Dear reader,
I’ve been casting far into the past, trying to read the Elfin scribble in documents such as the below, becoming frustrated with misspellings and potential mistakes and lack of documentation entirely. History recorded then erased, or smudged; handwriting befuddling to the modern eye; zooming in on my screen until all I see are squiggles. What exactly I’m searching for, I don’t know, except that the search itself grows addictive, exciting, even as it is at times stomach-turning.
(Not to even mention the frustration of names being spelled differently throughout time and sources. I get it, I do. But come on.)
Other than name-related frustration…
I’ve started a new job. I’ve begun to learn German, partially so I might have some hope of discovering my German ancestors, who, you may be pleased to learn, minded their own business in a small German town for most of forever. I picked up the guitar again after a decade-long break. All of this in pursuit of the same thing, which is finding my future. I’ve always been eager for the future, wanting to be older and older until I will myself out of existence. Perhaps this search for my past, which is not my own past but is the dirt from which my rib was formed, is about slowing that momentum towards the future. Taking my time.
Anyway, my life aside, I hope you’re ready for a deep dive. While we last looked at Europe in the years after World War II, we’re now heading back, back, much further back.
I’ve spent most of my time with the same line — this is the line that the Sylvesters of Shelter Island are in, that Isabella Milne in Philadelphia is in, that comes to my grandma and my mother and me. It’s the line that feels maternal, the line that brings me the strongest sense of connection. It is also the line that is, by far, the best-documented. Because history belongs to the victors, I know that for every Important Person Who Arrived On A Boat, there are hundreds of people whose lives go undocumented who never even saw the ocean. But it’s a privilege to be able to read and learn about these boat people, and so I will. In addition to that, it’s a burden, and one which has been an eye-opening journey for me. Perhaps the privilege lies in being able to share it with a growing number of you.
The farthest back I can find this line is, not so humbly, in the time of William the Conqueror. From a hefty volume containing the lineage of the L’Hommedieu family, compiled in 1942, when I suppose there was nothing better to do, I find the following about Thomas Brinley (Grizzelle Sylvester née Brinley’s father): he descends from the line of a Ralph (Rafe) de Brereton. (Ralph and Brereton both can be spelled pretty much any way you like as long as a few R’s and a B find their way in there.)
This far back it’s difficult to be sure of anything, but wherever possible I have cross-checked this information between tomes. To the best of what I can find, it seems that de Brereton was a member of the aristocracy in England at a time when it was very nice to be a rich French person in England. He was born roughly around 1057.
Let’s pull back briefly to take a look at another Frenchman, Gilbert de Venable, or Gilbert the Hunter. Gil was a Norman lord who participated in the Conquest in 1066. The de Venables had lots of land and wealth thanks to having taken it.
Back to the de Breretons: there seems to be reason to believe that the Breretons and the Venables were the same family. A de Brereton descendent in 1904 put forward this case convincingly. The two families’ coats of arms were similar (differing only in color and in what animal is depicted at the very top), and a de Brereton wanting to marry a de Venable apparently required permission from the Pope, or what we can think of as an “Incest Exception.” (Another explanation for needing their holy father’s approval could have been due to affinity [familial connection by marriage] rather than consanguinity [connection by blood].)
At any rate, the Breretons and the Venables were close for generations.
So Gilbert had all this land, and since Ralph was either friend or family, he wound up with Gilbert’s ‘third most valuable fief,’ Brereton. (At this point, Ralph de Venable perhaps changed his name to Ralph de Brereton.)
Brereton was part of the spoils of war, previously held by a free Saxon called Ulviet (about whom I can’t find much — Ulviet, where are you??). We shouldn’t spend much time crying over poor Ulviet, I think, as the centuries leading up to William the Conquerer’s landing in 1066 featured quite a lot of bloody land-grabbing and slave-holding.
Brereton is described in the Domesday Book, a survey of England completed in 1086. The land was four carucates (a medieval land unit — this described the area of land theoretically able to be farmed in a year by a team of 8 oxen; probably about 120 acres). There were two Neatheads (Cowkeepers), two villeins, and three serfs. There was “an acre of meadow, a wood one league (3 miles) long and half as broad, and a mill of the value of twelve pence.”
The Normans did not bring the first violence to the British Isles; it was a surprisingly contested place considering its dreariness. The history of people here is a long, long history. Stone tools and footprints found in Norfolk have shown that people were in England starting about 900,000 years ago, and there were many waves of people who came and went. The remains of a man from the Paleolithic era were found in Wales — this is evidence of the first modern humans in Britain. But the culture of that man, and of many before and after him, are completely lost; England has only been continually occupied from around 9,000 BC.
