General Notes

REFN: 5547AN
Baron De Leving, a Saxon nobleman, accompanied St. Margaret the Exile
when sh e arrived at the Court of King Edward the Confessor in 1057.
Edward the Atheli ng or “Royal Prince” (1016 – 1057) was the eldest son of
King Edmund (II) Iro nsiDe of England. He fled to Hungary during the reign
of Canute (1016 – 1035) where he married Agatha, daughter of King
Stephen. Their daughter, St. Marga ret the Exile, was born in Hungary in
1045. After the death of her father in 1057, St. Margaret arrived at the
English court of Edward the Confessor. With her came the forebearer of
the Livingstons, a Saxon nobleman named Baron De Leving. Ten years later
following the defeat of Harold Godwinson at Hastings in 1066, St.
Margaret was in exile again. This time, she fled to Scotland, an d
apparently, Baron De Leving accompanied her. St. Margaret married King
Ma lcolm (III) Cænmore of Scotland in 1068, and was canonised in 1250. Her
feast day in Scotland is November 16.
Perhaps Baron De Leving (or more likely his f orebearer) accompanied
Edward the Atheling into exile in the early 11th centu ry; for as Mr. E.B.
Livingston argues so convincingly in The Livingstons of C allendar, Baron
De Leving was doubtless of Saxon lineage. Mr. Livingston stat es:
“... in England, long before the Norman Conquest, the patronymic Leving,
Living or Lyfing, derived from Leofing, which in modern English means
‘the s on of Leof’ – namely ‘son of the Beloved’ – was borne by numerous
persons of rank and positon as their family or tribal name. It occurs as
early as the mi ddle of the ninth century as the name of one of the
witnesses to a charter of Berthwulf of Mercia; and the Archbishop of
Canterbury who crowned Edmund Iro nsiDe in 1016, and who likewise crowned
his rival and successor Canute a few months later, also bore that name.
So did another famous Saxon churchman, the Bishop of Crediton and
Worster, and the friend of Earl Godwine, who has come to us in the words
of the old Saxon chronicler as ‘Lyfing se wordsnotera bis cop,’ namely
‘Living the eloquesnt bishop’.
Besides these two great churchme n, there are many other persons bearing
this name mentioned in, or witness to , Anglo-Saxon charters; one of these
Levings or Livings being the Staller or Master of the Horse to Edward the
Confessor.”
Regardless of his origins, our lineage begins with Baron De Leving