From Notre Dame du Touchet, near Mortaine, in Normandy. The ruins of the old castle are still visible near the parish church: and the race of its ancient possessors is not extinct. M. de Touchet, Chevalier de St. Louis, was President of the Society of Antiquaries of Normandy in 1825, and his father, till shortly before the first Revolution, retained the Seigneurie of Beneauville, which they had held from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Their arms, Azure three hands Or, are different from those borne by the English Touchets.

Their ancestor, Orme, who possessed considerable estates in Cheshire, was surnamed the Harper, and Sir Peter Leycester fancifully derives their name from “Citharista, or Touch it.” The Cheshire pedigrees generally state that his son Matthew “was the father of Simon Touchet, Lord of Buglawton and Tattenhall in the time of Hugh Kevelioc, who is said to have succeeded thereto on the death of Henry, son of Henry, son of Josceline de Touchet; but all agree in his descent from Orme.” - Ormerod's Cheshire. They were seated at Buglawton shortly after the Conquest, and the manor of Tattenhall, which in Domesday belonged to William Malbeding, was vested in them by grant of Randle Gernons, Earl of Chester, in the time of King Stephen. Sir Robert Touchet, in 1319, “was one of the barons who, with the Earls of Lancaster and Hereford, assembled at Sherborne in Elmedon, and swore to stand by each other until they had amended the state of the realm; but notwithstanding this oath, Sir Robert Touchet, with many others, submitted to the King.” - Ibid. His grandson, Sir John, made his mark in the French wars, chiefly at the relief of Aquillon and the siege of Rheims, 33 Ed. III., “and was slain in a desperate engagement with the Spanish fleet before Rochelle, 44 Ed. III.” His wife Joan was the daughter of one of the greatest soldiers of the age, James Lord Audley, the hero of Poictiers; and the eldest of the three co-heiresses between whom his barony fell in abeyance. Their brother, Nicholas Lord Audley, only survived his father six years, and died in 1392, leaving no posterity. Joan was then already dead; but the barony, after some protest, was adjudged to her son Sir John; and he assumed the title of Lord Audley in 1403, being then “actively employed in military arrangements in Wales.”

From this time forth the Touchets ranked high in power and influence in the kingdom, and played a stirring part in its annals. The next Lord Audley fell in battle with the Earl of Salisbury at Bloreheath in Shropshire, while commanding the Lancastrians of Chester and the adjoining counties. His son changed sides, took part with the House of York, and was appointed Lord Treasurer of England by Richard III.; and his grandson, joining in the Cornish insurrection of 1497, was taken prisoner at Blackheath, and “was drawn from Newgate to Tower Hill in his own Coat of Arms, painted on paper, but reversed and torn, and there Beheaded.” Another Lord Audley was made a Knight Banneret in 1586 for his bravery at the battle of Zutphen; and his successor, who was for some time Governor of Utrecht, received the Irish Earldom of Castlehaven from James I. in 1617. The second Earl was executed on Tower Hill in 1631, “for certain high crimes and misdemeanours:” but both the titles were restored to his son by a fresh creation three years afterwards. This son served the King loyally in the Civil War, first under the Duke of Ormonde, and then as commander-in-chief in Ireland; and was recompensed at the Restoration by a grant of “the same place and precedence that his ancestors the Lords Audley enjoyed,” and his father had forfeited, with remainder to his brother Mervyn, and Mervyn’s sons and daughters.

Mervyn succeeded to the Earldom in 1684, and was followed by a son, a grandson, and a great-grandson, but the line terminated with the last named, John, seventh Earl, in 1777. The Irish title then became extinct, and the old barony, by virtue of the remainder, passed to the Earl’s nephew, George Thicknesse. His only sister, Lady Elizabeth (Collins calls her Lady Mary) then long since dead, had made an unequal match with a Captain Philip Thicknesse, Though greatly her inferior in birth, he came of an ancient family. “This curious and interesting local name belonged to a Cheshire family who frequently occur in the Palatine Rolls. Roger de Thickenes, and his brothers William and Henry, are mentioned in Edward II.’s time. It signifies Thickwithens or willows.” - Notes to Ormerod's Cheshire. The homely adage current in the county, “Better over the mixon than over the moor,” marking the old prejudice against all intermarriage with strangers, might at least be quoted in his favour. which her family never forgave. The Earl had good grounds for his objection to his brother-in-law. Even the polite peerages speak of the Captain as an “eccentric character,” and he is described as “utterly devoid of every generous and manly quality, rancorous, slanderous, vindictive, and malicious.” He was fined and imprisoned for libelling a brother officer. He wrote several books, “abounding in coarse, indecent, and revolting ribaldry,” and amongst them his own Memoirs. “The account that he there gives of his first marriage, when he was forty-two years old, is the most shameful narrative ever penned by any man of himself: Under a feigned marriage he seduced the woman, who he expected was rich, in order that he might make his own terms with her parents before he really married her.” She died after giving birth to three daughters, and he then, “according to his own story, at the suggestion of a learned and indecent old Judge, made love to a widow lady named Concanen, who was willing to marry him if a little longer time only were permitted her to forget the sainted and departed Concanen. In telling the story of this courtship, Thicknesse seemed to think it a fine joke. The widow, however, was unequal to the task of a courting match with the gentleman, for he goes on to tell us that when Lady Elizabeth Touchet heard of this courtship, she thought she would rather marry him herself, which she did. As the gallant gentleman puts it, ‘So I left the widow to finish her second mourning, and was soon after married to Lady Elizabeth Touchet.’” - Historic Houses of Bath.

Lord Castlehaven never spoke to his sister again, and her epitaph (quoted by Banks) alludes to this life-long estrangement “in a quibbling comparison between the infinite mercy of the Lord of ‘Héven,’ and the unrelenting cruelty of the Lord of 'Haven'": "Sacred to the Memory of the Lady Elizabeth Thicknesse.

‘The Lord of Hèven forsook her not.’”Banks attributes this “

cruelty”to her father, but, according to Collins, she had lost her father nine years before her marriage. Her mother had previously died. The new Lord Audley, by Royal license, added the name of Touchet to his own, and his descendants bore the title for another hundred years. The last and eighteenth Baron - counting from the first writ of summons received by Nicholas de Aldithley in 1313 - died in 1872, leaving no son, and the barony fell into abeyance between his two young daughters.

Dugdale speaks of another baron of this name, William Tuchet, who followed Edward I. to Gascony in 1296; then, on three several occasions, to Scotland; and was summoned to parliament in 1299. He was a man of ample possessions, as he received charter of free warren in all his demesne lands in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire (where he held Thorpe Waterville), Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire; with a Wednesday market and yearly fair at Levenhales - probably his principal seat - in the county of Hereford. Then follows another William Touchet - not his son, but the son of a Nicholas de Touchet, whose estate this William had inherited in 1310, when he received a writ of summons to the Scottish wars, which was repeated four years afterwards. In 1318 he was pardoned as an adherent of the Earl of Lancaster; but in 1321, “upon the Insurrection of that Earl, and his defeat at Burrough-brigg, being there taken with him, he was hang’d at York.”

Tuchet: from Notre Dame de Touchet, near Mortaine in Normandy. The family was seated at Buglawton and Tattenhall shortly after the Conquest. Sir John Touchet married the eldest daughter and coheiress of Lord Audley in the reign of Edward III., and the barony descended to Sir John’s son. The name is now Tuckett. There is a confectioner of that name at Plymouth.