(in Leland’s list, Boown) Two leagues south of Carentan, in a low and isolated situation, adjoining the Marshes of the Taute, are the two villages called the Bohons —the parishes of St Georges and St André-de-Bohon—that gave their name to this illustrious house. They belong to the arrondissement of St. Lo, in the Côtentin. The site of the castle, with its moat, are plainly visible near St André. Humphrey de Bohon founded a Benedictine Priory at St. Georges in 1092.—M. de Gerville.

“De Bohun le Vieil Onfrei,” who held the fief at the time of the Conquest, and was known as Humphrey with the Beard, “The practice of close shaving among the Normans, which caused the spies of Harold to report that the invading army was an army of priests, is further illustrated by the distinctions of ‘with the beard,’ or ‘with the whiskers,’ employed to identify particular members of a family.”—J. R. Planché. though said to have been near of kin to Duke William, was but slenderly rewarded for his prowess at Hastings. Wace speaks of him as among the foremost in the battle; yet all he received was the Norfolk manor of Talesford. It was the extraordinary succession of great alliances made by his descendants that gave the name its lustre, and wealth of accumulated dignities. His son, Humphrey Magnus, founded the fortunes of his family by his marriage with a great Wiltshire heiress, the daughter of Edward of Salisbury; and his grandson, Humphrey III., married the eldest of the three daughters of Milo of Gloucester, Earl of Hereford, Constable of England, and eventually the co-heir of her brother Mahel. She brought him as her dower, with twenty knight’s fees, the office of Lord High Constable, which “went with inheritance, and by the tenure of the manors of Haslefield, Newman, and Whitenhurst, But, according to Dugdale, Whitenhurst was the marriage portion of Maud de Mandeville, the wife of Henry de Bohun. See below. in Gloucestershire, by grand serjeancy.”—Duncumb's Hereford­shire. He was Seneschal to Henry I., and Sewer both in Normandy and England to the Empress Maud, in whose cause he fought and was taken prisoner at the battle of Winchester. His only son, Humphrey IV., whose wife was a Scottish princess named Margaret, sister of William the Lion, and widow of Conan le Petit, Earl of Brittany and Richmond, was Constable of England in his mother’s right, and according to the chartulary of Llanthony Abbey (their burial-place), succeeded to her Earldom: but in truth this was first granted to the next in succession, Henry de Bohun, by King John’s charter of 1199. This Earl of Hereford was one of the twenty-five great barons appointed at Runnimede to be the guardians of Magna Charta; and “the next ensuing year, the Barons raising fresh troubles, was by the procurement of the King, excommunicated by the Pope.”—Dugdale. He was one of the leaders of the rebellion against Henry III., and fell into the King’s hands at Lincoln. He died in 1220, on his voyage to the Holy Land, having married Maud, only daughter of Geoffrey Fitz Piers, Earl of Essex, who inherited from her brother, William de Mandeville, the great honour of Essex, and all its manifold possessions. With her, too, came their famous badge of the white swan, This was a favourite emblem in the days of chivalry. When the eldest son of Edward I., and a whole bevy of young nobles, were knighted with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey, two swans, covered with gold net-work and trappings, were brought to the altar; and the King, fixing his eyes upon them, solemnly swore “by the God of Heaven and the swans” that he would revenge himself on the Scots. Then turning to his sons and barons, he adjured them, should he die before he had fulfilled his vow, to carry his dead bones before them to Scotland, and never let them rest in the grave till his enemies were humbled to the dust. At the Canterbury tournament of 1349, Edward III. bore a white swan embroidered on his surcoat and displayed on his shield, with the legend: “Hay, hay, the wythe swan, By Godes soul I am thy man.”

“It was the first time,” says Ritson, “that one of our Anglo-Norman kings had used the vernacular English dialect in a motto.” betokening her descent from the mystic Knight of the Swan (see Toesni), and ever after borne by her posterity. It thus became the cognizance of Thomas of Woodstock, the husband of the eldest co-heiress of the Bohuns (hence called by Gower Vox clementis cygni), whose seal is diapered with ostrich feathers and swans. His Duchess Eleanor bequeaths to her son Humphrey “un psaultier, bien et richement enluminé, ove les claspes d’or enamailes ove cignes blank”; and when this good Duke, Lord Protector of Henry VI., was murdered in 1447, a poem of the time announces that “The Swanne is goon.” Henry IV., who married the other co-heiress, bore her silver swan, ducally gorged and chained Or, on his banner; and it is one of the badges, used by Henry V., that are carved on the cornice of his chantry in Westminster Abbey.