In 1995, material from a 10,000-year-old body found in the caves of Cheddar Gorge, known now as “Cheddar Man,”1 was linked by mitochondrial DNA to a local man who lived in the area. They belonged to the same haplogroup, which is a genetic population who share a common ancestor. So certain people in England have ancestors who have been there for a very, very long time. But that doesn’t mean that migration and movement stopped with Cheddar Man — the story of England and its colonies is a story of movement.
And with movement comes its friend — violence.
The Bronze Age English left behind weapons everywhere, along with harnesses for horses and chariots. Think Troy; the middle and late Bronze Age people were a warrior society where leaders engaged each other in war and collected tribute from their subjects in the form of food. Regional divisions were strong. There was hierarchy, there were slaves, there were chieftains. There were raids and wars and conflict. There was also trade, alliance, kinship, religion—
And then there were the Romans. They invaded the land, which was held by fifteen large tribes under the control of kings. At this point, there were an estimated 2 million people there, and it was a wealthy country, hence the Romans’ interest in having it. “The population is very large,” said Julius Caesar, “their homesteads thick on the ground… and the cattle numerous.” In 55 BC, the Romans began their process of takeover, though after the first round of ‘expeditions’ there was nothing until Emperor Claudius said okay, let’s actually do this, in AD 43. Over the course of many decades, the Romans took over the rest of the country with lots of fighting, burning, and losses on both sides. The Romans remained for 350 years.
After the Romans came the Anglo-Saxons, Germanic people who introduced Old English (called New English at the time2) which quickly took over as the vernacular. But the Anglo-Saxons’ settlement was not in itself calm nor peaceful. Sure, some of it looked a bit more like moving in, a peaceful process where you load up a UHaul and bring your kids. But there were battles, too, before the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were settled — though settled may not be quite the right word. For hundreds of years, there were frequent Viking raids, warring kingdoms, and Norsemen and Danes who came in and settled in various places and also took over for a bit. Christianity also arrived and settled quite forcefully, pushing Paganism to the side in favor of Popes and edicts and tithes.
So the England the Normans arrived in was a prosperous country, but not without its troubles. The first several years of William the Conqueror’s reign were marked with insurrection — and one should think, rightfully so, as William was hardly a kind invader. He summarily removed the English ruling class from power and replaced them with Normans, such as the Venables and the Breretons. He pillaged and razed and destroyed entire sections of the country in his quest for power.
Orderic Vitalis, a Benedictine monk writing in the 11th and 12th century largely about the Normans, wrote:
“And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed.”
The concept of the “Norman Yoke” would in later centuries be used to criticize the nobility of England, descendants of the Normans, and to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon kings had been more just, and that the time period before the Normans arrived had been a golden age in England.
Orderic Vitalis also said:
“[The Normans] arrogantly abused their authority and mercilessly slaughtered the native people like the scourge of God smiting them for their sins.”
Familiar?
William also set up a more structured and comprehensive feudalism. The Anglo-Saxons had this, too, where the kings’ supporters received land in exchange for military service, these men being called thegns. Ealdormen ruled the counties and also fought in the military. A result of the powerful, land-holding elite also serving in the military? Many of them died at the Battle of Hastings, working partly to clear William’s path to redistribute their land.
The rural economy was based on the manorial system in which the Breretons played a privileged part. At Brereton manor, like at others across the country, there were serfs and villeins who worked the land and received, in return, some of their own. (Of course, the king was the one who ‘owned’ all of the land, a concept which William took quite seriously and personally. He introduced “Forest Law,” which meant that the woodlands that covered much of England were now to be used as the hunting grounds for royalty. This was not great news for the people who might have been interested in eating or using the resources of those woods for themselves, as they had been able to do previously.)
We know from the Domesday Book that Brereton manor had serfs and villeins present. There is not much notable difference between the two; villeins were the most common type of serf in the Middle Ages. Serfs lived and worked under restrictions that kept them from enjoying the freedom that ‘freemen’ possessed. In this time, approximately 85% of the population were peasants, and of them, only 10% were freemen, rent-paying tenants who enjoyed a certain level of independence. The rest, then, were serfs.
