William Levett (baron)

William Levett (also spelled William de Livet) (c. 1200 – c. 1270) was lord of the manor of the South Yorkshire village of Hooton Levitt, a village named in part for his ancestors, and became the owner of the patronage of Roche Abbey on marriage to the granddaughter of the Abbey's cofounder Richard FitzTurgis, a Norman baron who co-founded Roche with the great-nephew of one of England's most powerful Norman barons, Roger de Busli.^[1]

Roche Abbey, founded by Richard FitzTurgis, ancestor of the Levett family

Levett (also spelled de Livet, de Lyvet, Levet)^[2] was likely born in Hooton Levitt, the son of Nicholas de Lyvet, the lord of the manor.^[3] There were four Hootons in Yorkshire, the name meaning 'a farmstead on a spur of land,' from the Old Norse.

Hooton Levitt was a tiny village, bordering on Nottingham Forest. As late as 1379, it had only 30 taxpayers. What made it valuable were its quarries, and those controlled by the nearby Cistercian Abbey of Roche.^[4] It was these quarries, and others like them nearby, that would later supply the grinding stones necessary to the cutlery industry that emerged at nearby Sheffield, and that in the meantime supplied building material to much of the county.^[5]

The Lyvet family were lords of the manor of several South Yorkshire villages, and Hooton Levitt (sometimes spelled Hooton Levett) was given the manorial affix of the Anglo-Norman family who eventually came to own it.^[6] William Levett married Constantia, granddaughter of Richard FitzTurgis,^[7] founder of Roche Abbey and first to style himself 'de Wickersley' after his holding of the nearby village of Wickersley.^[8]

Following the marriage of William Levett and Constantia de Wickersley, the Levett family controlled the Abbey through its patronage. In today's world such abbeys seem an odd concept, but during the Middle Ages they controlled huge swaths of land. Roche Abbey's holdings—and it was only of middling rank—were enormous, sprawling across five counties: Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Lancashire.^[9]

Little is known of the life of William Levett, lord of the manor of Hooton Levitt and controller of Roche. He appears to have been a power in the region, having witnessed a charter in 1240 confirming a grant under William de Warenne, 5th Earl of Surrey, one of the most powerful Norman magnates, of land to the Kirklees nunnery. Levett (referred to as 'William de Livet') served as Steward to the Earl of Surrey.^[10] The Levett family's name is often connected with grants of land to the Abbey through the centuries.^[11] As lords of the manor of Hooton Levitt and principal patrons of Roche Abbey, the Levett family wielded considerable influence in the region.

But these were turbulent times, punctuated by the Black Death and the evolving feudal order, in which labor imbalances due to plague deaths gave the common laborer leverage against his lords. By the time of the tenure of Roche Abbey Abbot John de Aston (1356–1358) the Levett family seemed to have been stretched thin. In 1377 John Levett, son of William and likely grandson or great-grandson of the original William who gained control of the Abbey through marriage, sold control of Roche to a London merchant.^[12] The deed records Levett's words: "I, John Levet, son and heir of William Levet, of Hooton Levet, have given, granted, and by this present charter confirmed to Richard Barry, citizen and merchant of London, the whole of my estate, which I have or my ancestors have ever had in the foundation of the Abbey of Roche...."^[13]

At the height of the Abbey's power, during the tenure of the FitzTurgis family and their Levett descendants, Roche had some 80 monks within its walls. Quarrying its stone-rich meadows yielded large profits, as did income from its sprawling holdings,^[14] principally of grazing land but also within the city of York.^[15] The family's ties to this ecclesiastical bedrock during the turbulent Middle Ages likely provided some measure of spiritual comfort. All this passed out of the family's hands in 1377, perhaps because of financial mismanagement or the collapsing labor market due to the Black Death.

The family continued to remain in the area,^[16] moving on to nearby Normanton,^[17][18] where they were lords of the manor of the Newlands estate,^[19] and had longstanding ties to the Knights Hospitallers, and to High Melton,^[20] where many of the original charters of Roche, as well as the Chartulary of the St. John of Pontefract Abbey, eventually fell into the hands of Thomas Levett, a descendant who turned them over to eminent Yorkshire antiquarian Roger Dodsworth for study and publication. Most of the other records of Roche were lost when the chest in which they were kept in St Mary's Tower, York, was blasted by the Parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell during the siege of June 1644 in the English Civil War.^[21]

