This surname is derived from a geographical locality. 'of Riddell,' in the parish of Lilliesleaf, Roxburghshire. A clan name of great antiquity. (2 Local; v. Reddall (1).

1761. Married — William Ridell and Mary Simpson: St. George, Hanover Square.

1768. — James Riddle and Mary Humphry: ibid.

1770. — Samuel Harper and Helen Riddell: ibid.

Descended from the ancient Counts of Angoulême, who claim to have received their fief from Charles the Bald in 866. The surname was first assumed about 1048 by Galfrid or Geoffrey, the second son of Count Galfrid, who had for his inheritance the barony of Blaye in Guienne, and married the heiress of Périgord. By this Countess Agnes, he had two sons: of whom the elder, Helias, was the forefather of the Counts of Perigord, and the second, Geoffrey, fought in Apulia, and came from thence to the conquest of England with William Bigod. He is mentioned in Domesday as having received large grants of land, and also succeeded to his father’s barony in Guienne. The next in succession, another Geoffrey, married Geva, the bastard daughter of Hugh Lupus, Some writers (including Dugdale) have contended for the legitimacy of Geva; but in that case it seems obvious that her daughter Matilda would, as next in blood, have inherited her father’s Earldom of Chester, rather than the son of her aunt. and was a Crown Commissioner in 1106 with Ralph Basset, whom he succeeded as Lord Justiciary (Mon. Angl. i. 172): but was soon after drowned in the famous shipwreck of the Blanch Nef, with his brother-in-law, the young Earl of Chester, and the King’s two sons. Maud, his only surviving child, was a great heiress, and married Richard Basset, who became in his turn Lord Justiciary of England, and with whom she founded Laud Abbey, in Leicestershire. Their son Geoffrey took the name of Ridel, and though in the next generation Richard, the heir, again called himself Basset, and became the ancestor of the baronial Bassets (see Basset), it was retained by his younger brother Hugh, who founded the still existing family. This Hugh de Ridel was one of the hostages given to Henry II. for William the Lion, King of Scots, having acquired through his wife, Margaret de St. Médard, the manor of Cranston in Scotland, which was lost in the subsequent Scottish wars, and Withering in Northamptonshire, held for three hundred years and upwards by his descendants. The French barony of Blaye, that he had inherited from his father, also remained with them till 1319; and by means of another estate they obtained in Guienne, their connection with the province was kept up till it fell into the hands of the French in the following century. His younger grandson, Hugh Fitz-Geoffrey, had some lands in Normandy, where his posterity appear to have settled; and one of them, Martin Ridel, Baron of More and Plainesevette, was Grand Treasurer of France under Louis XIV. (Feoda Norman, up. Chesnium.) Another of the family, Sir William Ridel, was seated in the North of England, and a person of some note under the first two Edwards, being successively Constable of Norham, Constable of Barnard Castle, Sheriff of Northumberland, and Governor of Newcastle. But he left no son when he died in 1328, and his three daughters, Isabella de Clavering, Constance de Kingston, and Joanna de Woderington, became his co-heirs.

In the sixteenth century the Ridels removed to Scotland. It would seem they had at that time lost much of their former importance; most of their lands having passed away through heiresses or been alienated; and in 1558 John Riddell (as the name was then spelt) sold his only remaining estate in Norfolk, and sought his fortune at the court of King James, where he was kindly received. From that date to the present day, that is, for more than three hundred years, the family has remained resident in Scotland. They were for a long time seated at Kinglass in West Lothian: thence they removed to the Highlands; and in 1778 James Riddell, of Ardnamurchan and Sunart in Argyllshire, received a baronetcy. Their present home is at Strontian, in the same county. The crest they bear is surmounted by a scroll inscribed “De Apulia,” in memory of the Geoffrey Ridel who fought under Robert Guiscard, and first came to England at the Conquest.

This account of the Ridels is abbreviated from an elaborate pedigree, with full references to the authority of public documents, given by Hutchinson in his History of Durham. “It may be here proper,” he continues “to take notice of a very singular error into which some Scottish genealogists have lately fallen. The family of Ridel has been by them mistakingly considered as the same with another of the surname of De Ridale. Accordingly they have blended together and confounded the history of both.

