(in Leland’s copy, Moubray) from the castle of Molbrai or Moubrai, near St. Lo, in the Côtentin. Dugdale, following Ordericus, often spells the name Molbrai. The Mowbrays used the mulberry as their rebus. Thos. Duke of Norfolk, at his famous duel with the Duke of Hereford at Coventry, rode "a horse barded with crimson velvet embroydered with Lions of silver and mulberry trees.” "It probably includes in its first syllable the name of the Scandinavian grantee c. 930, which is also preserved by Molbec, another place in the Côtentin.”—The Norman People. In the Dives Roll, however, it is given "Montbrai.” Three of this name - afterwards so illustrious in English history - Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, his brother Roger, and his nephew Robert, came over in the Conqueror’s train. “This Geffrey, being of a Noble Norman extraction, and more skilful in Arms than Divinity, knowing better to train up Soldiers, than to instruct his Clergy,” did good service at the battle of Hastings, though Ordericus does not tell us that he held any command in the army. In those days, when "the old Danish leaven was still at work,” no one thought the worse of a priest who could fight as well as pray; for churchmen held lay fees by military service, and bore arms without scruple. He had spent the vigil of St.Celict in exhorting and preparing the troops for the great issues of the morrow; and with Bishop Odo, “received confessions, and gave benedictions, and imposed penances on many.”—Wace. On Christmas Day following, he assisted at the coronation of the Conqueror in Westminster Abbey. When, according to ancient custom, the consent of the commons was asked before proceeding to the rite of consecration, the question, first put in English by Archbishop, Eldred, was repeated by him in French; and the voices which, at the Epiphany, had shouted, "Yea, yea, King Harold,” shouted at Christmas with equal apparent zeal, “Yea, yea, King William.”—Freeman. He received one of the largest grants of English lands, "an endless lust of lordships in Somerset,” besides many in other counties,—two hundred and eighty manors in all; and dedicated his immense wealth to the building of Coutances Cathedral. In 1069 he marched against the Western insurgents and raised the siege of Montacute; and three years later presided, as Justiciary of England, at the Kentish Scirgemót held on Penendon Heath to decide the suit between Bishop Odo and Lanfranc. He was in the successful campaign against Ralph Earl of Norfolk: and appointed Earl of Northumberland; but he soon relinquished the ungrateful task of ruling that disaffected and turbulent province to his nephew Robert, who, on his death in 1093, became heir to all his temporal possessions.

