This surname is derived from a nickname. 'a lover, a sweetheart, a darling'; Old French druerie.

'Or beare the name of Druerie.'

Chaucer, R. of R. 5064.

The virgin is described as 'Cristes drurie' in Arthour and Merlin (Halliwell).'It is as dereworthe (precious) a drury As deere God hymselven.': Vision of Piers Plowman.

Alice Druerie, Huntingdonshire, 1273. Hundred Rolls.

Nigel Drury, Yorkshire, ibid.

Thomas Drory, 1379: Poll Tax of Yorkshire.

Willelmus Drory, 1379: ibid.

Johannes Drury, 1379: ibid.

1629. Married — Thomas Errington and Jone Drewrye: St. James, Clerkenwell.

1662. — Francis Drury and Elizabeth Terry: ibid.

(Anglo-French-Teut.) Sweetheart, Darling. [Middle English Old French druerie, &c„ a love, darling; Provenç. drudaria; from O.H.Ger. drút, trút, a friend] It is as dereworthe a drury As deere God hymselven.—Piers Plowman, 633-4.

For certeynly no such beeste To be loved is not worthy, Or bere the name of druerie.—Chaucer, Rom. of the Rose, 5062-4.

You was our drowrie and our dayes darling.—Henryson, Mor. Fab. 19 (c. 1450); New English Dictionary

Mac an Druaidh This is anglicized Drury in Roscommon and Drew (q.v.) in Louth and Monaghan.

Drury is also an English name derived from an old French word meaning sweetheart. IF 305*

Mac an Druaidh This is anglicized Drury in Roscommon and Drew (q.v.) in Louth and Monaghan.

Drury is also an English name derived from an old French word meaning sweetheart. IF 305*

“Love-Token” in Old French.

(English) A sweetheart or lover.

Various speculative derivations have been assigned to this name. Like Drew or Drewett, it has been affiliated to Drogo. Again, druerie, in the language of Chaucer, signifies love or courtship: “Of bataille and of chevalrie, Of ladies love and druerie Anon I wol you tell.”

Camden says that it means, “in old English, a precious jewel;” and Fuller, following in his wake, tells us it is the Saxon word for a pearl. Blomfield is nearer the truth. “This family took the name of a village in Normandy, of no other name than Drury.” He should have said Rouvray, near Rouen. “Milo de Rouveray occurs 1180-95, Osbert de Rouvray 1198 (Magn. Rotul. Scaccarii Normanniæ). John de Rouverai in London and Middlesex 1189 (Rot. Pip.). In the thirteenth century the name had been abbreviated to Drury.”—The Norman People. The De Rouvrays, Sieurs de Buisson and De la Picaudière, the first in the “Election de Gisors,” and the second in that of Lisieux, were ennobled in 1667; and one of the family sat in the great Assembly of the Nobles in 1789. There is still a representative in the male line, M. de la Rouveraye de Sapandré, living at the Château de Lortier, near Lisieux (vide Nobiliaire de Normandie). Their arms are entirely different from those borne by the English Drurys; and with a variation in the tinctures, exactly those of the Maynards; for they give Azure a chevron between three sinister hands couped at the wrist Argent.

The Drurys were first seated at Thurston in Suffolk, “at which Place Sir John (the son of the first who came over), John his son, Henry his grandson, and John his great-grandson, lived many years.” Fourth in descent from this latter John were three brothers, Roger, Nicholas, and John, living in the latter half of the fourteenth century, from whom all the different branches of the family were derived. Sir Roger, the eldest, was the progenitor of the Drurys of Rougham; from Nicholas, the second, descended the Drurys of Ickworth, Hawstead, Besthorp, Riddlesworth, Egerley, &c.: and John was the ancestor of the Drurys of Wetherden, where he had his seat.

Of these the most distinguished, as well as the most numerous, were the descendants of Nicholas. He it was who first added to his arms the Cross Tau, The Tau, or crutch of St. Anthony, was borne by the monks of his Order. ever after borne by him and all his posterity, in memory of a pilgrimage he made to the Holy Land, after having fought under John of Gaunt in Spain. He left two sons: 1. Henry, of Ickworth, near Bury St. Edmunds, apparently in right of his grandmother, which was conveyed by his daughter Jane to Thomas Hervey in 1525, and is now the seat of her representative the Marquess of Bristol.

2. Sir Roger, of Hawstead, who died about 1495, and built a townhouse in Wych Street, called Drury Place, which gave its name to Drury Lane. He had three sons: John; William, seated at Besthorp in Norfolk, of whom came the Drurys of Besthorp; and Sir Robert, who succeeded him at Hawstead, and was one of the Privy Councillors of Henry VIII. In the next generation the family was again subdivided, for Sir Robert was the father, not only of Sir William, his heir at Hawstead, but of another Sir Robert, who was of Egerley in Buckinghamshire.

Let us first continue the Hawstead line. Sir William, styled by Camden “Vir genere et omni elegantia splendidus,” was killed in a duel about precedence with Sir John Burroughs while serving in France under Lord Willoughby in 1589. His successor, Sir Robert, who was knighted at the siege of Rouen in 1591, had only two daughters; Dorothy, who died in infancy, and Elizabeth, “the famous beauty and rich heiress, traditionally said to have been thought of as the intended bride of Henry Prince of Wales, eldest son of James I.” These ambitious projects were, however, to say the least, premature; for the poor girl died in 1610, when she was but fifteen—it is said of a box on the ear given to her by her father. She is represented on her monument in Hawstead Church as leaning on her elbow, with her cheek (was it the aggrieved cheek?) resting on her hand; and some lines in her epitaph, written by the learned Dr. Donne, whose early patron her father had been, seem to convey a covert allusion to her over-sensitiveness: “Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheek, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her body thought.”

