William de Warrenne, the “loyal young vassal” to whom, as Orderic tells us, Duke William had committed the castle of Mortemer in 1054, was the son of Ralph, Sire de Garennes, so called from a place in Normandy, afterwards named Bellencombre, where a magnificent castle long remained. He attended the great council at Lilleboune, and fought at Hastings: “De Garenes i vint Willeme, Mult li sist bien el chief li helme.”

Few among the Duke’s followers were as munificently dealt with, for “his possessions resembled the dominions of a sovereign prince rather than of a subject.” He held the great baronies of Castle Acre in Norfolk, Lewes in Sussex, and Coningsburgh in Yorkshire (with twenty-eight towns and hamlets within its Soke), besides grants in nine other counties - three hundred English manors in all. Like many other Norman nobles, he claimed as an ancestress one of the numerous nieces of Duchess Gunnor (Nepotes plures prædictæ Gunnoræ) whose descendants “have been inaccurately set down as kinsmen instead of distant connections of the Conqueror.” - Planché. But he himself was bound to his sovereign by a closer tie. He was probably William’s son-in-law, as his wife, who died in child-bed in 1085, was the mysterious Gundreda believed to have been Queen Matilda’s daughter. Orderic says she was the sister of Gherbod the Fleming, Earl of Chester, without alluding to her parentage, but William de Warrenne, in his charter to Lewes Priory, states his donations to be for the soul (among others) of his Lady, Queen Matilda, the mother of his wife (matris uxoris meæ). Mr. Freeman conjectures that she and Gherbod were the children of the Queen by a former marriage - probably clandestine and informal, as it is passed over in silence by all the chroniclers. From the splendid provision made both for Gherbod and his sister’s husband it is at all events clear that they must have been closely connected with the Conqueror.

When the new King returned to Normandy the year after the Conquest, William de Warrenne was one of the “valiant Men”employed under Bishop Odo and William Fitz Osbern in the government of the Kingdom, and in 1704 he and Richard de Bienfaite were Chief Justiciaries of England. On the breaking out of the rebellion of Ralph Guader and the Earl of Hereford, having vainly summoned the two Earls to appear before the King’s High Court, “they laid aside the Gown, and took up the Sword; wherewith, meeting with those bold Rebels at a place called Fagadune, they valiantly fought, and happily vanquished them; and for terror of others, cut off the right Foot of all they took alive.” - Dugdale. In 1087 he stood firm for William Rufus against the revolted Bishop Odo, and for his good service in the field and council chamber received the Earldom of Surrey. He died the year following, and was buried by Gundreda’s side in the priory he had founded at Lewes. This, as well as its cell in his Norfolk stronghold of Castle Acre, was for Cluniac monks, in ever-grateful remembrance of the great respect and honour with which he and his wife, when passing through Burgundy on a pilgrimage to Rome, had been entertained at the Abbey of Cluny. He guarded his gifts by the most solemn curses: “May God meet those who oppose or destroy them with the sword of anger and fury, and vengeance, and eternal malediction!” Yet even the memory of his place of sepulture was altogether lost, and his tomb and that of Gundreda was only discovered by chance a few years ago, in making a railway cutting. The second Earl - “a skilful and stout Soldier” - forfeited his great estate in 1101 by taking part with Robert Courtheuse; but when peace was concluded between Henry I. and his brother, he was restored to his Earldom, and from that time forward continuing faithful to the King, and “in favour as much as any,” commanded the rear-guard at the battle of Tinchebrai, where Courtheuse was vanquished and taken prisoner. He died in 1135, leaving by his wife, Elizabeth de Vermandois, the widowed Countess of Mellent, three sons; William, third Earl; Reginald, who married the heiress of Wirmegay; and Ralph, who died s. p., besides two daughters. Adelina, the youngest of these, married Prince Henry, the son of David of Scotland.

