The English abbreviation of De Hauterive, or De Alta Ripa, from Hauterive, Normandy. “A barony possessed by a branch of the Paganels.” —The Norman People. The old Norman form of this name was De Hault Rey. In the time of Henry II. Josceline de Louvain, the brother of “Queen Adeliza of Arundel,” and the founder of the great house of Percy, granted lands at Heringham (now Hardham) in Sussex either to William de Alta Ripa or to his father, whose name is variously given as Robert or John. They were among the principal tenants of the Honour of Petworth, and though they likewise held land in Lincolnshire, adopted as their coat the five fusils of the Percies, with a change of tincture. William was a devout man, who bestowed much of his substance on the Church. Some time before 1185, he founded a Cistercian nunnery at Goxwell in Lincolnshire, and probably at the same date (the original charter was burned) a Priory of Black Canons of St. Augustine at Hardham, of which “some of the original buildings may still be traced, although now applied to the purposes of a farmhouse.”—Dallaway's Sussex. The elder line of his descendants ended in 1301 with another Sir William, whose granddaughter and sole heiress, Eva, married Sir Edward St. John; but representatives of a younger branch remained till 1758. They were seated at Moorhouse, near Petworth, acquired in the fifteenth century by Edward Dawtrey through his wife Isabella Wood, the heiress of her uncle John, Treasurer of England under Richard II. “Their old mansion, built round a court with an arched gateway in the centre, was in great part taken down in 1763. A large chamber remained, having a stuccoed ceiling with the crests of Dawtrey, and their escocheon of arms, with the date 1580.”—Ibid. It was there that Leland visited Sir Henry Dawtrey, and received—but evidently did not credit—the following account of his genealogy: “Dawtery told me that there were three Women or Sisters that had division of the Landes of the Honour of Petworth, and that they were thus married: to Percye, Dawterey, and Aske. So that thereupon I gather that al these three cam owte of the Northe Countre. Percy, Dawterey, and Aske, give the myllepykes” (fusils), “but with difference yn the fielde. The first partition hath not continued in al the aforesaid three names holy, but hath been disperkiled. Yet some likelihood is, that seing so much remained a late yn Percye’s hand, that Dawterey and Aske had never like partes, to have beene but as beneficiarii" (mesne-lords) “to Percye.”

The Dawtreys constantly appear on the roll of Sussex Sheriffs; and the two last of the name, Thomas and William, filled the same office in 1682 and 1736 in Essex, where they possessed Dodinghurst Park. William never married, and bequeathed his estate to Richard Luther, the son of his sister Sarah.

Anthony Dawtrey, a cadet of this house, migrated into Hampshire, where he settled at Worcot or Woodcote. “Sir John Dawtrey was Sheriff of Hants in 1516, and Sir Francis in 1548.”—Woodward's Hampshire.

Some descendants also continued in Lincolnshire, where the name took the form of Hawtrey. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, William de Alta Ripa, of Algerkirk in that county, married Catherine Chakers, a Buckinghamshire heiress, and settled on her estate there, called Chakers or Chequers. Tenth in descent from him was Sir William Hawtrey, the last of the line, who only left three daughters. An offshoot of this latter house, seated at Ryslip in Middlesex, ended with John Hawtrey in 1690.

Lastly, a flourishing family of Yorkshiremen, holding of the Percy Fee in Craven, bore the name of De Alta Ripa, and remained till the time of Henry VI. Their fortunes were founded by two-coheiresses, Anne and Matilda de Carleton, who about 1235 married two brothers, Sir Geoffrey and Sir Ralph de Alta Ripa. Sir Geoffrey purchased the latter’s share of Carleton and Lothersdene; and in the next generation Sir Thomas married Preciosa de Marton, who inherited Elslack from her grandfather, Ralph Darrel. Their son Geoffrey had license in 1318 “to kernel and embattle his house at Elslack-in-Craven, a hamlet dependent upon Broughton, “In the civil wars of the seventeenth century this village, situated on the highway, and almost at an equal distance between the hostile garrisons of Skipton and Thornton, had its full share of devastation and misery. It was a tradition at Broughton Hall, that a son of the family was shot on the lawn, and that the village had been so completely pillaged of common utensils that an old helmet travelled from house to house for the purpose of boiling broth and pottage.”—Whitaker's Craven. of which, as we find in Kirkby’s Inquest, he was joint-Lord. “Of the embattled house of the Alta Ripas (if they ever availed themselves of their license to embattle) there are now no appearances; a few lancet windows may possibly be of that period.”— Whitaker's Craven. The last heirs-male were Geoffrey’s grandsons, who each left a daughter; and the estate “went, as it came, through two females.”