“from Beuron, near Mantes, Normandy, which seems to have been the appanage of a younger branch of the Tessons.” - The Norman People. Erneis de Buron appears in Domesday, as a great landowner in York and Lincoln; Ralph de Biron, at the same time, held a barony in Notts and Derby, and had his castle in the latter county. How they were related to each other is not positively known, but they were probably brothers; and it is from Ralph that the Barons Byron descend. His posterity remained seated at Horestan Castle for three generations, till Robert de Biron married the heiress of Clayton, and they removed into Lancashire. In 1540, Sir John Byron (nephew of another Sir John who had been knighted by Henry VII.’s own hand on the field of Bosworth) had a grant of Newstead Priory, where the family thenceforward took up their abode. In the civil wars of the following century, no less than seven brothers of the name were in arms for King Charles. The elder, Sir John, had already served in the wars of the Low Countries, and when the Royal standard was raised at Nottingham, brought to it a “good body of men with arms and ammunition,” and a considerable sum of money. He fought at Powick Bridge, Edgehill, and Roundway Down, where, charging at the head of his regiment, he put to rout Sir Arthur Hesilrigge’s far-famed “impenetrable”cuirassiers; and in 1643 was “for his courage and military conduct created Lord Byron of Rochdale in com. Lancaster,” with special remainder to all his “six valiant brothers.” Soon after, he was appointed Field-Marshal General of all His Majesty’s forces in the counties of Worcester, Salop, Chester, and North Wales; and held Chester gallantly during a long and severe siege, “keeping both town and garrison contented with cats and dogs, and those failing, but with one meal in three days”as long as any hope of relief remained. Many attempts were made to come to his aid, but none of them succeeded; and he had at length to surrender the place in 1645, on terms “the most honourable for himself and the whole garrison that were given in England, except those he afterwards gained at Carnarvon.” This was in the following year, when he was commanding in Conway, and stood a second but much briefer siege. Charles I. afterwards named him Governor to the Duke of York, and he died at Paris before the Restoration, leaving no children. The title passed to his next brother, Richard, “one of those valiant colonels in the fight of Edgehill”; and though the Byrons, in common with the rest of the Royalist nobility, had “suffered much for their loyalty, and lost all their fortunes, yet it pleased God so to bless the honest endeavours of the said Richard Lord Byron, that he repurchased part of their ancient inheritance, which he left to his posterity, with a laudable memory for great piety and charity.” It was to this Richard that his kinsman Colonel Hutchinson (the famous Parliament officer) wrote, when summoned to surrender Nottingham Castle: “He might consider there was, if nothing else, so much of a Biron’s blood in him, that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a task he had undertaken.’ Fourth in descent from him was George Gordon Byron, who succeeded as sixth Lord in 1798, and gave a lustre to his ancient name that had never yet belonged to it. It was, however, said of him, with some truth, that “he was prouder of being a descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of ‘Childe Harold’ and of 'Manfred.’”His father, Captain Byron, had been a wild and reckless prodigal, who first carried off the wife of Lord Carmarthen (see Arcy), and after her death married a Scottish heiress, Miss Gordon of Gight, whose fortune was so completely swallowed up by his debts that she was obliged to sell her whole estate to Lord Haddo only a year after their marriage. He died in 1791, leaving his widow and only son in bitter poverty, till the latter, when about ten years old, succeeded his great-uncle in the title and family property. Unfortunately, this great-uncle (the same Lord Byron who killed his neighbour and relative Mr. Chaworth in a duel: see Chaworth) was a man of wayward and violent temper, His grand-nephew and heir, the poet, says in one of his letters: “As to the Lord Byron who killed Mr. Chaworth in a duel, so far from retiring from the world, he made the tour of Europe, and was appointed Master of the Stag Hounds after that event, and did not give up society until his son had offended him by marrying in a manner contrary to his duty. So far from feeling any remorse for having killed Mr. Chaworth, who was a ‘spadassin,’ and celebrated for his quarrelsome disposition, he always kept the sword which he used on that occasion in his bedchamber, and there it still was when he died.” who “being at enmity with his son, resolved out of spite, that the estate should descend to him in as miserable a plight as he could possibly reduce it to, took no care of the mansion, and fell to lopping every tree he could lay his hands on.” The hated son died before his father, and the punishment intended for him devolved upon the future poet, who thus found his inheritance injured and despoiled. As he grew to manhood, the young lord’s own extravagance further burdened the impoverished estate; by the time he was of age, he already declared himself “ruined;”and a few years later, pressed by his creditors, he was reduced to sell his old family seat of Newstead. Though it was decayed and dilapidated through long neglect, he was both fond and proud of his home, and “it cost me,” he writes to Moore, “more than words to part with it.” There was an old prophecy of Mother Shipton’s, that “when a ship laden with ling should cross over Sherwood Forest, the Newstead estate would pass from the Byron family.” Among his other vagaries, the fifth Lord used to amuse himself with sham fights on the lake in front of his house, having erected two mimic forts and collected a little fleet of vessels, that attacked these forts, and were cannonaded by them in return. “The largest of these vessels had been built for him at some seaport on the eastern coast, and conveyed on wheels over the forest to Newstead. In Nottinghamshire, ‘ling’ is the term for heather, and in order to bear out Mother Shipton and spite the old lord, the country people, it is said, ran along by the side of the vessel, heaping it with heather all the way.” - Moore's Life. He endeavoured, as his father had done, to remedy his fortunes by a rich marriage; but it proved so unhappy that, at the end of a year, Lady Byron found herself obliged to return to the shelter of her father’s roof; and his pecuniary difficulties were so far from being relieved, that during this short time there had been nine or ten executions in his house. Not many months after, he bade farewell to England for ever, and ended his life abroad, leaving an only child who became Countess of Lovelace. The barony was inherited by a distant cousin, whose grandson now represents the family.

A Norman name: From the Domesday Book, de Burun. Biron; a local name