PENNINGTON
Pennington, Baron Muncaster
The Pennington family pedigree goes back to Gamel de
Pennington, Lord of Pennington in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189). It was
Richard de Lucy that gave them Ravenglass, a village on the remote coast of
Cumberland County in England (now Cumbria) in 1208. The Pennington's became High
Sheriff of Cumberland, a title and position that was handed down from father to
son for centuries in the same way that the title of Earl of
Cumberland was inherited by the eldest sons of the Clifford family.
George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland and Queen Elizabeth I’s Champion was
known as the Privateering Earl who
took Puerto Rico off the Spanish in 1598. Henry Percy, 9th Earl of
Northumberland also owned estates at Egremont Castle on the Cumberland Coast and
his early education was by the parson at Egremont.
William Pennington (d. 1573) who was High Sheriff of Cumberland County 1552, 1558 and 1565 married the widow of Sir Hugh Askew in 1563, and their 2nd son John (d.1613) inherited the Askew estates at Seaton. (See below) http://www.ancestryuk.com/Askew.htm
Living on the north west coast of Cumberland he would have become an expert sailor and fisherman, as ships were the only source ot transport to and from Ravenglass in the 17th century. He may well have been one of the northern fishermen who fished off Iceland and Cape Cod in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Ravenglass Map location;-
The Pennington’s of Henham, and Amersham
The name Pennington is one of the oldest in England.
Surnames did not exist before the Norman Conquest (1066 AD). The population was
so low that names of neighbors were not duplicated often enough to pose
problems. With the
conquest, surnames began to be taken by the nobility. By 1200 most families used
two names, though the second name was not always hereditary. The name Pennington
started, as so many English surnames did, as a place name. It is a
manor, parish and village in the old land of Cumbria, later called North
Lancaster and now in the new county of Cumbria. The Cumbrians are of mixed
Brigantes tribe of Celts and Viking ancestry, with a strong mixture of Saxon,
Danish and
Irish blood as well. The manor is exactly the same size as the parish which
formerly belonged to the Cistercian Abbey of Furness, and includes 4,160 acres
or six and oneself square miles. The parish was the smallest in Lancashire. The
village was composed of 50 houses and 284 people in the mid nineteenth century,
and is about the same size today. The name was spelled Pennegetun in the
Domesday book of 1086 AD, the first census of England initiated by William the
Conqueror, when all of England and Wales had only about one and a half million
people. The name apparently arose either from the British word pennig (little
hill) or from pennaig (prince) and the Saxon word ton (town).
The oldest Pennington we know of, Gamel de Peninton or Penitone, bore an Old
Norse first name, indicating Viking ancestry. He held the manor during the time
of King Henry II, count of Anjou and a Plantagenet, who reigned from 1154 to
1189. The grass covered ruins of the original manor house and castle still
stand, but in about 1242 the lord of the manor moved to Mulcaster, now Muncaster
castle at the mouth of the river Esk, some twenty miles to the west. The lord of
Muncaster was generally a knight until 1676 when he was made a Baronet. In 1783,
his descendant was made a Baron. During the War of the Roses, Holy King Harry,
Henry VI, became lost after the Battle of Towton in 1464. Sir John
Pennington rescued him near Muncaster. In gratitude, King Henry presented Sir
John with a fragile glass cup called the "Luck of Muncaster" and a
blessing that the family would never run out of male heirs so long as the cup
remained
unbroken. Though the cup still survives, the last male Pennington of this line
died in 1917. The present lord, Sir William Pennington-Ramsden, is descended
from the family of the mother of the last Lord Pennington. (1)
The oldest male Pennington given names are those of the lords of Pennington and
Muncaster. Gamel�s sons were Benedict and Meldred. Alan was lord in 1208,
followed by Thomas (d. 1240), Gamel, and many Alans, Johns, and
Williams. The various cadet (younger sons) branches in the area had such names
as Allen, Christopher, Edward, George, Gilbert, Henry, Rowland, Thomas and
William from 1500 through 1627. The female names from this period were
Agnes, Alice, Allys, Catherine, Elizabeth, Isable, Mabell and Margaret.(2) By
1250 the Pennington names were all in Norman form. In general, Old English
(Saxon) and Cymric (Welsh or British) names were a minority in the population.
It may will be that other inhabitants of the village of Pennington took the town
name as a surname during the 1100�s and 1200�s, yet since it was a
very tiny village, it is very likely all were closely related anyway. Gamel de
Peninton can
with very great confidence be called an ancestor of all the Penningtons today.
Due to normal increase, the descendants of Gamel spread throughout the entire
Furness section of Lancashire from the seacoast to the tops of the highest of
the Furness Fells (Map 1), spread throughout the scenic Lakes district of old
Cumberland and Westmoreland and spread across Morecombe Bay to Preston and to
Wigan and Radcliffe in southern Lancashire between Liverpool and Manchester.
They also spread south along the old Roman road Ermine Street, the
site of which today is generally occupied by main highway A-1, into Yorkshire
and on down south to London. The earliest Pennington we know to have reached
London was Ralph, who died there in Shoreditch in 1444. Most of the London
Penningtons were spread out along Ermine Street halfway to Cambridge, or crammed
in the 677 acres (about 1 square mile) of the City of London (as opposed to
suburbs) centered around London Bridge (Map 2) and included within the Roman
wall and the medieval wall built on its ruins.(3)
American Connections
Cumberland County, England
became a centre of knowledge for Atlantic mariners and explorers, when
Thomas Harriot who was Elizabethan England’s best mathematician and had spent
a year at Roanoke in 1585, was given lands at Brampton. He was able to teach
northern master mariners, the
sciences of cartography (map making) and navigation on both the east and the
west coasts of the country, including the ancient north sea port of Hartlepool
in the Palatinate of Durham which was held by
Ingram de Clifford, brother of the Earl of Cumberland. Links between
mariners on the east and west coast were good, thanks to the roman road running
across country from the Solent to the river Tyne, less than 70 miles away.
Sources;
[16062] Reprinted from the History and Pedigree of
the Penningtons, compiled by Joseph Foster,21 Boundary Rd, St John's Wood,
London N.W. Microfich Files DE Archives Dover DE
The Privateering Earl – Richard
T Spence
Cumberland Families and Heraldry
– Hudleston, C.Roy and Boumphrey R.S.
Thomas Hariot and
the Northumberian Household, G.R. Batho.