Now one thing we can say for the Normans is that they were opposed to slavery. William banned the slave trade and freed certain slaves, marking a shift from Anglo-Saxon England, where at one point it’s estimated that at least 10% of the population were slaves. We shouldn’t be too impressed with the Normans, though, as they had only recently abandoned the slave trade themselves, and they also mercilessly slaughtered massive quantities of the English in their takeover.
The other reason we might not feel impressed is because the system that was established and set into stone had certain similarities with slavery itself, though in key ways it was a much less cruel system.
The Normans didn’t invent serfdom, but they did increase their number over time, and they converted both farmers and slaves into serfs. So while enslaved people were bought and sold as individuals — the person being considered ‘property’ — serfs were legally bound to the land, which could be bought and sold itself. Serfs spent their time working the manor’s land producing cash crops for the lord to sell, and working their own land to produce food for themselves and their families. They could not leave, and they were passed from one landowner to the next through the will, via the land itself. They could not change their profession or sell or trade their property without their lord’s permission. They technically did not even have possessions. Surely some lords were kinder than others, but how much does this mean when one is tied to the land? A serf could gain freedom if they escaped from their manor to a city or borough and managed to live there undetected for a year; however, there are obvious drawbacks to this, as starting over somewhere new could be impossible, and the lord would likely be on the hunt.
So it was that six centuries before Grizzelle Sylvester established herself and the small enslaved family she brought with her on Shelter Island so that they could support the massive plantations of cash crops in the Caribbean, her ancestors, the Breretons, were gifted the spoils of war in the form of a manor with its own serfs to boot, who planted and harvested cash crops for their lord. Plus ça change.
Over the centuries, the Breretons kept the manor in the family and continued to be earls and barons and sirs and whatnot, rubbing elbows with those who claimed God favored them, AKA royalty. Those with Norman blood continued to be in a favorable position, though this positioning occasionally came at a grave price.
In 1536, Sir William Brereton, a member of King Henry VIII’s court, was accused by the king of committing adultery with his wife, Anne Boleyn. William and Anne were beheaded alongside several others, though now historians believe that they were innocent of their crime. Henry made it all up to the family by appointing another Brereton to fill the same position as the deceased, so it seems the anger wasn’t too deep and Henry probably just wanted an excuse to kill a wife. And so, less one head, the Breretons continued to bask in the warm light of wealth and power.
The branch I’m exploring did, unfortunately, disconnect before the beheading, when in 1200 Isolde de Brereton received from her father the lands of Brinley3 (or perhaps Brunlee). She married Gilbert de Stoke and the new Brinley family disappears for awhile before reappearing in the 17th century once again rubbing elbows with a king. Beheading is, again, involved in the story.
In the 17th century, as you may recall from a previous letter, the Brinleys were a relatively well-to-do family in England — Thomas Brinley, Grizzelle’s father, was auditor for King Charles I. I am morally obligated now to remind you what William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, said of Charles I: “[he] knows not how to be or be made great.” Something that, if said of me, would kill me on impact.
Anyway, Charles I’s reputation plummeted when he dissolved Congress in 1629. This led to great unrest and the English Civil War. Charles I would not escape with his head, but Thomas Brinley on the other hand left the city for a country house, from which he would then send his children to New England, where they would once again become invaders-turned-elite.
Of Charles I, Gerrard Winstanley, an English activist in the 17th century, wrote:
“Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressor, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake.”
Sources:
“The L’Hommedieu Family of Southold Long Island New York” Compiled by William Alexander L’Hommedieu and Patia Havens L’Hommedieu, Port Washington, NY, 1942
“The Breretons of Cheshire, 1100 to 1904 A.D.” by Robert Maitland Brereton
“Genealogical Gleanings in England” by Henry F Waters
“History of Cheshire, Vol. III.,” Northwich Hundred, p. 83
“The Norman Conquest didn’t change ordinary people’s lives very much,” Ars Technica
“Peasants and their role in rural life,” The British Library
You’d think we could have a nice little giggle about ‘Cheddar Man’ but we cannot, because in 2018 there was a facial reconstruction based on his skull and DNA; the reconstruction shows a dark-skinned, blue-eyed person, and the British got racist about it. As if all of our ancestors did not walk on two legs, first, in Africa.
this is a joke
The Brinleys have so far been a bit harder to pin down, but the website FabPedigree, “for hobbyists who want to trace their descent from ancient genealogies,” suggests that one William Brindley of Willenhall, born 1553, is the 10th great grandfather of our dear new king, Charles III. I will put a pin in this for now and pray to the beloved Christian God that it is not so.