According to the genealogy of the Suffolk family of Bacon, one Grimald, or Grimaldus, a relative of the Norman chieftain, William de Warrenne, came to England in 1066 at the time of the Conquest and settled near Holt, in County Suffolk. His son, or Great Grandson Robert, took the surname Bacon, or rather assumed the use of the place-name as a surname. In the north of France the surname Bacon is still in use. William Bacon in 1082 endowed the Abbey of Holy Trinity at Caen. The surname Bacon is found in the Battle Rolls in England in the eleventh century and in the Hundred Rolls in the thirteenth. There are occasional variations in spelling, such as Bacun and Bachun, and in some instances the surname Bacon may have been corrupted from Beacon. Some derive the surname from the Saxon baccen or baccen, a beech tree.
Much of the source data for the early Bacon ancestry is taken from "The Bacon Genealogy" by Thomas W. Baldwin (1915) as quoted from "The Baronetage of England" by Kimber and Johnson published in 1801. Also from the "Cleveland Genealogy" by Edmund James Cleveland and Horace Gillette Cleveland. The direct line which follows is based on a chart by Mrs Eliza Buckingham Bacon of New Haven which is taken from the Bacon Genealogy by Thomas W. Baldwin, 1915. It differs somewhat from that contained in the grant of a coat of arms made to Sir Nicholas Bacon in 1568, however, in the same book from which an extract of the grant was taken is a table of the family of Bacon from Grimbaldus to Robert, father of Sir Nicholas which with the exception of one or two of the earlier generations is in accord with this line.