This surname is derived from a geographical locality. 'from Venables, a parish in the arrondissement of Louviers, in Normandy' (Lower). One of this family was tenant under Hugh Lupus, temp. William I, so we may say he 'came over with the Conqueror.'

William de Venables, Salop, 1273. Hundred Rolls.

1616. Thomas Venables, Buckinghamshire: Register of the University of Oxford.

1621. Richard Venables, Southamptonshire: ibid.

1690. Married — Ann Venables: St. Antholin, Budge Row, London.

1754. — John Venable: ibid.

1791. Married — John Venables and Elizabeth Norman: St. George, Hanover Square.

(French-Latin) belonging to Venables (Eure); prob. a form of French vignobles = Vineyards [from Latin vinea, vineyard: the orig. of -oble is disputed; it prob. represents Latin oppidulum, little town] de Venables occurs in the list of “Compagnons de Guillaume à la conquête de l’Angleterre en MLXVI” graven over the main doorway (inside) of the old church at Dives, Calvados.

William de Venables.—Hundred Rolls

Place name in France.

(Welsh) One who came from Venables or Vignoles (vineyard), in France.

From Venables, “about thirty miles beyond Rouen, on the road to Paris, between St. Pierre and Vernon, standing in the centre of the neck of a peninsula formed by a bend of the Seine. The high road runs straight through this tract to the centre of the arc of the Seine, which it intersects at a point where the river bends past Pont Andeli, near the famous Château Gaillard.” - Ormerod's Cheshire. Venables was the barony and ancient seat of the Le Veneurs, so named from their hereditary office of Veneur or Venator (Huntsman) to the Dukes of Normandy. They occur as far back as the tenth century in the charters of the Gallia Christiana; and Walter Le Veneur is a conspicuous figure in the Battle of the Fords, fought in 960 between Lothaire King of France, and Richard Sans Peur of Normandy. “Desperate was the battle waged in the Dieppe water; - knights struck down, and struggling in the stream - sinking into the pits of the river-bed - mixing their blood with the waves. Thrice did Richard raise the Norman war-cry, Dex aie! his own folks joining him, whilst (as the excited Trouveur tells) all the slogans attributed to the various provincial nationalities were resounding. Mont Joie! cried the Frenchman; Arras! the Fleming; Valie! the Angevin; and Thibaut himself shouting out Passe avant et Chartres! Face to face, the two Sovereigns observed each other; and whenever Lothaire saw Richard lift up the sword, did not his heart, as the Normans tell us, die within him? Lothaire was actually thrown off his horse, though not by Richard; but, unhurt, he speedily regained his seat and resumed the contest. Richard fought desperately, and Thibaut could distinguish the young Duke’s clear voice rising amidst the turmoil, vituperating him as a miscreant and a traitor.

“But who so prominent in the group as Gaultier-le-Veneur? All the interest of the battle seemed at one juncture to be concentrated upon the Huntsman, as though he had been the sole object of the conflict. Dragged off his horse - seized by the enemy - rescued and remounted by the ready Duke on the best he had - perhaps his own charger: and now, again, for the battle!” - Sir Francis Palgrave.

Gilbert de Venables or Gislebertus Venator, as he is entered in Domesday, was one of the Palatinate barons of Hugh Lupus, in Cheshire, and has been called his nephew, although his name does not appear in the pedigree of the son of the Earl’s only sister, Ralph de Meschines, and Dugdale makes no mention of it. A pedigree-roll of Legh of Adlington (quoted by Sir Peter Leycester) makes the astounding assertion that he was the younger brother of Stephen Earl of Blois! But his kinsman at least he must have been; for he and several others of the family had come over to England in the Earl’s train, and were richly provided for in his county of Chester. Gilbert, who bore the name of his fief, always accorded by the usage of Normandy to the head of the house, received the principal share of the lands, There is a legend that one of his manors - Moston, “then consisting chiefly of swamps and morasses” - was won by a hand-to-hand encounter with a dragon, further commemorated by the extraordinary crest borne by his posterity; a wyvern, pierced with an arrow, issuing out of a weir for taking fish, and devouring a child. “It chaunced in his tyme,” (so runs the story) “a terrible dragon to make his abode in the lordeshippe of Moston, wheare he devowred all suche p’sons as he laid holde on, whych the said Venables hering tell of, dyde in his awne p’son valiantlie and couragiouslie set on the saide dragon, where firste he shot him throwe with an arrowe, and afterward with other weapons manfullie slew him, at whych instant tyme he was devowring a childe.” Moston, however, was only acquired through an heiress in the time of Henry IV. Ormerod suggests that the legend relates to an ancestor of this heiress, whose crest was adopted by the Venables. and made Kinderton his caput baroniæ. “The site of his castle,” says Ormerod, “is another proof of the lines of the antient roads continuing in his time the accustomed avenues to Chester, and the points which the Norman conquerors were anxious to secure, the hall at Kinderton being only a few hundred yards distant from the station at Condate.”

According to the same authority, the name of Gilbert’s descendants was Legion. He was “the progenitor of numerous lines of the Venables family, of the Leghs of Booth, with their collateral branches, and the Meres of Mere; to which must be added with probability only not amounting to positive proof, the Leighs of West Hall, and with weaker, but still very strong probability, the Dones, Leghs of East Hall, and Breretons.” The representative of one of these houses, Charles Legh of Adlington, Sheriff of Cheshire in 1747, claimed to be heir-male of the Barons of Kinderton, but lived to see the extinction of his own house, surviving both his son and his grandsons.

