By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson } F.S.A. 



243 



is distinctly stated in his great Foundation deed : " de qua villa 

 traxit originem (from which place he derived his birth). 1 There 

 is a tradition that he beg*an life only as a poor boy, and that having 

 no surname, he adopted for one the name of his native parish. It 

 was a very common custom, especially in that century, for ecclesiastics 

 to be called after their birth-place. Oat of the first hundred names 

 in the <e Wiltshire Institutions 3> (which is a transcript from the 

 Diocesan registers of Salisbury), between the years 1297 — 1301, no 

 less than eighty are designated, chiefly after Wiltshire towns or 

 villages, as William de Laving\,jn, Adam de Cumbe, Richard de 

 Cannings, &c. It was also the case that established surnames were 

 sometimes capriciously relinquished in favour of names descriptive 

 of residence, as conveying a notion of greater importance. 2 If 

 William of Edingdon really had been the "poor boy " of the tradition, 

 so much the more honour both to himself and the times in which he 

 lived : and if he was an anonymous poor boy, what better could he 

 do than borrow the name of his birth-place? But there is good 

 reason for believing the tradition of his very humble origin to be 

 inaccurate. One of the deeds in the Edingdon chartulary certainly 

 mentions without any surname both his father and mother, cc Roger 

 and A vise/' and "his brother John." But this brother John is 

 shewn by the evidence of documents (as will appear presently) to 

 have been a knight, and moreover, the very person mentioned 

 above as a large landowner holding under Romsey Abbey, in the 

 Manor of Edingdon. This knight was succeeded in 1361 by a 

 son of the same Christian name, also a knight, and nephew to 

 William, then Bishop. So that, instead of being a penniless 

 lad, the Bishop seems to have begun life as the younger son in a 

 good established family, whose name was the same as that of their 

 parish. Further, it will be shewn, by the aid of documents, that a 

 very large part of the estate with which, when Bishop, he endowed 

 the Monastery, was the identical land held by his brother, the elder 



1 Dugdale, New Monasticon, vol. vi., 536. See infra, p. 252. 

 2 Frost (History of Kingston on Hull, Co. York, p. 16, note) mentions one 

 James, son of Adam and Agnes Helleward, who preferred to go through the 

 world as " James de Kingston." 



