egister of that parish in my possession, on the
17th day of July, 1690; and was twenty-five years old on his arrival in
the colony. Wills of wealthy persons, which are still preserved in his
handwriting, attest his early employment; and his name soon appears in
the records of Accomack, on one or the other side of every case in
court. Within the precincts of Lymington church, whose antique tower and
rude structure, typifying in the graphic picture struck off by the
Camden society what the old church at Jamestown probably was, may be
seen the tomb of a Tazewell, who died in 1706, on which is engraved the
coat of arms of the family,--a lion rampant, bearing a helmet with a
vizor closed on his back; an escutcheon, which is evidently of Norman
origin, and won by some daring feat of arms, and which could only have
been held by one of the conquering race. A wing of the present
manor-house of Lymington, built by James Tazewell, the father of
William, who died in 1683, is still standing.

The orthography of Tazewell, like that of the earlier Norman names which
were forced to float for centuries on the breath of the unpolished
Anglo-Saxon, has been spelt at various times in various ways by members
of the same family, and in various ways in the same writing; as the name
of Shakspeare, though a plain Anglo-Saxon name, was spelt in four
different ways in his will. Thus, in the parish register of Buckland
Newton, in the county of Dorset, the name is spelt in four different
ways; and one of the spellings, which is still popular in England, is
Tanswell, and opens up to us the true original of the name in
Tankersville, the name of one of the knights who came over with William
the Norman, and whose name is inscribed on the roll of Battle Abbey. The
process was evidently Tankersville, which, contracted, and marked by the
apostrophe, became Tan'sville; and, as the Norman blood became, in the
course of centuries, more intimately commingled with the ruder but
steadier Anglo-Saxon stream, the Norman _ville_ gave way to the Saxon
_well_, and Tan'sville took the form of Tanswell; and Tanswell and
Tazewell, variously spelt, have been used indifferently by father and
son of the same family for more than three hundred years, and are so
used at the present day.[1] The late Mr. Tazewell thought that his name
was originally spelt Tazouille, and that the ancestor emigrated from
France to England before the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and I
lean