General Notes

Margaret, wife of Hugh Sargent, was daughter of Nicholas and Agnes (Masters) Gifford, of the Abbey of St. James, which was a western suburb of the town of Northampton. This abbey was a religious estate of considerable note, founded before the year 1112, by William Peverel, natural son of William the Conqueror, and to which he (Peverel) gave forty acres of land. It is called St. James End.

From the section titled "Genealogical Research in England: Gifford-Sargent - From A Genealogical Chart in the Parish Registers of Courteenhall, Co. Northampton"; Contributed by G. Andrews Moriarty, Jr., A.M., LL.B., of Newport, R.I., and communicated by the Committee on English Research (appearing in Vol. 75, Jan. 1921, New England Historic and Genealogical Register, p. 59):

The following pedigree, based on the records already given in this article and on other records and authorities cited below, shows the descent of William Sargent of Malden, Mass., from John Gifford le Boef of Twyford, co. Bucks, in 1277, and traces the probable ancestry of John Gifford le Boef to Osbern de Bolebec, a Norman lord, whose sons settled in England in the time of William the Conqueror. It corrects in some important particulars the account of the family of the Giffards of Twyford contained in the late Maj. Gen. the Hon. George Wrottesley's "Giffards from the Conquest to the Present Time," published in 1902 in the Collections of The William Salt Archaeological Society, New Series, vol. 5, as well as certain errors in the printed Visitations of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire and in the pedigree entered in the Heralds' College in the reign of Queen Elizabeth by Thomas Gifford, son of Sir George. It supplies, also, some corrections and additions to the Gifford pedigree published in the Register, vol. 71, pages 174-175, and includes the corrections which, as is found by an examination of the registers of the parishes of All Saints, Northampton, and of Courteenhall, should be made in the statements about the English Sargents in the early part of the "Sargent Genealogy."

The Giffard-Gifford family is one of the most ancient and distinguished families of England. Planche, in his work entitled "The Conqueror and his Companions," describes Walter Giffard the Elder (vide infra, 1, i) as "the progenitor of a race from which the noblest families in England may be proud to trace their descent." The Gifford family of Twyford, co. Bucks, which sprang from a cadet of the great house of Brimsfield, co. Gloucester, was one of the most ancient families of the Buckinghamshire gentry. During the Middle Ages members of this family held lands in capite and served as high sheriffs, knights of the shire, commissioners of the peace, and arrayers for the French wars. They also did their part in the Scottish, Welsh, and French wars. In the Wars of the Roses they appear to have adhered to the House of York. In Tudor times George Gifford, of the younger branch, settled at Middle Claydon, co. Bucks, was the right-hand man of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, in the dissolution of the monasteries, and saw to it that his family profited by his activities and that his brothers were well provided for out of the monastic spoils.

In the early history of the Twyford family its fortunes were greatly increased by the marriage of Sir John Gifford le Boef (vide infra, 11), about the year 1300, with Alexandra de Gardinis, heiress of the De Gardinis family, which brought to its part of the lands of the ancient Norman house of De Arsic, one of whose coheiresses was the great-grandmother of Alexandra and a descendant of William de Arsic, one of the eight knights appointed by William de Fiennes, in the reign of William the Conqueror, to the custody or guard of Dover Castle. By the marriage of Thomas Gifford of Twyford (vide infra, 15) with Alianora Vaux the family became connected with the great Lancastrian family of Vaux of Harrowden, co. Northampton, one of whose members was raised to the peerage by Henry VIII. In the reign of Elizabeth the younger branches sank into the ranks of the minor gentry and merchant class, one of the daughters marrying into the mercantile family of the Sargents of Courteenhall and Northampton, from which sprang William Sargent, the settler in Malden, Mass.