References

1. The foundation charters of Roche, Roche Abbey, The CisterciansUniversity of Sheffield, cistercians.shef.ac.uk
2. The Levetts of Yorkshire and those of Sussex were likely related. The Sussex family had longstanding ties to Lewes and Firle, both under control of the Earls Warenne, Earls of Surrey. As Yorkshire Levetts acted as witnesses for documents executed by the Earls of Surrey, and William de Livet was the steward of Wakefield for the 5th Earl, suggests that they may have followed their more powerful betters northward to Yorkshire. The Sussex Levetts and Yorkshire Levetts do not share coats-of-arms, but their arrival in Yorkshire likely predated the general use of heraldry.
3. Nicholas de Lyvet owned the manor at nearby Lupset and at Pickburn, which he held of William Earl Warenne, Earl of Surrey.
4. There were considerable quarrying lands in South Yorkshire, including those of the now-vanished village of Levitt Hagg, also named for the Levett family.
5. Also necessary to the eventual iron and steel industry was coal, also readily available nearby, and in later centuries quite a few coal lands were controlled by Levetts living at High Melton and elsewhere. These family holdings were largely squandered by two barrister brothers, Thomas Levett, High Sheriff of Rutland, and his brother John, a York barrister wielding a powerful appointment from the Archbishop of York. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two lawyers' lawsuits litter old Yorkshire records.
6. Maltby-Maltbie Family History, Dorothy Maltby Verrill, Birdsey Lucius Maltbie, Maltby Association, Newark, New Jersey, 1916
7. One of the earliest appearances of the FitzTurgis name is on a York charter of 1194 which refers to "Turgis, son of Turgis.' The name Turgis was probably Norman, but the origin is pure Viking. The name FitzTurgis means, when translated, son of (fils de in French) Thor (Turgis), the Old Norse god. Both FitzTurgis and de Busli have been described by one historian as 'two members of the lesser baronage.' The name FitzTurgis was later Anglicised to Sturges and its variants.
8. The de Wickersleys later moved to Broomhall, Sheffield, where the family name eventually died out, and the family holdings were carried by marriage into the family of Robert Swift, High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1599, from a family increasingly powerful in the region who came from Rotherham.
9. Roche Abbey lands: table of holdings, Roche Abbey, Sheffield University, cistercians.shef.ac.uk
10. Confirmation by William, Earl Warren (ca. 1240), of the grant by Reinerus Flandrensis, Muniments of Kirklees and Armytage Family, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, The National Archives, nationalarchives.gov.uk
11. Yorkshire: The History of Roche Abbey from Its Foundation to Its Dissolution, James D. Abeling, Printed by Robert White, Worksop, 1870
12. John Levett's sale of the patronage of Roche Abbey followed by 30 years the most profound ravages of the Black Death, from 1348–49, which altered irretrievably the agricultural landscape of England. Aside from conferring more power onto the scarcer peasant laborers, the Plague also converted many landlords to raising sheep instead of cereals. The Black Death almost certainly figured into Levett's sale of Roche – perhaps even taking the life of an intended heir.
13. Ibid.
14. Possessions of Roche Abbey, rotherhamweb.co.uk
15. Roche Abbey, Rotherhamweb.com
16. The Levetts seemed to feel some proprietary interest in the Abbey, or perhaps a sense of sour grapes that they had lost control. Although the family had disposed of their patronage of Roche Abbey by sale to a London merchant in the fourteenth century, a lawsuit was filed in 1534 by 'William Levet v. Henry, Abbot of Roche.' A photograph of the original court roll held in the O'Quinn Law Library at the University of Houston:
17. Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, Vol. I, Third Series, Joseph Jackson Howard (ed.), Mitchell and Hughes, London, 1896
18. Miscellanea Genealogic et Heraldica, Joseph Jackson Howard (ed.), Vol. I, Third Series, Mitchell and Hughes, London, 1896
19. "Newland Estate". Stanley History Online. Retrieved 22 January 2011.
20. A stained glass panel originally in the Great Chamber of the Old Hall at High Melton, now in St James' Church, High Melton show the Levett arms impaling Barnby, a prominent Yorkshire family.s:History of Cawthorne/Barnby Hall, Banks Hall, Manor House, &c. A stained glass panel recorded as being in the Old Hall, but now lost, showed the Levett arms impaling those of Reresby of Thrybergh, another family prominent in Yorkshire for centuries.
21. Roche Abbey: The Sources, University of Sheffield, cistercians.shef.ac.uk

External links

• Roche Abbey, The Cistercians, University of Sheffield, cistercians.shef.ac.uk
• Roche Abbey, Images of Roche Abbey, Maltby, Rotherham with a Google Earth map of Roche Abbey, Rotherhamweb
• Roche Abbey, The Heritage Trail, theheritagetrail.co.uk

Further reading

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman, Ballantine Books, New York, 1987, ISBN 978-0-345-34957-6
• The Black Death, Ada Elizabeth Levett, Adolphus Ballard, Reginald Vivian Lennard, Octagon Books, 1974, ISBN 978-0-374-96164-0

Further viewing

• Simon Schama's A History of Britain, Simon Schama, BBC, 2002