Another Norman ancestor who must go overboard is the alleged founder of the “noble” house of Bolingbroke—­that “William de St John who came to England with the Conqueror as grand master of the artillery and supervisor of the wagons and carriages,” since it can be positively shewn that the St John family first set foot in England a good many years after William I. was safely underground; and with this mythical William must also go that equally nebulous progenitor of the Fortescue family, “who” according to the venerable and almost uniform tradition, “landed in England with his master in the year 1066, and, protecting him with his shield from the blows of an assailant, was graciously dubbed ‘Fortescu,’ the man of the stout shield.”  The Stourtons, so the “Peerages” say, were “of considerable rank before the Conquest, and dictated their own terms to the Conqueror”; but, as Canon Jackson, the learned antiquary, truly points out, “of this there is no evidence.  The name is found, apparently for the first time, among Wiltshire landowners, in the reign of Edward I., when a Nicholas Stourton held one knight’s fee under the Lovells of Castle Cary.”

The Duke of Norfolk has a family tree of very stately growth, and can well afford to repudiate a good many of the ancestors provided for him by “Peerage” editors.  Certainly, if he ever read the following statement he must have smiled aloud: 

“The Duke’s proudest boast is that his name of Howard is merely that of an ancestor, Hereward the Wake, whose representative, Sir Hereward Wake, is still in Northamptonshire.”

As a matter of fact, his Grace’s earliest known ancestor was Sir William Howard, “who was a grown man and on the bench in 1293, whose real pedigree is very obscure”; and who, no doubt, would have laughed as heartily as his descendant of to-day at his imaginary derivation from the Conqueror’s stubborn foe of the fens, Hereward the Wake.

In the Fitzwilliam pedigree we encounter another nebulous knight of the Conqueror.  “The Fitzwilliams,” we are informed, “date so far back that their record is lost, but Sir William, a knight of the Conqueror’s day, married the daughter of Sir John Elmley,” and so on; and further, that at Milton Hall, Peterborough, one may actually look on an antique scarf which “was presented to a direct ancestor of the Fitzwilliams by William the Conqueror.”  The most skilled of our genealogists have sought in vain for an authentic trace of this gallant knight of Conquest days; and Professor Freeman does not hesitate to dismiss the story of his existence as “pure fable.”  But if Sir William of Normandy must fall from the family tree, his place is most creditably taken by Godric, a Saxon Thane, who, as a forefather, is at least as respectable as any Norman warrior in William’s train.