The third William - the last Earl of his race - died in the Holy Land, but the manner and place of his death are not known. He had joined the Crusade of 1145 under the Emperor Conrade and St. Louis, and never returned home. His only child was a daughter named Isabel, on whom devolved his Norman and English honours and splendid domain. She was twice married, each time to a bastard; for her first husband, William de Blois, was the son of King Stephen, who gave him the Earldom of Mortaine in Normandy; and the second, Hamelin Plantagenet, was the son of Geoffrey of Anjou, and base-brother to Henry II. Each bore her titles of Earl of Warrenne and Earl of Surrey, for she had no children by her first marriage.

William de Blois had been a quiet, unambitious man; but Hamelin Plantagenet The cross supposed to have been put up in his time at Braithwell, in South Yorkshire, bears this inscription: Jesu le fiz Marie Pense tou Le frere no roy Je bus prie. and his posterity were great potentates in five successive reigns. He carried one of the three Swords of State at Cœur de Lion’s coronation, and was entrusted with the 70,000 marks of silver collected for his ransom. His son was numbered among the four Earls that guaranteed to the Pope that King John (then under excommunication) should “do whatever was required of him”; witnessed his consequent abdication and homage; was present at Runnimede; and Constable of Bamborough and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with all Northumberland “committed to his trust.” Henry III. several times employed him; first of all in getting rid of the obnoxious favourite Falk de Bréant, whom “he had command to take to the Sea Coast, and then leave to the Winds”; and he officiated as Cup-bearer at the King’s marriage. John, the next heir, a man of fiery, imperious, and unstable temper, who bore the title of Earl of Surrey for fifty-four years, had married Alice, daughter of Hugh le Brun, Count de la March, the sister on his mother’s side to Henry III., and took up arms against Simon de Montfort in his brother-in-law’s behalf. But, “being in the Van of the Royal Army at Lewes with Prince Edward, he and William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, did there unworthily desert him at the very beginning of the fight, and fled to Pevensey Castle, and thence to France.” The barons promptly seized Lewes Castle and his other possessions, which he vainly strove to recover, till he joined Prince Edward after his escape from Hereford, and, taking part in the battle of Evesham, he “had the benefit of that glorious Victory,” and was re-instated. About the year 1268, he had a bitter quarrel with Sir Alan le Zouch touching some title of land, and “discerning that he must submit to the Justice of the Law, having first, passionately vented himself in foul language, at length assaulted Sir Alan and his son in Westminster Hall with such violence, that he almost killed the one and much wounded the other. And having done so, fled to his Castle at Reigate,” locally known as Holms Castle; a strong place, built on the site of a former Saxon fortress that had arrested the march of the Danes, and commanded the pass through the wide valley that stretches across West Kent - “Holmesdale, Never won, ne never shall.”

But he was closely pursued and pressed by Prince Edward with a superior force, and had to submit in all humility, meeting the Prince on foot, and imploring his mercy. Nevertheless, he was mulcted of 8,400 marks fine. When Edward I. issued the first writs of Quo Warranto in 1277, and the barons were questioned as to their titles, our Earl brought out a rusty sword, and unsheathing it before the justices -”Behold, my lords,” he said, “here is my warranty; my Ancestors coming into this land with William the Bastard, did obtain their lands by the Sword, and with the Sword I am resolved to defend them, against whoever shall endeavour to dispossess me: for that King did not himself conquer the land and subdue- it, but our progenitors were sharers and assistants therein.” The next year he claimed and obtained free warren on some of his Sussex lands, pleading a former grant by King John “in regard of their surname De Warenna”; and in 1282, when the King appointed him and Roger Mortimer guardians to the sons of Griffith ap Madoc, one of the loyal Welshmen that had opposed Llewellyn, he appropriated the poor boy’s inheritance with a high hand. “These Guardians,” writes Powell, “forgetting the service done by the Fathers of the Wards to the King, so guarded their Wards with small regard, that they never after returned to their Possessions: And shortly after the said Guardians did obtain the said Land to themselves by charter of the King.” He commanded three several expeditions into Scotland, and was appointed Governor of the kingdom after the victory of Dunbar; but met with a crushing defeat at Stirling in 1296. He died in 1303, on his return from another Scottish campaign, and was buried under the chancel pavement at Lewes, with this inscription: "Vous qe passer ob bouche close, Prier pur celly ke cy repose: En bie come bous esti jadis fu, Et bous tiel, serretz come je su: Sire Johan Count de Garenne gist yey; Dieu de sa alme eit merey.