Humphrey V., Earl both of Hereford and Essex as the son of this illustrious heiress, officiated as Marshal of the King’s house at Henry III.’s marriage in 1236, and three years later was one of the nine godfathers of his eldest son. “The custody of the Marches of Wales was committed to him, and he acquired the truly honourable distinction of the Good Earl of Hereford from his zealous opposition to the arbitrary measures proposed by the King.”—Duncumb. Twice already he had protested against them; once in 1227, when he “demanded the restoration of the Charter of Liberties;” and again in 1253, “when that formal curse was denounced in Westminster Hall against the Violaters of Magna Charta, with Bell, Book, and Candle.”—Dugdale. When the Barons’ War broke out, he and his two sons were foremost in taking up arms against the King; and the eldest of them, Humphrey VI., was one of the chief commanders at Lewes, and again at the disastrous rout of Evesham, where, “it is said by some, that when he came near the place of fight, he withdrew himself.” Be this as it may, both he and his father were taken prisoners; and while the Earl was pardoned and restored within the year, the son died soon after in captivity at Beeston Castle in Cheshire, whither he had been carried. Faithful to the family tradition, he had taken to wife an heiress of the best blood in England, Eleanor de Braose, the daughter of the Lord of Brecknock, by Eva, one of the five co-heirs of William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke; and their son, Humphrey VII., inherited the Earldom at his grandfather’s death in 1275. He and Roger Bigod were the two bold Earls who, in 1296, when ordered out to take the command of the army in Gascony, declared they would go if the King went, but not else; for, as Lord High Constable and Earl Marshal of England, they were bound only to attend upon the Sovereign himself in war. To assert their privilege, “the two Earls put themselves in Arms; which being discerned, that business was prosecuted no further."—Dugdale.

The next heir, Humphrey VIII., achieved the crowning triumph in this long category of splendid alliances by marrying the King’s daughter, Elizabeth Plantagenet, widow of John, Earl of Holland. He followed his father-in-law to Scotland on five several occasions, and is “li Conestables Joefnes homes, riches et metables, Ki Quens estoit de Herefort of the Roll of Carlaverock; justly described as “the most distinguished nobleman in the kingdom.” Five years afterwards, he received from Edward I. a grant of the whole territory of Annandale, that had been wrested from Robert Bruce. During the next reign he was the determined antagonist of the King’s worthless favourites, actively opposed Piers Gaveston, and was present when he was beheaded near Warwick in 1314; then engaging with equal zeal against the younger Despencer, he joined the Earl of Lancaster in his unsuccessful revolt. He lost his life after the defeat at Boroughbridge, where, while endeavouring to cross the bridge, he was run through the body with a lance by a soldier that lurked underneath. He left five surviving sons; John, Humphrey, Edward, William, and Æneas; of whom the two elder each inherited the Earldoms. John held them only four years; Humphrey IX., who succeeded at twenty-four, died unmarried in 1361; Edward was already dead, leaving no issue; and the honours and heritage descended on William’s son, Humphrey X.

William de Bohun, “a right valiant and expert commander,” who had died the year preceding, was created Earl of Northampton when the Black Prince was created Duke of Cornwall in 1337, and received splendid grants from the Crown, including the castle and town of Stamford with the lordship of Grantham in Lincolnshire, Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, and Oakham in Rutlandshire. No man had more fairly earned the King’s favour. He served him well and faithfully through life, following step by step in the wake of his fortunes, and commended as an excellent soldier in an age when all alike competed for glory in the field. He was one of the Marshals of the army in Flanders in 1338; in the great sea-fight at Sluys in 1340; at “that famous Feast and Jousting, which the King made for love of the Countess of Salisbury” in the same year; his Lieute­nant and Captain-General in Brittany in 1342; among the chief leaders of the heroes of Cressy; twice commissioned to treat with the Scots, and Lord Warden of the Marches towards Scotland. His wife, Elizabeth, one of the co-heiresses of Giles, last Lord Badlesmere, was a great benefactress of the Church; and among numerous other gifts, bestowed on the house of the Black Friars in Ludgate (where she was buried) “a Cross made of the Wood of the very Cross of Our Saviour, which she usually carried about her, wherein was contained one of the Thorns of his Crown.”

