The other Norman line: Bunbury back to King Stephen

Not every discovery this month wore a crown, and one of the quietest has just turned into one of the oldest. It runs up the Lane side of the family, the Lanes of Lanespark in Tipperary, and it now reaches almost to the Conquest.

Colonel John Lane of Lanespark married, in 1727, Elizabeth Bunbury, daughter of Mathew Bunbury of Kilfeacle. The Bunburys had come to Ireland only two generations before her, when Benjamin Bunbury took lands at Killerig in Carlow in 1669. But their own line runs back across the sea to Bunbury and Stanney in Cheshire, and thanks to George Ormerod's great History of the County Palatine of Chester, checked against the heralds' visitations of 1580 and 1663, it now runs there with a name at every step.

Generation by generation the descent climbs: from John Bunbury, lord of Bunbury, Stanney and Occleston, who died about 1506, back through a Richard reported sick and so missing from the army that fought at Agincourt in 1415, through the lords who levied fines on the manor in the fourteenth century, to David, the first Lord of Stanney, and up at last to Henry de Boneberi, holding Bunbury in the reign of King Stephen, in the middle of the twelfth century. He is the first of the family the records name. Above him only one thing is said: that the Boneberis sprang from a younger son of the house of St Pierre in Normandy, who took the name of the manor for his own. That step the records assert but do not prove, so it is kept as what it is, an honest origin note and not a claim.

There is a footnote worth telling, because it is exactly the kind this research exists to catch. For a while the old pedigrees offered the Bunburys something grander: a marriage into the Malpas family that would have carried the line back to the Welsh princes of Powys, and through them to William Marshal and a shelf of royal blood. It was tempting, and it was wrong. Ormerod is plain that the Hugh de Bunbury who married the Malpas heiress belonged to a different branch, the senior St Pierre of Cause line, not our Bunbury cadet. So the Welsh crown has been set down again, honestly, before it was ever really picked up. The family keeps the twelfth-century lord it can prove and lets go the prince it cannot.

Elizabeth Bunbury's line comes down through the Lanes to the Whites and the Joneses, and so to my father's grandmother, and so to here. It is a smaller story than a High King. But a documented Cheshire descent to the reign of King Stephen, with a red herring caught and thrown back, is the shape of the best finds on this side of the family.