Seated in Dorsetshire. “Hugh Maltravers witnessed Henry I.’s charter to Montacute, and 5 Stephen William Maltravers gave 1000 marks of silver and ₤100 for the widow and lands of Hugh de la Val during the term of fifteen years, and then to have the benefit of her dowry and marriage. John (temp. Hen. III.) was Custos of the King’s forests this side Trent, and claimed to have of every forester in the Forest of Savernake and elsewhere in the county of Wilts, at his death, his horse, saddle, and horn, bridle, sword, bow, and barbed arrows.” - Hutchins' Dorset. Their home was at Wellcombe, and several manors in the county, Lytchet Maltravers, Loders Maltravers, Worth Maltravers, as well as Stapleford Maltravers in Wiltshire, Henford Maltravers in Somersetshire, and Childrey Maltravers in Berkshire - testify to their possessions. Sir John Maltravers was Seneschal of the Household to Edward I., If this John, whom Dugdale represents to have been a rebel baron 1 Henry III., and to have died 24 Edward I., be one and the same person, he must have been a very aged man indeed; as those periods comprehend a space of eighty years.”— Banks. Nichols, more probably, gives two Sir John Maltravers, father and son. and another Sir John his son, who served in the Scottish wars, and was taken prisoner at the battle of Bannockburn, had summons to parliament as John Maltravers, sen., in 1327. He was the Lord Maltravers whose name in history is blackened by a celebrated crime. Edward II., after his deposition, had remained for some time in the custody of the Earl of Leicester, from whom, being found too lenient a gaoler, he was transferred to the keeping of Lord Berkeley and Lord Maltravers, and by them conveyed to Berkeley Castle. But as Lord Berkeley, again, “used more courtesie,” than was desired, he was replaced by a sterner spirit, Sir Thomas Gournay, who, with Maltravers, remained in charge of the King to the end. Being haunted by the fear of a rescue, they hurried their poor prisoner away secretly to Corfe Castle, and from thence to one strong place after another, keeping him constantly on the move, and always travelling by night, till, judging that all trace of him must be lost, they brought him back to Berkeley. Meanwhile the Earl of Kent was plotting to release his brother; and the Queen and the Bishop of Hereford wrote “sharp letters to his keepers, blaming them greatlie for that they dealt so gentlie with him, and kept him not streictlier;” and the Bishop added an enigmatical line, which by a change of punctuation might be made to bear two exactly opposite meanings; “Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonus est.”

They had little trouble in reading the riddle, and set themselves to their suggested task, trying various means of getting rid of the King, without leaving any marks of violence. At last they hit upon a fiendish device, and put him to death with such revolting cruelty that his shrieks and wails “moved many within the castell and the towne of Berkeley to compassion.”

The House of Lords, however, judged that Maltravers had not himself laid hands on the King, but employed Gournay and Ogle as his deputies; and although sentence of death was passed upon him in 1330 by the same parliament that condemned Edward’s assassins, it was for a different crime—the murder of the Earl of Kent. Maltravers had in the meantime made his escape to Germany, where he remained for many years. At last, in 1345, he voluntarily came and surrendered himself to Edward III., on his landing in Flanders; and “for his special services there, where he lost all his goods, and suffered great oppression,” obtained the King’s free permission to return to England and abide the decision of the next Parliament Six years later, he received a full pardon, with a fresh writ of summons; and in 1352 was appointed Governor of the Channel Islands. He founded a hospital in Guernsey, and died in 1364, five years after his only son John, who, like himself, had been summoned to parliament in the first year of the King’s reign. John, too, had a son who died early in life, and his two daughters became their grandfather’s heirs. Joan, the eldest, was twice married, but childless; and thus the barony devolved on Eleanor, the wife of John Fitz Alan (a younger son of the Earl of Arundel) Marshal of England in 1377, and summoned to parliament in the same year as Lord Maltravers. Their grandson succeeded as twelfth Earl of Arundel; and the two titles were jointly conveyed in 1580 to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, by Lady Mary Fitz Alan, sole heiress of the eighteenth Earl.

A younger branch, which survived the elder only by twenty years, descended from Robert, believed to have been an uncle of the elder Lord Maltravers. His grandson, Sir John, married a Dorsetshire heiress, Elizabeth Sifrewast, who brought him Hooke and Crowel, and was succeeded by another Sir John, whose two daughters inherited. One of them conveyed Hooke to Sir Humphrey Stafford.

The name occurs in England temp. Henry I., and it was doubtless introduced at the Norman Conquest, though the family were not ennobled until the reign of Edward II. It may be of local origin, and allusive to some "bad passage" or traject.

Montravers: not named in Domesday, but occurs in the reign of Henry I. The name has been made odious through John, Lord Maltravers, who murdered Edward II. with terrible cruelty. We have the name still as Maltravers.