(French) see Picket in Dict.

This name is seven times registered in Domesday; though probably in more cases than one as a duplicate. Among the tenants-in-chief, we find: Picot, Hants, 50 b. Yorksh. 309 b.

Picot de Grentebrige, Cambr. 200.

As under-tenants: Picot, Surr. 35, 35 b. ter. 44 b. 50 b. 151 b. Heref 187. Cambr. 190,190 b. bis. 191,194 bis. 195,197 ter. 200,201 b. 202 passim. 202 b. Northampt. 227. Stafford. 247,255 b. Shropsh. 258 passim 258 b. ter. Yorksh. 309 b. passim. 310 b. 321 b. 322 b. 328 b. Essex, 67, 68.

Picot, homo Alani comitis, Yorksh. 310 b. Linc. 347 ter. (see Vol. 2, p. 208).

Picot, Rogerus, Chesh. 264 b.

Picot Vicecom. de Exesse, Cambr. 201 b.

Picotus, Sussex, 25. Cambr. 190 passim 193 b. Essex, 3 b.

Of these, the greatest landowner was Picot de Say, who held twenty-nine lordships in Shropshire alone, and whose real name was Robert de Say, Ficot or Picot having originally been a sobriquet. (See Say.) “Picot (called Miles to distinguish him from his suzerain) who held of him in his barony of Clun” (Eyton), was probably his relative. Another Picot held of Roger Fitz Corbet in Worthin; and his descendant Ralph Fitz Picot (living 1180) acquired Aston, now Aston-Pigot, in that vicinity, through his wife. Others of the name were contemporary with Ralph (Ibid.).

The Sussex Picots were benefactors of Battle Abbey. About the end of the twelfth century, Gilebert, the son of Fulk, the son of Warine, whose father had come over with the Conqueror, gave “a piece of land in a field E. of the windmill” (a windmill is still to be found on the same site); and “Adam his brother, William and Petronilla, children of Laurence; Adam the son of Adam; and Stephen (whose deed is dated 1304) son of the second Adam,” all occur in its chartulary. They appear to have been seated in its immediate neighbourhood.

“Picot de Grentebrige,” the other Domesday Baron, was Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, and had very large possessions in different counties. “Picot bore rule in Cambridge, and Eustace in Huntingdon; and the amount of wrong wrought at their hands seems to have far surpassed the ordinary measure of havoc. Among the other sins of Picot, the Survey charges him with depriving the burgesses of Cambridge of their common land. Yet he too appears as an ecclesiastical benefactor. A church and monastery of regular canons arose at his bidding in honour of St.Giles within the bounds of the old Camboritum, and strangely as the building has been disfigured in later times, some small relics of the work of the rapacious Sheriff still survive. The foundation for a Prior and six regular Canons was made in 1092 at the prayer of his wife Hugolina de Gernon.” - Freeman. The head of his Honour was at Brunne, where the moat of his castle, with a few other traces of the building, yet remain.

His son, Robert Fitz Picot, forfeited the barony by conspiring against Henry I., by whom it was granted to Pain Peverel, said to be the husband of Robert’s sister. Robert, we are told, had a younger brother, “Saher de Say, who is stated to have taken refuge in Scotland, and obtained grants from Alexander I., named after him Sayton. Alexander, his son, was a baron of Sayton and Winton (Chalmers, Cal.I.517; Douglas, Peerage). From him descended the Lords Seyton or Seton, Earls of Winton and Dunfermline, Viscounts Kingston, and (under the name of Gordon) Marquesses of Huntley and Dukes of Gordon.” - The Norman People. In the genealogy given by Burke, this Saer, the ancestor of one of the most illustrious houses in Scotland, is called the son of Dougall, whose father first assumed the name of Seyton in the time of Malcolm Canmore. But when I find that Dougall, living in the reigns of Edgar and Alexander I. (1098-1124) is married to a daughter of De Quinci, Earl of Winchester, Constable of Scotland, I may surely be permitted to doubt! Saier de Quinci received his Earldom from King John about 1210, and it was his second son, who, by marrying the Princess Helen, became in her right Constable of Scotland.

