This is one of the families that derived their descent from Bernard the Dane, Regent of Normandy, c. 940. Anguerrand or Errand de Harcourt was in the Conqueror’s army, and is said to have commanded the archers of Val de Ruel at the battle of Hastings; but he returned to his own country after the new king’s coronation; and it was his younger brother Robert, who had accompanied him to England, that was the ancestor of this illustrious house. This Robert who was surnamed Le Fort, and built the castle of Harcourt in Normandy, was the father of seven sons, of whom the first born, William, having taken part with Henry I. against Robert Curthose, was rewarded with large estates in England, which he bequeathed to his second son Ivo, who became permanently settled in this country. The elder brother remained in France, where he was the progenitor of a long list of great houses. From him descended Jean d’Harcourt, Vicomte de Châtelherault, in whose favour the barony of Harcourt was erected into a Comté by Philip de Valois in 1338: the Harcourts, Barons Bonestable and Montgomery; the Harcourts, Barons d’Ollande; the Harcourts, Counts of Harcourt and Aumale, the Marquises of Montmorency 1578, and Pierre d’Harcourt, Baron de Beuvron, Beauffou, etc., “in recompense of whose services the baronies of La Motte, Mery, Cleville, and Vareville were by letters mandatory of Henry IV. in 1593 erected into a marquisate called La Motte Harcourt” This Pierre was the ancestor of Henri d’Harcourt, Marshal of France, whose two marquisates of Thury and La Motte Harcourt were united into a dukedom by Louis XIV. In spite of the many wars and revolutions that have since swept over France, the Ducs d’Harcourt retain, as I am informed, the Château d’Harcourt, near the old Norman stronghold that has borne their name for eight hundred years; and the adjacent village of Harcourt-Thury, which gives them one of their titles, recalls a memory of still more ancient date, their Scandinavian cri de guerre of Tur-aie (Thor aide).

The English Harcourts were seated at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, acquired through the heiress of the Camvilles, whose mother received it as a marriage gift from her cousin, Queen Adeliza of Brabant, the second wife of Henry I. Here the ruins of the castle they built attest its former magnificence, and their effigies, for many successive generations, remain in the parish church. One of these, that of Dame Margaret Harcourt, the wife of a Sir Richard who fought for the House of York in the wars of the Roses, and received the Garter from Edward IV., shows the Order worn immediately above the elbow of the left arm, with the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense. It is an almost unique instance of a woman’s effigy so decorated: There are only two other known examples; that of Constance Holland, wife of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, whose monument (now much defaced) is in St. Catherine’s Church, near the Tower of London; and that of Alice Chaucer, wife of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, in Ewelme Church, Oxfordshire. and shows that she belonged to the few rarely- honoured ladies who, in early times, were affiliated to the Order, They were “Ladies of the Fraternity of St. George and of the Society of the Garter,” for whom robes and hoods were duly provided, as they were for the knights.

"The Robes were lined with fur, but the hoods with scarlet, and both embroidered over with little Garters; and the proportion of cloth, fur, and Garters, were allowed according to their several degrees." --Sir Harris Nicolas. Dame Harcourt would receive "five ells of cloth and half an ell of scarlett, and one fur, consisting of two hundred bellies of pure miniver.” The first two ladies who wore "Saint George’s livere” were Isabel Plantagenet, the daughter of Edward III. and the wife of John, Sire de Coucy and Earl of Bedford, who received robes in 1375: and the Fair Maid of Kent, wife of the Black Prince, three years later. The two last were the little daughters of Henry VII., in 1495; Lady Margaret (afterwards Queen of Scotland), who was then not yet five years old; and Lady Elizabeth, only three. These tiny princesses must have been nearly buried under their burden of miniver. The Stanton-Harcourt line were far from emulating the blaze of titles of honour that surrounded their French cousins. Though they made great alliances, acquired great possessions, and did their duty manfully in the wars, no Harcourt was ever summoned as a baron in the feudal times; and it was not till the reign of Queen Anne that Sir Simon Harcourt, on being appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, received a peerage. He was created Baron Harcourt of Stanton- Harcourt in 1711: and declared Lord High Chancellor of England in the course of the following year. He was considered the ablest of the Tory lawyers; and when, in 1701, he impeached Lord Somers before the House of Lords, it was confidently predicted that he would one day sit in Somers’ chair. The next year he was appointed Solicitor General, and in 1707 Attorney General, but resigned with Harley in 1708. The preamble to his patent of peerage, previous to the usual panegyric of his virtues and abilities, makes honourable mention of the “warlike action” of his ancestors; more particularly of his grandfather Sir Simon, who raised the siege of Dublin in 1641, and, “fighting courageously against the Irish rebels, was the first Englishman that fell a sacrifice to their fury.”

Lord Harcourt retained the office of Lord Keeper till the accession of George I., who transferred the Great Seal to Lord Cowper. He received, however, a Viscountcy in 1721; and his grandson and successor was advanced in 1740 to an Earldom, with the second title of Viscount Harcourt of Nuneham- Courtenay, taken from his seat in Oxfordshire. All these honours expired with the third Earl in 1830, but the grand old Norman name did not perish with them. Counting from Bernard Le Danois, their first recorded ancestor in the far-off Scandinavian time, it had then been handed down through twenty-eight generations; nearly two more have since passed away, and it lives among us yet. Its present representative is the descendant of Philip Harcourt, a younger brother of the Lord Chancellor’s, who acquired through his wife Ankerwyke in Buckinghamshire, the present seat of the family.

Earl Harcourt’s estates passed through an heiress to the Vernons, with one notable exception. During the emigration of the French nobles at the close of the last century, the Marquis d’Harcourt and his family took refuge in England, and became intimate with Lord and Lady Harcourt Both parties were equally proud of the name they bore, no less than of the remote ancestry they had in common, and equally disposed to claim the tie of kindred, though it had to be sought for in the dim twilight of past ages, after a severance of seven hundred years. The French cousins spent much of their time at Nuneham, and the childless Earl grew so fond of the sons, that he proposed to leave his only unentailed estate, St. Leonards, near Windsor, to one of them, on condition that he was bred up as an Englishman and a member of the Church of England. The eldest boy was accordingly sent to Eton, educated as a Protestant, and, dropping his foreign title to become a plain English esquire, inherited St.Leonards under Lord Harcourt’s will But he left only daughters; and the estate, after some litigation (for a clause in the will, providing that it should never belong either to a Frenchman or a Roman Catholic, had first to be set aside), passed to his nephew in France, by whom it was sold.

A Norman name: Harcourt; a local name