Robert, Earl of Northumberland, was the son of the “Sire de Moubrai” mentioned by Wace at Hastings, Roger de Moubray, of whom, singularly enough, there is no further trace in history. Robert’s portrait has been minutely painted by Ordericus. “He was a person of large stature, strong, black, hairy, bold, and subtile; of a stem countenance, few words, and so reserved, that he was seldom seen to smile; stout in arms, disdainful to his equals, and so haughty-minded, that he thought it below him to obey his superiors.” No description could surely less enlist our sympathies; and yet it is impossible to read of his horrible fate unmoved. He had successfully governed Northumberland during several years, and had taken prisoner at Alnwick the Scottish King who invaded his territory, when, in an evil hour, he, with the Earl of Eu and others—for some variously explained cause—rose in arms against William Rufus. He was sum­moned to court to answer for his conduct; but “being not a little puft up with pride, in regard he had not long before subdued Malcolme, he scorned to obey the King’s commands.” William at once took the field in person, and marching into Northumberland, besieged and reduced Newcastle-on-Tyne, and took Tynemouth by storm. “In 1090, Earl Mowbray re-founded Tynemouth Priory, and filled it with Black Canons; and out of enmity to the Bishop of Durham, made it a cell of St. Albans, in Hertfordshire. In his unsuccessful conspiracy to dethrone William Rufus, he converted the place into a fortress, which after a siege of two months was taken by storm.”—Mackenzie's Northumberland. Both the Earl and the Earl’s brother were in the fortress, but the latter only was captured, for the Earl escaped to Bamborough Castle, then considered impregnable, and held by one of his kinsmen, John Morrel (see p. 305). The King, pursuing him, beleaguered the place; and Mowbray, feeling himself insecure, again shifted his quarters, and getting out of the Castle by night with thirty of his followers, took sanctuary in his own collegiate church of Tynemouth. But he was dragged away from the very steps of the altar, grievously wounded, and paraded in triumph before his castle gate, with the threat that, if it were not surrendered, his eyes should be then and there put out The gallant castellan, who had made a most obstinate defence, hereupon yielded up his trust; and the Earl’s eyes were spared. But they never saw the light again. He was thrust into the dungeon pit of Windsor Castle, and there, for thirty-four dreadful years, lived in the dumb darkness of a noisome vault, as if he were already in his grave. He was actually dead in the eye of the law; for his newly-wedded wife, Maud de Aquild, who had “had little joy of her marriage,” obtained the Pope’s license to marry again, and chose for her next husband Nigel de Albini, the founder of the great English house. (See Albeny.) Nigel’s eldest son Roger, who by King Henry’s desire bore the name of Moubray, was “the infant Earl of Northumberland” described in 1138 at Northallerton, as placed, with the more aged of the barons, upon the car on which was erected the famous mast or standard that gave its name to the battle, and bore the cross with the consecrated host in a silver pyx, and the three banners of St. Peter, St.Wilfrid of Ripon, and St.John of Beverley. Yet there is no evidence that either he or his posterity ever held the Earldom, though he certified in 1165 to a great barony of 99 knight’s fees. He was not the famous soldier that his father had been; but he gained renown in the crusade under St.Louis in 1148, and assumed the cross a second time, when he and Guy de Lusignan were together captured by Saladin. He was redeemed by the Templars, to whom he had been a great benefactor; so great, in fact, that they covenanted to protect, release, and serve him and his heirs for ever, and to make them partakers of all their prayers and penances. On his journey home, “finding a fierce Dragon fighting with a Lion, he mortally wounded the Dragon; whereby he so gained the love of the King of Beasts, that he followed him into England, to his Castle at Hode.” This fable was evidently suggested by the silver lion on his shield— a bearing far too renowned both then and thereafter on the battle-field to need any such fanciful illustration: “For who, in fight or foray slack, Saw the blanch lion e’er fall back?” “The field, (saith he) in which the lion stands Is blood, and blood I offer to the hands Of daring foes; but never shall my flight Dye black my lion, which as yet is white.” Besides many grants of land to the Church, he founded two religious houses in Yorkshire; Byland Abbey, for the Cistercians, at the instance of the Lady Gundred, his mother, and Newburgh Priory. Part of his great possessions, the lands of Frontdeboef, conferred upon his father by William Rufus, were hotly contested by the Stutevilles; and the struggle was renewed in the time of his grandson William, and proved of long continuance. This William was one of the twenty-five illustrious conservators of Magna Charta. He was succeeded by two sons; of whom the last, Roger, married the eldest co-heiress of the Baron of Bedford, Maud de Beauchamp, and was the father of another Roger, summoned to parliament in 1295, and an active soldier in the Welsh and Gascon wars. The next Lord Mowbray served in Scotland from his boyhood, and was appointed Warden of the Marches, and Constable of Scarborough and Malton, by Edward II.