Saer’s descendant Christopher, the brother in-law of Robert Bruce, is distinctly stated to have been of English lineage, v. Ridpath’s Border History. Yet no family was ever more thoroughly Scottish in heart and deed, or suffered more cruelly from the English invasion. Christopher himself was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor in 1306 at Dumfries; his brother John underwent the same fate at Newcastle; and Sir Alexander Seton, Governor of Berwick in 1333, saw his son Thomas—”a comely and noble-looking youth”—hanged before his own eyes at the gates of the town! But it is with Picot, or Pigot, that we have here to do. Though many families have borne and still bear the name (twenty-three coats of arms are assigned to it in Burke’s Armoury), one only of them can trace a descent from a Domesday tenant This was Roger Picot, tenant in fee of Broxton, co. Chester, in 1086: whose line has been carried on uninterruptedly to the present time. Gilbert, his grandson, acquired several other Cheshire manors through his wife Margaret, daughter and heir of Robert de Rullos; and for many generations their descendants were Lords of Butley, and great benefactors of Chester Abbey. John Pigott, Justice in Eyre, who was Justiciar of Chester in 1401, and Serjeant-at-Law for the counties of Chester and Flint 1400-9, married another heiress, Agnes de Wetenhall, and left two surviving sons: John, Lord of Butley; and Richard, seated at Chetwynd in Shropshire, the immediate ancestor of the existing family. John’s posterity continued at Butley till the time of Edward VI., when the last heir died, and the place was sold by his three daughters. “A junior branch, seated at Bonisall in Cheshire, and afterwards at Fairsnape, Lancashire, was still extant in 1746”—Ormerod's Cheshire.

Richard had been transplanted into Shropshire by his marriage with Joan, daughter and co-heir of Sir Richard de Peshale of Chetwynd. From him descended a long line of wealthy squires, who constantly occur as Sheriffs of the county, and held Chetwynd for twelve generations. Richard Pigott, who sold his inheritance in 1774, it is said “for an old song,” and afterwards lost a great part of the purchase money abroad, was the graceless youth that made the wager recorded in Burrow’s Reports under the title of “The Earl of March versus Pigott” He and the son of Sir William Codrington, sitting one evening over their wine at Newmarket, “agreed to run their father’s lives one against the other, Sir William being a little turned of fifty, and Mr. Pigott upwards of seventy.” But it turned out that poor Mr. Pigott had died in his distant home in Shropshire at two o’clock in the morning of that very day; his hopeful son being altogether unacquainted with the state of his health. On this, young Pigott refused to pay the five hundred guineas he had staked; but found that he had to reckon with the notorious Duke of Queensberry (then Lord March), who, having taken Mr. Codrington’s bet, brought an action against him for the amount, and recovered it “Lord Mansfield decided that the impossibility of a contingency is no bar to its becoming the subject of a wager, provided the impossibility is unknown to both the parties at the time of laying it”—Burke. Mr. Pigott died at Toulouse in 1794, having survived both his foreign wife and his son, and was succeeded by his uncle William, Rector of Chetwynd and Edgmond. A branch of these Pigotts is seated at Doddingshall in Buckinghamshire.

Two other families, now either extinct or lost dated from the time of Henry I.; and though both seated in the same county, appear, as far as I am able to judge, to have been entirely distinct Sir Ralph Picott, living under Richard I. and King John, who has left his name to two manors in Essex still called Picotts, “descended from a Picott who was Sewer to Alberic de Vere in Henry I.’s time. Sir Ralph’s son Sir William in the reign of Henry III. held of the King in capite by the service of keeping one spar-hawk in the King’s court at the King’s cost Sir Ralph, his son, obtained in addition 'that the King was to find him maintenance for three horses, three boys or grooms, and three greyhounds; and the said Ralph was to change the Spar-hawk at his own charge.’ He had two sons, William and Robert, which last was of Pateswic, and dying in 1334 was buried in Dunmow Priory of which he was a benefactor. John, son of William, was his heir, and sold the estate in 1349.”—Morant's Essex.

The other Picots—sometimes called De Heydon—held Kingston and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, of Henry I. in capite by the Serjeantry of keeping his hawks. (I may observe, that this coincidence of tenure is the one point of contact between the families.) Peter Picot, in the reign of Henry II., held Heydon in Essex by Grand Serjeantry; " that is, by the Lords of it serving or waiting at the Coronation of the Kings of England with a bason and towel, to wash the King’s hands before dinner, and to have for fee the Bason, Ewer, and Towel.” He was followed by John; by Peter; by Thomas, who had free-warren in Kingston and Ratcliffe 37 Hen. III.; and lastly by Sir Peter Picot, who survived both his sons, and died in 1313, leaving as his heirs his sister Isabella Touke and his nephew Simon de Seneville.

Bartholomew, Hubert, William, Lambert, Ralph, Reginald, Richard, Roger Picot, Normandy 1198 (Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae). See also Pickett.