“De Ridale is evidently a local surname, and has its origin from the district of that name in Yorkshire. Persons of that name were settled in Ridale as early as the middle of the twelfth century. One of them, Walter de Ridale, it appears, went to Scotland at the time that King David I. brought the monks of Rieveaulx, in Ridale, to settle them at Melrose in Roxburghshire, and there acquired the lands of Liliesleaf in that county. The descendants of this Walter, as well as himself, retained possessions at the same time both in Ridale and Roxburghshire, so that the origin of the family is clear beyond dispute.

“Another branch of the De Ridales, besides that of Liliesleaf, in Scotland, settled at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Philip de Ridale was mayor of that town, an office which was then of great importance, in the reign of Edward I. Whether he was the chief of all the family, or whether he was of a younger branch, we know not; but it seems probable that the honourable family, the Riddells, of Swinburne Castle, are his descendants.”

Surtees, however, gives a wholly different pedigree of the last mentioned family. He discards Philip the Mayor and all connection with Berwick-upon- Tweed; and derives them from Hugh Ridel, living 4 Ed. III., a brother of the Sir William Ridel who was appointed Constable of Norham in 13n. Several of them were Mayors or Sheriffs of Newcastle-on-Tyne; two were “merchant adventurers:”and one, Sir Thomas, colonel of a regiment of foot in the service of Charles I., and Governor of Tynemouth Castle, “dyed abanyshed man (after his lordship of Tunstall was sold to pay his composition) at Antwerp in Brabant.” He had “rendered himself so obnoxious to the Parliament that ₤1000 was offered for his apprehension; and escaped with difficulty from Berwick in a small fishing vessel.” Another Thomas, who was seated at Swinburne Castle, engaged in the Jacobite rising of 1715, and was taken prisoner, but escaped from Lancaster Castle, and was included in the general pardon. He afterwards married one of the co-heirs of Widdrington in Northumberland; and his son acquired Felton through another heiress of the same name, Their house of St. Edmund’s, near Gateshead, was, as the property of an ancient Roman Catholic family, gutted and plundered by a Protestant mob in 1747, and has since been untenanted. They are still represented in the male line, and bear Argent; a fess between three garbs or wheatsheaves Azure: whereas the coat of the Riddells of Ardnamurchan is Or, three piles Gules in point, over all a bend Azure. That of the Ridells of Roxburghshire is Argent, on a chevron Gules between three ears of wheat stalked and leaved ppr, as many fleur-de-lis of the second.

Of that Ilk, in the parish of Lilliesleaf, co. Roxburgh. There is a tradition of great antiquity, ascending to the VII. or VIII. century. See Lay of the Last Minstrel, notes-but documentary evidence goes back to the XII. only. Richard Basset, justiciar of England, temp. Hen. I., married the heiress of Riddell, and his eldest son assumed his mother's surname. Genealogists differ as to the extraction of the family. See Douglas's Baronage. Betham's Baronetage, Nisbet's Heraldry, &c.

REDELL: Local: from the lands of Ridell in Roxburghshire. The family are descended from Oscitel de Ridel, 1090.

Local. From lands in the county of Yorkshire, formerly called the Ryedales.

The same as Riddell, found Rydale, De Rydale, and De Ridale; from Riddell or Ryedale, in the parish of Lilliesleaf co. Roxburgh. Sir Walter Scott refers to several curious documents which warrant most conclusively the epithet of "Ancient Riddell." See Stat. Ac. of Scotland, vol. iii. p. 27, note.

The Riddells or Riddles have long been established in Northumberland. During the 16th and 17th centuries several of the mayors and sheriffs of Newcastle bore the name of Riddel (B.). The Riddells of Tillmouth were an important family in the 13th and 14th centuries. An ancient family of Riddell once lived at the seat of that name in Roxburghshire (L.). Riddells - Quarter is a township in Northumberland. The Cornish name of Riddle has evidently had an independent origin.