It is only with the principal house that I can even attempt to deal; and here the task is made easy; for few families can show so complete a record of a long line of ancestry. There were in all twenty-two Barons of Kinderton - the last surviving of Hugh Lupus’ Palatine Baronies - who filled a great position in the county, and constantly served as Sheriffs. Till the fifteenth century we do not hear of their intermeddling even in the local wars so frequently waged on the Welsh frontier; but from that period a series of vicissitudes “attest the qualities of the family.” Sir Richard, the eleventh Baron, fought and died in the cause of Richard II. He had joined the Percies at the battle of Shrewsbury, was there taken prisoner, and beheaded as a traitor at York. His brother Sir William, who, on the other hand, had early taken part with Henry IV., and been appointed Constable of Chester on his accession to the throne, then received a grant of the forfeited Barony of Kinderton. But he refused to benefit his children at the expense of his brother’s orphans. He used his influence with the new King to obtain the restoration of their birth-right, and voluntarily surrendered all claim to the barony for himself and his heirs. Kinderton was accordingly settled on his nephew Hugh; but in process of time his posterity succeeded to the inheritance he had so generously relinquished. Hugh’s grandson, the fourteenth Baron, a zealous Lancastrian, fell at Bloreheath fighting for the Red Rose under the banner of Lord Audley, with the Chamberlain of Chester, and many other gallant Cheshire gentlemen. He was then only twenty-two, and left no children; the great-uncle who followed him likewise d. s. p.: and thus the line of the Constable, who had been the saviour of the family, became, “in great justice,” the rightful heirs of its patrimony. Another Baron of Kinderton was slain at Flodden. Fourth in descent from him was the young heir mentioned by Sir Peter Leycester in 1624. He speaks with affectionate pride of “that ancient barony, which only of all the rest of the Barons of Chester since the Norman Conquest has continued in a successive line of the heirs-male, and even lately, when it was at the point of failing, and even likely in all men’s account to have been transplanted, it pleased God in his providence to raise a successor of the same stem, who at this present time is a towardly young gentleman, Peter Venables, Baron of Kinderton, who, though scarce out of his minority is likely to replenish the same (if God will) with a fruitful increase of his race, having an heir-male by a daughter of Sir Richard Wilbraham of Woodhay, Knt., and baronet. To speak of the large extent of this fee and barony, and how many knights, esquires, and gentlemen hold lands and do service to the court there holden, were now beside my purpose, though it would tend much to the dignity of that great lordship.”

All the hopes founded on the birth of this promising “heir-male,” Thomas Venables, were doomed to disappointment. His mother had no other child: and though his father married a second wife who brought him four additional sons, they were all childless. Thomas himself died in his father’s life-time, and his son Peter was the last Baron of Kinderton.

There had been no reason for apprehending this sudden collapse of a line that had held its own through the changes and troubles of six hundred years. Peter was one of a family of eight; besides four sisters, he had three brothers to represent his name. Yet, by a strange fatality, none of these brothers survived him, and none ever married. His sisters, too, remained single, with the exception of one who was the wife of Thomas Pigot of Chetwynd in Shropshire. His own marriage with Catherine Shirley had given him only two daughters, Katherine Countess Ferrers, and Anne Countess of Abingdon; and his death in 1679 - ten years only after his grandfather’s - closed a succession that had been uninterrupted since the days of the Conqueror. No name had been more esteemed and venerated in the county of Chester than the name that expired with him.

Neither of his daughters had children. Countess Ferrers died shortly after him, while still under age; and her sister, who was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne, followed in 1715; the death of “that best of Queens,” says her courtly epitaph, “having preceded and perhaps hastened” her own.

Kinderton then passed to her aunt Mrs. Pigot’s only child Anne, then the wife of Henry Vernon of Sudbury, who inherited under her great-uncle’s will. Her son, George Vernon, was created in 1762 Lord Vernon, Baron of Kinderton, and was the direct ancestor of the present Lord.

The house of Venables bore Azure two bars Argent (distinguished only by a difference in the tinctures from the coat of Mainwaring), and first adopted by the fifth Baron about 1253. Gilbert, grandson of the Gislebertus Venator of Domesday, sealed with a falcon sinister regardant; and his son William (living in 1183) with a lion rampant sinister.

The progenitor of the great Cheshire family was a tenant under Hugh Lupus, temp, William I., whom he had probably accompanied to the Conquest of England. The name is local, from Venables, a parish in the arrondissement of Louviers, in Normandy.

A baronial name, from Venables, near Evreux, Normandy. The family does not appear under this name in Normandy, its proper name being le Venour, or Venator. Arnulph, Gislebert, Gaufridus, Hugh, Richard Venator, Normandy 1180- 95 (Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae). Richard V. 1198 (Ib.). Gislebert Venator, or De Venables, held the barony of Kinderton, Cheshire, 1086, from whom descended the V.s, barons of Kinderton, and many other families. See Leigh, Towneley. See also Grosvenor.

A location name in Normandy in the Domesday Book, Gislebert de Venables, an under­tenant (Cheshire) at the time of the Survey. Richard de Venables in Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus, King John The barony of Kinderton continued in this family till 1676.

Venables: from a place between St. Pierre and Vernon on the Seine. It was the seat of the Veneurs, or Hereditary Huntsmen, of the Norman Dukes. Gilbert de Venables, or Venator, was one of the Palatine Barons in Cheshire under Hugh Lupus.

The ancient and notable family of Venables is now established, as it has been for ages, in Cheshire and Shropshire, and it also occurs in North Wales. The parent stock seems to be that of Kinderton in Cheshire, of which the family possessed the lordship from the time of William the Conqueror to the end of the 17th century; Gilbert de Venables was the Norman founder of this family (O.). The Shropshire representatives were probably derived originally from the Cheshire stock. Thomas Venables was a Cheshire gentleman who contributed £25 to the Spanish Armada Fund in 1588 (Sp.).

The ancient and influential family of De Venables or Venables was represented in the county in the 13th and 14th centuries (E. and H. R.).