But in 1320 he joined the discontented nobles that rose in rebellion under the Earl of Lancaster, having, as the defrauded son-in-law of De Braose (see Vol. I., p. 54) a strong personal ground of quarrel with the Despensers; and after the rout at Borough Bridge, was taken prisoner and hung in chains at York. “So great,’ adds Dugdale, “was the indignation of the King and the Spencers, that they would not suffer his dead body to be taken down from the gallows.” His widow, the unhappy heiress of Gower, was committed to the Tower with her son; and so “grievously oppressed,” that she was forced to give up great part of her patrimony to the favourite. The son, however, John, third Lord Mowbray, was restored at the accession of Edward III., and is styled in his charters Dominus Insulæ de Haxiholme, et de Honoribus de Gowher et de Brember. He had for some time the charge of “the Gibraltar of Scotland,” Berwick-upon-Tweed; followed the King in his French campaigns with a train of forty men-at-arms and forty archers, married the King’s cousin Joan Plantagenet, daughter of Henry Earl of Lancaster, and died of the plague at York in 1360. His successor, endowed with u the high blood’s royalty” which came to him from the mother’s side, made the most splendid alliance in the kingdom; for his wife, Elizabeth Segrave, was the daughter and heir of Lord Segrave by Lady Margaret Plantagenet, daughter and eventually sole heiress of Thomas de Brotherton, the eldest son of Edward I. by his second marriage with Margaret of France, who was Earl of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England. With the honours of the Bigods, he had received the whole of their domains; and his granddaughter brought “a great inheritance in Lands with addition of much honour” to her husband. He did not long live to enjoy them; for, in 1367, when his eldest son was little more than four years old, he was attacked and slain by the Turks as he passed near Constantinople on his journey to the Holy Land. His young heir, John, fifth Lord Mowbray, received the Earldom of Nottingham on the day of Richard II.’s coronation in 1377, but dying the following year, unmarried, his only brother Thomas succeeded him, and in 1383 was created Earl of Nottingham, as he had been. Two years after­wards, in right of his descent from Thomas of Brotherton, he was constituted Earl Marshal of England.

The new Earl, who soon gave proof of rare power and energy, was looked upon with jealous hatred by the ignoble favourites that then had the King’s ear; most of all by the Duke of Ireland, who is said to have designed to take his life. He was one of the great lords that solicited the Duke’s dismissal from the Royal council, and banded themselves together against him at the battle of Radcote Bridge, where he was defeated and forced to fly the country. Mowbray was apparently none the less in favour with the King, who appointed him Captain of Calais, his Lieutenant in Picardy, Flanders, and Artois; then his Justiciary in Flintshire, Cheshire, and North Wales; and further, “acknowledging his just and hereditary title to bear for his Crest a golden Leopard, with a white Label; which of right did belong to the King’s eldest son (if he had any) granted to him and his heirs, authority to bear the golden Leopard for his Crest, with a Coronet of Silver, about his neck, instead of the Labell.” It is to this Shakespeare makes allusion: King Richard: Lions make leopards tame.

Norfolk: Yea, but not change their spots. He also confirmed the Earl Marshalship to him and his heirs male, directing that, “by reason of this their Office, they should bear a Golden Truncheon, enamelled with black at each end, having at the upper end of it the King’s arms graven thereon, and at the lower end their own Arms.” This was, according to Dugdale, in 1397. Yet, no later than the ensuing year, in the seeming height of his glory and success, his old enemies, “the Parasites by whom the King was governed,” caused him to be arrested for high treason, and prepared to impeach him in Parliament Finding himself in their power, and moved either by a pressing sense of danger or by flattering promises of future favour, he made terms with his captors, and joined them heart and hand. Thenceforward he cast in his lot with the men that he had all his life opposed and condemned, and acted with them unhesitatingly, even “in the destruction of that honourable person Richard Earl of Arundel, whose Daughter he had Married; and was one of the cheif that guarded him to his Execution. Nay it is said by some, that he bound up his Eyes, and beheaded him himself. And soon after that, had a principal hand in that execrable Murther of Thomas of Woodstock Duke of Gloucester (the King’s Uncle), causing him to be smothered with a Feather-bed at Calais.” —Dugdale. The recompence of his infamy followed on the instant He received not only all the lands of his unfortunate father-in-law, but the forfeited estates of Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick—two principalities—by a grant dated Sept 28, 1398; and the day following was created Duke of Norfolk; his grandmother Margaret Plantagenet, who was still alive, being at the same time created Duchess of Norfolk. But the Nemesis that dogs the steps of the “slippery greatness whose foundation is laid in blood” was close upon his heels. On the very day twelvemonth that he had caused the Duke of Gloucester to be murdered at Calais, he was banished the realm for ever.

The story of his quarrel with the Duke of Hereford, as told by Shakespeare in the opening chapter of his Richard II., is taken from Holinshed; Froissart gives it rather differently. But the facts remain the same. Hereford denounced him as a traitor in the presence of the King at the parliament held at Shrewsbury, and, flinging down his gage, declared:— “What I do speak, My body shall make good upon this earth, Or my divine soul answer it in heaven.”