Humphrey X. united the three Earldoms of Hereford, Essex, and North­ampton, “but these great honours were not long by him enjoyed”; for he died in his thirty-second year, the last survivor of his princely race. He had married the daughter of his guardian the Earl of Arundel, and left only two little girls to represent all the power, wealth and grandeur of the Bohuns. Both of them were matched with the kindred blood of Plantagenet. Eleanor, the eldest, married Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the sixth son of Edward III., to whom she brought the office of Lord High Constable, and the Lordships of Essex and Northampton. The second, Mary, became Queen of England. Her husband, Henry Earl of Derby, the son of John of Gaunt, was created Duke of Hereford in her honour two years before he ascended the throne as the first King of the House of Lancaster.

The Barons Bohun of Midhurst represented, in the female line, a younger son of “le viel Onfroy” of the Conquest, Richard de Méri, Sieur de Bohun, 1070-1113, whose daughter and heir carried his Norman barony to one Engelger, supposed to have been by birth an Angevin. Engelger’s daughter must have been the wife of Savaric Fitz Cana, for their eldest surviving son, Savaric Fitz Savaric, inherited the barony in 1180.

Savaric Fitz Cana was the son of Cana, daughter of Gelduin II., Lord of Chaumont sur-Loire, by her second husband, Ralph de Beaumont, Vicomte du Mans, whom she married about 1055. When the Honour of Arundel was forfeited to the Crown in 1102 by the outlawry of Robert de Belesme, some “rich manors lying on either bank of the Arun between Arundel and the sea,” were bestowed upon Savaric, to which Henry I., by a subsequent grant, added Easebourn, Midhurst, and Lynchmere. His eldest son died s. p., and the second, Savaric Fitz Savaric, became Baron of Bohun on the death of his uncle, Engelger II.; “On the death of Engelger de Bohun in 1180, Joscelin, Bishop of Salisbury, became the male heir of his family, but he and his son Reginald, who was then Bishop of Bath, had evidently waived their claims in favour of Savaric Fitz-Savaric, the next lay heir. The Barony of Bohun would at that date have few attractions for an invalid already meditating retirement to the cloister. In 1184 he resigned his Bishopric, and became a monk of the Cistercian Order, but died the same year.”— Edmund Chester Waters. but he again left no posterity, and the son of the third brother, Franco Fitz Gelduin, became the heir. He is best known as Franco de Bohun, the name which he adopted and transmitted to his descendants. His grandson and namesake, who obtained a share in the great Pembroke inheritance through his marriage with Sibyl, one of the seven daughters of William de Ferrars Earl of Derby, by his first wife, Sibyl de Mareschal, was summoned to Parliament in 1295 as one of the barons of realm. This writ of summons, was, however, never repeated either to his son or grandson, and it was not till 1354 that one was received by his great-grandson John, Lord Bohun of Midhurst. But neither his son John nor his descendants were ranked, as Dugdale relates, among the barons of the realm, thus showing, in Dugdale’s opinion, that a writ of summons was not then conceived to create an hereditary dignity. The said John de Bohun had a son Humphrey, whose son, another John, had issue two daughters his co-heirs, whereof Mary married David Owen, a natural son of Owen Tudor; and Ursula married Robert Southwell, but had not any issue.

“Sir David Owen, by Mary his wife, had Henry his eldest son, who was a great spendthrift, and sold the reversion of the manor of Cowdrey, co. Sussex, &c., after his father’s death, to Sir William Fitz William, for two thousand one hundred and ninety-three pounds, six shillings, and eight-pence.”—Banks.

BOHUN: Humphrey de Bohun came hither with the Conqueror, and was a tenant in capite in Norfolk and elsewhere. Domesd. From him sprang a great baronial race. The Norman habitat of the family appears to have been the village of Bohon in the arrondissement of St. Lo.

A Norman name: Bohon, a local name Domesday Book de Bohun.

Bohun: in Leland, Boown. Two villages near Carentan are St. Georges and St. Andre-de-Bohun. Humphrey de Bohun received the Manor of Talesford in Norfolk (Domesday). The Bohuns acquired the earldoms of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton. The name is still extant as Bone and Boone.