Sir Robert Neville, Kt.

Find A Grave Memorial# 135891519

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135891519/robert-neville

The Neville family is first attested decades after the Norman conquest of England and Domesday Book, which did not cover County Durham, the area of their earliest recorded landholdings. Following the conquest most of the existing aristocracy of England were dispossessed and replaced by a new Norman ruling elite, but the male line of the Nevilles was of native origin, and the family may well have been part of the pre-conquest aristocracy of Northumbria. The continuation of landowning among such native families was more common in the far north of England than further south.

The family can be traced back to one Uhtred, whose son Dolfin is first attested in 1129, holding the manor of Staindrop (formerly Stainthorp) in County Durham, which shared with a vast church estate and some limited common in 14,000 acres (5,700 ha). This locality remained the principal seat of the family until 1569, their chief residence being at Raby in the north of the parish of Staindrop, where in the 14th century they built the present Raby Castle. Dolfin was succeeded by his son Meldred and he in turn by his son Robert fitz Meldred, who married the Norman heiress Isabel de Néville. Their son Geoffrey inherited the estates of his mother's family as well as his father's, and adopted their surname, which was borne by his descendants thereafter. In Norman-ruled England a Norman surname was more prestigious and socially advantageous than an English one. Already before the Néville marriage the family was a major power in the area: "In the extent of their landed possessions this family, holding on obdurately to native names for a full hundred years after 1066, was pre-eminent among the lay proprietors within the bishopric of Durham during the twelfth century".

In the 16th century the Nevilles claimed that their ancestor Uhtred was descended from Crinan of Dunkeld, ancestor of the Scottish royal House of Dunkeld. As well as prestigious ancient connections with the royal families of both England and Scotland, this claim entailed a line of descent from the Bamburgh dynasty of Earls of Northumbria, attaching the Nevilles' later power in the north to a pedigree of pre-eminence in the region stretching back at least as far as the early 10th century. Modern genealogists have put forward a variety of different speculative theories to connect Uhtred with his purported forebears, but none of these is supported by any direct evidence.