Her two aunts, Frances, the wife of Sir C. Wray, and Elizabeth Countess of Exeter, divided her inheritance.

The posterity of Sir Robert Drury of Egerley was of longer continuance; and two of his younger sons, Sir William and Sir Drue, made their way gallantly in the world. Sir William, a good and resolute soldier, received the Garter from Queen Elizabeth, and was constantly engaged in her service. Fuller (alluding to the supposed signification of his name), likens him to “a pearl in preciousness, clear and hard, innocent and valiant, and therefore valued deservedly by his Queen and Country.

“His youth he spent in the French wars, his middle in Scotland, his old age in Ireland. He was Knight Marshal of Berwick, at what time the French had possessed themselves of the Castle of Edinburgh, in the Minority of King James. Queen Elizabeth employ’d this Sir William, with fifteen hundred men, to besiege the Castle, which Service he right worthily perform’d, reducing it within few days to the true Owner thereof. Drury was accused of having violated the terms of capitulation by delivering up the gallant Kirkaldy, who had only yielded his sword to him on the full assurance of safe-conduct, to the tender mercies of the Regent, who forthwith ordered him to be hung on the market place. But, according to Robertson, Morton insisted that as long as Kirkaldy and the other prisoners lived, his own life was not secure; “and Elizabeth, without regarding Drury’s honour or his promises in her name, gave them up to the Regent’s disposal.” Whoever was to blame, it is a very ugly story. “Anno 1575 he was appointed Lord President of Munster, whither he went with competent forces, and executed impartial Justice, in spite of the opposers thereof. For as the Sign of Leo immediately precedeth Virgo and Libra in the Zodiac; so no hope that Innocency will be protected, or Justice administered, in a barbarous Country, where power and strength do not first secure a Passage unto them. But the Earl of Desmond opposed this good President, forbidding him to enter the County of Kerry, as a Palatinate peculiarly appropriated to himself.

“Sir William, no whit terrified with the Earl’s threatening, entered Kerry with a competent train, and there dispensed justice to all persons, as occasion did require. Thus, with his seven score men, he forced his return through seven hundred of the Earl’s, who sought to surprise him. In the last year of his Life, he was made Lord Deputy of Ireland; and no doubt had performed much in his place, if not afflicted with sickness, the Fore-runner of his Death, at Waterford, 1598.” His heirs were two daughters.

His younger brother, Sir Drue, who reached the patriarchal age of 99, was Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, for some time Constable of the Tower, and joined in commission with Sir Amyas Paulet as Keeper of Mary Queen of Scots; both knights being, as Fuller tells us, “branded as Puritans.” He made two highly advantageous marriages, for his first wife, Elizabeth Calthorpe, was through her mother Amata Boleyn (Queen Anne’s aunt), the cousin of the Queen, and brought him Riddlesworth in Norfolk, where he built a house; while the second, Katherine Finch, was the heiress of Linstead in Kent. His son, Sir Drue II., was created a baronet in 1627, but the line failed with his great- grandson.

Of all these various ramifications, that spread over the Eastern Counties and reached into Buckinghamshire, two families, as far as I know, alone survive. One of them (as entered in the Visitation for Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1684) is traced back to the first Sir Roger who acquired Rougham, and died in 1405. His successor married Katherine Swinford, the daughter of Katherine Roet, afterwards Duchess of Lancaster, by her first husband; and from them descended (though Burke leaves an ominous blank of nearly two centuries in the pedigree) Richard Drury, citizen of London, obt. 1606, whose son settled in Huntingdonshire, on an estate of his wife’s. Their great- grandson, Thomas Drury of Overstone in Northamptonshire, received a baronetcy in 1739, but left no son to inherit it, though collateral branches remain. His two daughters were Mary Anne, Countess of Buckinghamshire, and Jocosa, Lady Brownlow.

The other family—the Drurys of Knightstone in Devonshire—descend from a younger son of Sir Robert Drury of Rougham, living in the reign of Elizabeth.

The founder of the family in England is mentioned in the Battel-Abbey Boll. He settled first at Thurston and subsequently at Rougham, co. Suffolk, and his descendants Continued in possession of that estate for about six hundred years. B.L.G.

A jewel.

Or De Roueray, from Rouvray, near Rouen. Milo de Rouvray occurs 1180-95, Osbert de Rouvray 1198 (Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae); John de Rouverai in London and Middlesex 1189 (Rot. Pip.). In the 13th century the name had been abbreviated to Drury. Adam D. of York, and William D. occur, and Sire Niel Drury was an Alderman of London 1312 (Palgr. Parl. Writs).

Drury, Drewry, or Drewery, is an ancient Lincolnshire name. As Drury, and occasionally as Drewery and Druery, it was established in this county and in the adjacent counties of York and Cambridge in the 13th century (H. R.). Drewry was the name of the mayors of Lincoln in 1543, 1754, and 1761 (St.). There were Drewrys in Leake in the reign of Charles I. (T.). The name is still established in Lincoln and Leake. Thomas Drewree was rector of Wroot in 1504 (Sto.) During the 17th century four or five of the mayors of Nottingham bore the name of Drury (Deering's "Nottingham"). There was an old and distinguished family of Drury, of Rougham and Hawsted, Suffolk, in whose possession the family estate had continued for 600 years (L.).; this Suffolk family apparently gave rise to the Drurys of Besthorp, Norfolk, four centuries ago (Cullum's "Hawsted").