heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

THE EURES.
135
According to the pedigree contained among the "Additional pedi-
"grees" at the end of Glover's Visitation of Yorkshire, 1575, edited by Joseph
Foster, and for which he says he is indebted to John H. Matthews, Esq.,
of Lincolnshire, the worthy knight seems to have had, even in those ancient
days, a distinguished lineage and illustrious family history indeed, we must
;
go back to the time of the Roman occupation, when the hill on which the
town of Malton now stands, and which is the extreme end of a spur of the
Yorkshire wolds, was surrounded by a belt
of low marsh skirting
Derwent, a totally impassable morass for many miles, except
at this point,
the river
where there was a long, but easy ford. To command this, a Roman
station was established at the junction of the great roads running to
Whitby, Flamborough, Londesborough, and York. During the Heptarchy
it became the royal villa of the Kings of Northumbria and here Edwin
probably lived. The lords of it were Torchil, and Siward, Earl of Northumberland,
the mighty warrior who overthrew Macbeth, and eventually
(dying peacefully, clad in armour, on his bed) was buried in St. Olave's
Minster, York, which he . had founded.
At the Conquest it was held by Gilbert Tyson,
who fell at the battle of Hastings, fighting under the
Anglo-Saxon banner, and was afterwards granted to
his son William, whose only daughter carried it in
marriage to Ivo de Vesci, who built a castle here.
Their only daughter, Beatrix, married Eustace Fitz-
John, son of John Monoculus, lord of Knaresborough,
the younger son of Eustace de Burgh, a noble Norman,
whose arms were quarterly or and gules.
Fitzjohn sided with Henry I. and held the castle against Stephen
indeed, commanded a division of the Scotch army against him at the
battle of the Standard.
" However, on the accession of Stephen, he was
" received into favour, and founded and endowed the priory of St. Mary's,
" Malton, committing
it to the charge of the canons of the order of Sem-
" pringham," whose superior, Gilbert, had established the order of the
Premonstratensians or Gilbertines, a mixed community of men and women,
of which eventually there were as many as forty throughout England.
Little, however, now remains of it
except a portion of the nave of the
church, which has been lately beautifully restored (as
far as restoration is
possible) by the Rev. E. Pitman, under the direction of Mr. Temple Moore,
the architect.
Fitzjohn was slain in the wars against the Welsh, 1157. By his first
wife, Beatrix, daughter of Ivo de Vesci, Lord of Alnwick and Malton, he
had a son, William FitzEustace, Lord de Vesci in right of his mother, whose
great-granddaughter, Margery, married Gilbert De Aton in Pickering-lythe