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.

The house of Fitzgerald is credited with an ancestor, one Dominus Otho,
"who is supposed to have been of the family of the Gherardini of
Florence. This noble passed over into Normandy, and thence, in 1057,
into England, where he became so great a favourite with Edward the
Confessor that he excited the jealousy of the Saxon Thanes." Dominus
Otho must t