Norfolk, retorting the accusation, gave the Duke the lie; then, raising the gauntlet in token that he accepted the challenge, threw down his own:— “I interchangeably hurl down my gage Upon this overweening traitor’s foot, To prove myself a loyal gentleman Even in the best blood chamber’d in his bosom.”

The King appointed that the trial by battle should be held at Coventry, upon Gosford Green, where the lists were accordingly set up. Holinshed’s minute account brings before us in “imaginary puissance” the splendid pageant that led to such momentous results. He tells us how the Duke of Aumerle, High Constable, and the Duke of Surrey, officiating as Earl Marshal, guarded the lists with “a great company apparelled in silk sendall embroidered with silver, every man having a tipped staff to keep order;" and how the King, with a retinue of more than 10,000 men in armour, entered the field “with great triumph,” attended by all the peers of the realm, and took his seat under a richly adorned canopy. The challenger, armed at all points, was the first to appear, mounted on a white courser barded with green and blue velvet, bearing the badges of the House of Lancaster, swans and antelopes in goldsmiths’ work; and proclaimed that he came to do his devoir against Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, “as a traitor untrue to God, the King, his realm, and me.” Then, swearing by the Holy Evangelists that his quarrel was just and true, he put down his visor, made a cross on his horse, and took his appointed place. The Duke of Norfolk, on a horse barded with crimson velvet embroidered with silver lions and mulberry trees, next made his oath before the Constable and Marshal, and “entered the field manfully, saying aloud, ‘God aid him that hath the right’ Each champion, dismounting, seated himself on a canopied chair of state, while the heralds proclaimed the challenge, and the Earl Marshal viewed their spears to see that they were of equal length. Then the traverses and chairs were removed, and the herald commanded them “on the King’s behalf to mount on horse back, and address themselves to the combat.” The Duke of Hereford was quickly horsed, and closed his beaver, and cast his spear into the rest, and when the trumpet sounded, set forwards courageously towards his enemy six or seven paces. The Duke of Norfolk was not fully set forward, when the King cast down his warder, and the heralds cried, “Ho, ho!” Then the King caused their spears to be taken from them, and commanded them to repair again to their chairs, where they remained two long hours, while the King and his council deliberately consulted “what order was best to be had in so weighty a cause.” The sentence finally pronounced was banishment from the realm. The Duke of Hereford was exiled for a term of ten years, and the Duke of Norfolk for life.

Hereford returned home the following year to reign as the first Lancastrian King of England; but Norfolk never saw his native land again. He died in 1399 "Venice, on his return from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, either of the pestilence, or, as others assert, of a broken heart “The shield placed over his remains in St. Mark’s Church remained in Venice when the Duke’s ashes were removed thence to England in the spring of the year 1533.”—Rawdon Browne.

He left by his wife, Lady Elizabeth Fitz Alan, two sons, and two daughters; Thomas, his successor; John; Isabel, married first to Henry, son of William Lord Grey of Groby, and secondly to James, sixth Lord Berkeley; and Margaret, the wife of Sir Robert Howard.

Thomas, the eldest son, who simply bore the title of Earl Marshal, was beheaded for conspiring against Henry IV. in 1405, and left no posterity. His brother John was restored as Duke of Norfolk by Henry VI. in 1424, and was succeeded in the title by a son and grandson, with whom this princely line expired. The last Duke married a daughter of the great Earl of Shrewsbury, and died in 1475, leaving a little child of two years old, Lady Anne Mowbray (sometimes styled Duchess of Norfolk), to inherit the immense estates—one great tract in Yorkshire is still known as the Vale of Mowbray—that had been handed down from the time of the Conquest Edward IV. at once marked the prize as his own. His baby son, Richard Duke of York, was invested with the titles and dignities of Lady Anne’s father, and in 1477, when both were about four years old, was married to Lady Anne herself. She did not long survive; for six years afterwards, when the little Prince was murdered in the Tower, he was already a widower.

