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By J. Horace Round, M.A. 





ERBYSHIRE can boast of having been the cradle 

 of two of our oldest extant houses — families whose 

 pedigrees from the days of the Conqueror are clear 

 and beyond dispute. To say this is to assert 

 that few in England can equal them, and none, perhaps, 

 surpass them, in proved antiquity of descent. But they can 

 claim more than this. The Gresleys of Drakelowe and the 

 Shirleys of Eatington are alike still living on lands held by 

 their Domesday ancestors when the Conqueror was King. 

 Is there in all England any other family that is able to establish 

 in the male line a connection so long as this ? I do not, of 

 course, say that there is not ; but I cannot remember a single 

 case in which it has yet been possible to prove absolutely 

 the fact. The obscurities of twelfth century genealogy are 

 almost invariably a bar. 



Both these families still bear the surnames they derived 

 from Derbyshire manors, and both were connected in the 

 Middle Ages with the public life of the county as sheriffs 

 and as knights of the shire. The ancestors of both, more- 

 over, were great knightly tenants of the house of Ferrers, Earls 

 of Derby, and are consequently found side by side in records 

 of the twelfth century. Indeed, in the great return of his 

 knights made by the Earl of Derby in 1166— the only return 

 entered under Derbyshire, and one of extraordinary value for 

 the feudal history of the county— the first two entries are 



