General Notes

It is from acorns that great oak trees grow.  So let us begin by looking at the seedling of the Butler family tree.  It will be found in 12th century England.  The paternal ancestry of the family is traceable in unbroken succession to a certain Hervey who was living about 1130.  From the "Testa de Nevil", which was compiled a century later, we know Hervey had a son, Hervey Walter (which suggests a maternal connection with someone by the name of Walter) and a daughter Alice, to whom her father gave a dowry of about 400 acres in Lancashire.  Harvey seems also to have had various estates in East Anglia.  But the identity of his father, mother or wife has not yet been established.  It has been suggested in "The Complete Peerage" that he may have married an aunt of Thomas Becket, with whose family the Butlers were reputedly connected.

Theobald Blake Butler, a leading authority on the history of the family, who died only this year [1965] and whose works are now available to scholars in the National Library, Dublin, the British Museum and the Irish Genealogical Research Society, laboriously traced back to Domesday the lands which this family subsequently held in East Anglia and Lancashire and discovered that at least nine of the sixteen or more holdings which our Hervey was believed to have owned in Norfolk and Suffolk were entered in Domesday Book under the ownership of Walter de Caen.  The discovery led him to surmise that the paternal ancestor of the Butlers was Walter de Caen (son of William Malet who accompanied the Conqueror and, being half Saxon, was entrusted with the burial of King Harold after the Battle of Hastings).  In his last years, however, Blake Butler was inclining to the view that Hervey in about 1130 may have acquired much of Walter de Caen's lands by marriage, which would make Hervey, not the son or grandson, but son-in-law of Walter de Caen. Further research on the point might prove rewarding, paricularly with reference to the most likely candidates of the name of Herve in 11th Century France and to the Hervey who was Becket's envoy at the Papal Court 1163 to 1166 when he died.  The scattered Keurdon MSS are unlikely to carry the matter any further, though Carte did hint to the contrary; nor has the Buxton Collection of hundreds of unpublished medieval charters in Cambridge University Library helped on the point.  But in Germany, the early archives of the Buttlar family certainly need appraisal.  [Butler Family History]

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Curt Hofemann, curt_hofemann@@yahoo.com, in a post-em, wrote:

from the 1911 version of the Encyclopedia Britannica:
BUTLER, the name of a family famous in the history of Ireland. The great house of the Butlers, alone among the families of the conquerors, rivalled the Geraldines, their neighbours, kinsfolk and mortal foes. Theobald Walter, their ancestor, was not among the first of the invaders. He was the grandson of one Hervey Walter who, in the time of Henry I., held Witheton or Weeton in AmoundernÍss, a small fee of the honour of Lancaster, the manor of Newton in Suffolk, and certain lands in Norfolk. In the great inquest of Lancaster lands that followed a writ of 1212, this Hervey, named as the father of Hervey Walter, is said to have given lands in his fee of Weeton to Orm, son of Magnus, with his daughter Alice in marriage.