The representation of the great house of Mowbray then reverted to the Berkeleys and Howards, as descendants of the two daughters of the first Duke, Isabel and Margaret. By her first husband, Lady Isabel had only a daughter, the heiress of Groby; but by Lord Berkeley she had two more daughters and four sons, of whom William, the eldest, died s. p. in 1492, having been successively created Viscount Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham, and Marquess of Berkeley; and Maurice, the next, eighth Lord Berkeley (the ancestor of the existing family), divided the great Mowbray inheritance with the second Duke of Norfolk in 1499. Lady Margaret was the mother of “Jock of Norfolk,”

“the true knight to whom no costly grave Can give due homage,”

who died fighting for Richard III. on the field of Bosworth, and was the first of fifteen successive Dukes of his name and blood, who have been Earls Marshal of England in her right.

The two thirteenth-century baronies of Mowbray and Segrave remained in abeyance between the descendants of these two great heiresses, till Henry Howard, father of the fifth Duke, was summoned to parliament as Baron Mowbray in 1639. Then again the direct line failed with the eleventh Duke; and in 1777 they once more lapsed between his two nieces Winifred Lady Stourton, and Anne Lady Petre, continuing dormant for more than a century. They are now vested in the nineteenth Lord Stourton.

A very ancient offset of the English Mowbrays still bears the name in Fife- shire. Nigel de Mowbray, the grandson of Nigel de Albini, had a younger son named Robert; “Of which Robert,” says Dugdale, “I finde that he took to wife a Countess in Scotland, who had a faire Inheritance there; from whom descend the Mowbrays of that Kingdom.” It was, however, not Robert, but Nigel’s second son, Philip, that came to Scotland, presumably on a visit to his kinswoman Ermengarde de Beaumont, the Queen of William the Lion; and married Galiena, the daughter of the potent Earl of Dunbar. Though not a “Countess,” she brought him great possessions; amongst them the baronies of Inverkeithing in Fife, and Barnbougle and Dunmanyne (Dalmeny) in West Lothian; and the office of Standard Bearer of Scotland, with the “hostilages thereunto belonging” (an obsolete word, signifying a house in every town where the King resided). He built his castle at Barnbougle, a rocky promontory on the S. side of the Forth, so named from some forgotten battle (in the Gaelic Bar-na-buai-gall, the point of the victory of Strangers) where fell a Celtic chief whose cairn remains hard by. His grandson Galfrid had a writ of military summons as an English Baron in 1287, though he was conspicuous among the Magnates Scotia 1292-94, and one of the nominees of John Baliol. He married a daughter of the Red Comyn, and had four sons; William; John, the handsomest man in Scotland— “In all Scotland was nowcht than As this Jhon so fayre a man,”

(says Wynton's Chronicle); Roger, and Philip. All the three eldest died s. p. Roger, though he was Standard Bearer to the Bruce, and received the augmentation of a golden crown to his blanch lion for his services at Bannockburn, entered into a conspiracy against his sovereign in 1320, and was sentenced to death and forfeiture as a traitor. His last brother, Sir Philip, a gallant soldier, who unhorsed the King himself at the battle of Methven, had been killed at Dundalk two years before, leaving a son John, and a daughter of his own name. Sir John also fell in battle, in the service of Edward Baliol; and Philippa his sister, through the interest of her powerful relatives, received back her uncle Roger’s forfeited baronies in 1346. Three kinsmen, Alexander, Galfrid, and William de Moubray, vainly preferred their claims as heirs-male. She married a foreign knight, Sir Bertold de Loen, and from her only son David, who bore her name, and married Lady Janet Stewart, a daughter of the Regent Duke of Albany, the present family descends. The principal line, seated at Bambougle, ended with another heiress One of her descendants—who again all took the name of Moubray—sold the three baronies of Inverkeithing, Bambougle, and Dalmeny in 1615 to the first Earl of Haddington. They were afterwards acquired by the ancestor of the Earls of Rosebery. in 1519, and the representation of the house passed to her great-uncle, William Moubray of Cockairny in Fife, with whose posterity it remains.

A Norman name: Moutbray; a local name Maubray, local name, Belgium.