very ancient highway from Mexborough through Sprotborough to the great North road at Doncaster Bridge."—Ibid.

One of the eleven deluded kinsmen that affixed their signatures to Hugh's pedigree was William Fitzwilliam of Milton, Knight, the ancestor of the present Earl. He stands first on the list, as "the eldest brother of that house," which had then been seated for several generations in Northamptonshire. His father was in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, and when his old master fell into disgrace, gave him "kind entertainment" at Milton. For this offence the King summoned him to his presence, and demanded "how he durst entertain so great an enemy to the State? He answered, that he had not contemptuously or wilfully done it in disobedience to his Majesty, but only as the Cardinal had been his master, and partly the means of his greatest fortunes. At which answer the King was so well pleased, that, saying he had few such servants, he immediately knighted him, and made him one of his Privy Council."—Collins.

Sir William himself spent between thirty and forty years of his life in Ireland, having been five times one of the Justiciaries, and three times Lord Deputy and Commander-in-Chief, always proving himself a faithful and prudent administrator. "His vigilance," says Sir John Davis, "was very conspicuous in the memorable year 1588, when the routed Armada, in its return, dared not to land in Ireland, except against their wills driven by tempest, when they found the shore worse than the sea for them." As Constable of Fotheringay, he had for some time the custody of Mary Queen of Scots; and the day before she was beheaded, she gave him, for a keepsake, the portrait of her son, in recognition of the courtesy and consideration he had shown in all his dealings with her. He died in 1599. His grandson and namesake was created in 1620 Baron Fitzwilliam of Lifford in Ireland; and the third Lord received the additional titles of Viscount Miltown, co. Westmeath, and Earl Fitzwilliam, co. Tyrone, in 1716. An English Earldom followed in 1746, with a duplicate Viscountcy, Milton in Northamptonshire (the identical name with the omission of one letter). These were granted to the third Earl, who, two years before, had married Lady Anne Watson-Wentworth, eldest daughter of the first Marquess of Rockingham, and sister of the well-known minister who formed "the Rockingham Administration," of which Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke formed a part. On his death in 1782 the Marquessate became extinct, and the principal part of the great Wentworth estates, including Malton and Wentworth Woodhouse, passed to his nephew William, fourth Earl Fitzwilliam, who added the name of Wentworth to his own. Wentworth House had been the favourite seat of the great Earl of Strafford, who, in his earlier and happier days, delighted in "the petty and innocent pastimes" of a country life; and passed, on the death of his only male heir in 1695, to his grandson Thomas Watson, the third son of his eldest daughter, Lady Anne, who had married the second Lord Rockingham. It had been pulled down and rebuilt on a grandiose scale by the first Marquess, who constructed a vast Italian palace, with a facade six hundred feet long, a great portico in the centre, and a gallery copied from that of the Colonna Palace at Rome, and measuring one hundred and eighty feet, on the first floor. It is a treasury of works of art, and contains what are probably the finest and moat interesting Van Dycks in England.

A branch of this family, bearing the same beautiful coat, had been settled in Ireland as early, it is believed, as the reign of King John; though the pedigree only actually begins with an Edward Fitzwilliam, temp. Ed. II., whose son William was the builder and first Constable of Wicklow Castle. Their earliest possession was Thorncastle, where Philip Fitzwilliam built a fort in the time of Henry VI., but they subsequently held Merrion, Bray, and Baggotrath, co. Dublin, and in 1629 Sir Thomas (son of a Sir Richard who had been Lord Warden of the Marches of Leinster) was created Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion. On the breaking out of the great Rebellion, he hurried to Dublin to offer his services to the Crown, but being a Roman Catholic, he found them rejected, and had to repair to England in order to join the Royalist army. Charles I. granted him an Earldom at Oxford in 1645; but as the Great Seal had at that time passed out of the possession of the unhappy King, the patent could never be perfected. His son Oliver, a Lieutenant-General under the Marquess of Ormonde, was, however, created Earl of Tyrconnel three years after the Restoration, and died s. p.; his brother William succeeding to the Viscountcy only in 1667. The line ended with the great-grandson of this William, Richard, seventh Viscount, in 1816; and the estates passed to the children of his sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke.