A name of homely and familiar sound. “Le Wayte”was the watchman who went his nightly rounds, carrying a lantern, and “a trump with which to sound the watches or give the alarm:”the guardian of the peace in the old couvre-feu days, when all decent folks were a-bed betimes. “To the former title of this official duty it is we owe the fact of our still terming any company of night serenaders ‘waits,’ and especially those bands of strolling minstrels who keep up the good old custom of watching in Christmas morning. A good old custom, I say, even though it may cost us a few pence, and rouse us somewhat rudely, may be, from our slumbers.” - Bardsley's English Surnames. The name is very common in old registries, and was in course of time borne by many “worshipful” families. Adam de Wayte, in 1306, held in Lincolnshire; and a monumental brass in Stoke-Charity Church commemorates Thomas Wayte, who died in 1482. But surely no interpolator, however ignorant or intrepid, could venture to place it on the roll of the Norman conquerors.

It is true a Robert La Waite is entered on the Norman Exchequer Rolls of 1180: but in the preceding century the only name I can find that resembles it is Waet, the Anglicized form of the Breton seigneurie of Vacajet. It gave one of his designations to the mysterious Earl of Norfolk whose parentage remains an unsolved problem, and was, in this country, variously styled Ralph de Wayer or Guader and De Waet; but is called by French writers Raoul de Vacajet, Seigneur of Guader and Montfort in Brittany (v. Neustria Pia, pp. 596,612, 627).

The vexed question of his nationality can probably never now be set at rest. Mr. Freeman brands him as “the only English traitor in the motley host”of the Conqueror; a Norfolk man born of a Breton mother; and charitably suggests that, as he fought on the Norman side at Hastings, he “must have been outlawed by Harold for some unrecorded treason or other crime.” The statement that he was an Englishman rests on the authority of the Abingdon and Peterborough Chronicles; while William of Malmesbury and Wace distinctly declare him to have been a Breton: Joste la cumpaigne Néel Chevalcha Raol de Gael: Bret estoit è Bretonz menout, Por terre serveit ke il out. - Roman de Rou, 13,625.

From this it appears that he commanded a contingent from Brittany, which it is difficult to conceive would have been entrusted to an outlawed alien. We learn from Domesday that he was the son of an Earl Ralph who had held in England under the Confessor, and whom Mr. Freeman, adopting Mr. Taylor’s suggestion, identifies with Ralph the Staller. Mr. Planché is of opinion that he was the Confessor’s nephew, Ralph Earl of Hereford, the fourth son of his sister Goda by her first husband Dreux, Count of the Vexin. He married Githa or Gueth, an English heiress, and had (according to this theory) two sons, of whom Ralph Guader was the elder, and Harold, Lord of Sudeley, the younger. He is called Earl of Hereford by the majority of the historians, but is expressly described by the old Norman poet Gaimar as Earl of the East Angles;” and in Duchesne’s list of the Normans who flourished in England before the Conquest, occurs as “Comes Est Angliæ, pater Heraldi dominus de Sudeley.” Ralph Guader was consequently rewarded for his services at Hastings “by confirmation only in his hereditary rights and dignities.

“The assertion that the elder Ralph was an Englishman, born in Norfolk, may not be untrue, for his mother, sister of Edward the Confessor, might have been in this country, and in that county, at the time of his birth; while on the other hand, the Countess Githa was probably in Bretagne when Raoul was born, from which circumstance he might take the name of Gael, as having first seen the light in that castle.” - The Conqueror and his Companions.

Ralph Guader had himself held land in England in the time of the Confessor, when, according to Blomfield, he possessed nearly the whole town of Buckenham in Norfolk. After the Conquest, we find him installed as Earl of East Anglia, and gallantly repelling the invading Danes, who had attacked his castle of Norwich. Yet in 1075 - scarcely six years afterwards - he was in open rebellion against the Crown. The King, for some reason or other, had refused him permission to marry Emma, the daughter of his late Seneschal, William Fitz Osbem, and the sister of Roger Earl of Hereford; and Ralph, in defiance of his authority, took the opportunity of one of his absences in Normandy to celebrate the wedding with great splendour at Exning in Cambridgeshire.

“There was that bride-ale To many men’s bale.”

Besides his new brother-in-law, Earl Roger, and the Saxon Earl Waltheoff, “a great company,” says Freeman, “of Bishops and Abbots and other great men was gathered together;” and a large number of Bretons settled in England attended at their countryman’s summons. “At the feast men began to talk treason,” and air their grievances; many charges were brought against the King; and the time was declared opportune for shaking off their allegiance. All agreed upon a rising, and swore to stand or fall together. Waltheoff - whether willingly, or as he subsequently alleged, unwillingly - took the oath with the rest; but presently repented, and hastened to betray the plot to Archbishop Lanfranc. Thence he proceeded to Normandy, laden with rich gifts for the King’s acceptance, to implore his clemency; but only succeeded in staving off his own execution for a time.

The two Earls, meanwhile, had gone to their several Earldoms and collected their forces, having agreed to join hands at an appointed trysting place. The Bretons flocked to Ralph’s standard, and with them, added to a considerable array of mercenaries, he set out to meet his ally. But he had got no further than Cambridge when he was confronted by a formidable host, led by the Justiciary, William de Warren, Robert Malet, and the two soldier Bishops, Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, that he could not attempt to encounter in the field. He retreated to Norwich, where he took ship, and went to seek aid in Denmark, leaving his newly-made bride in charge of his castle. The young Countess was a brave woman, and defended the place during a three months’ siege against all the engineering skill that could be brought to bear upon it. She held it till “the King was forced to grant her his Peace, and licence to go out of the Realm”with her garrison, and then departed in triumph to Brittany, where she was soon after joined by her husband. Then, at last, Lanfranc could write the King word that “the Kingdom was cleansed of the filth of Bretons.” But the fate of the poor prisoners was altogether terrible. All who had been at that fatal bride-ale were grievously punished; some had their eyes put out; others their right feet cut off: and every one who had aught to lose suffered forfeiture. Of Ralph’s own lands in Norfolk, the greatest share went to the Bigots.

Ralph, thus banished from England, long flourished in Brittany. “He lived to take the Cross at the preaching of Pope Urban, to set forth as a Crusader in the train of William’s eldest son, and to die, along with his heroic wife, on their way to the Holy City. His son succeeded to his Breton estates of Wader and Montfort, and his daughter was restored to England by a marriage with Earl Robert of Leicester.” - The Norman Conquest.