Ry pur sa alme priera Croiz mill jours de pardon abera.”

“Certain it is,” concludes Dugdale, “that he was a Person of high Esteem with the King,” for, according to his mandate to the Archbishop, prayers were offered up throughout the Province of Canterbury for the soul of “this our Earl, who had been a most faithful and useful Subject to him and the whole Realm.”

He left two daughters - one of them married to John Baliol, afterwards King of Scotland. His only son had died in early life, long before, leaving a posthumous child, that succeeded to the Earldom, and proved the last heir-male. This second Earl John, a stout soldier in Edward III.’s wars, who received from Edward Baliol a grant of the Scottish Earldom of Stratherne, was twice married, but both his wives were childless; and on his death in 1347, an elder sister, Alice Countess of Arundel, was his sole heir. Her son, Richard FitzAlan, ninth Earl of Arundel, in her right also bore the title of Earl of Surrey; and it remained vested in his descendants till the time of Elizabeth. The famous house of FitzAlan then ended with its eighteenth Earl, whose daughter Mary, Duchess of Norfolk, conveyed his two Earldoms to the Howards. One or both of them have been since borne by the eldest son of each successive Duke.

The last Earl Warren had, during the lifetime of his first wife Joan de Barre (the granddaughter of Edward I.) lived openly with a concubine named Maud de Nereford, by whom he had an acknowledged son, who bore his name, and (with a canton added) his arms. This Sir Edward Warren acquired the Cheshire barony of Stockport, with Poynton, through his wife Cecily, the heiress of Sir Nicholas de Eton; and their descendants remained in the county for fourteen generations. A second Sir Edward was High Sheriff in 1563. His grandson, called Stag Warren for his great size and strength, was, as a Royalist, “in ill odour with the Parliamentarians,” and lost his wife through the rough handling of a party of Cromwell’s soldiers, sent to search Poynton for horses and arms. She had a favourite nag, which she endeavoured to save by mounting it herself; but she was brutally dragged out of her saddle, and so threatened and terrified that she was brought to bed before her time, and died in child-birth. The last of the house, Sir George, who lived till the beginning of the present century, left an only daughter, married in 1777 to Thomas, Viscount Bulkeley. She had no children, or near relatives; and, casting about her eyes in search of an heir, selected her friend Lady Vernon, the daughter and heiress of Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, of Stapleford, co. Notts, to whom she bequeathed Poynton and Stockport. “Lady Bulkeley was slightly influenced in her devise of the property by her belief in the remote kinship of that family to her own. Watson, in his History of the Warrens, makes the Borlase Warrens to descend from a younger son of the Poynton house, temp. Hen. VII.; but this is effectually disposed of by the Herald and Genealogist (vols. vii., viii.) which shows that their descent was from a family named Waring, long settled in Warwickshire, who may possibly have descended from some earlier Wareyne of this house.” - Ormerod's Cheshire (Helsby’s Edition.) The Lancashire estates were devised to Lord de Tabley, who took the name and arms of Warren. Lady Vernon did the same; and on her death in 1837, her son George, fifth Lord Vernon, by Royal Sign Manual, “assumed the name of Warren only for himself, and his children thenceforward to be born.”

A Norman name: From the Domesday Book, de Warene, Warenger. Varengeville, local name