Sir Alured de Valer

See https://web.archive.org/web/20140902013135/http://mysite.verizon.ne... for his history. Fought in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and was alive at the time of the Doomsday Book in 1086.

A Norman knight who came over to England with William the Conqueror, fought at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, was granted land in England for hismilitary services and whose name is in The Domesday Book.Norman knight who came over to England with William the Conqueror,

fought at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, was granted land in England for his military services

and whose name is in The Domesday Book

Generation 1, Alured de Valer, a Norman knight who came over to England with William the Conqueror, fought at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, was granted land in England for his military services and whose name is in The Domesday Book.

Norman knight, came to England with William the Conqueror. Fought at Battle of Hastings 14 Oct 1066. Granted land in Nottinghamshire for military services. Granted land in England for military service for the Conqueror Name is in the Domesday Book. Black shield bore three gold walnut leaves between narrow silverstripes. Tall, powerful with a swarthy complexion.

Almost all the Wallers in the world are descendants of the people listedbelow. (see origins of the Wallers on the English Page) Generation 1, Alured de Valer, a Norman knight who came over toEngland with William the Conqueror, fought at the Battle of Hastings onOctober 14, 1066, was granted land in England for his military servicesand whose name is in The Domesday Book. Generation 2 and 3, Unknown de Valers. Statements have appeared inprint that Alured de Valer fought with William the Conqueror in theBattle of Hastings, 14 Oct. 1066; was given land in England for hismilitary service; that his name is recorded in The Domesday Book(published in 1086) and that he died in 1183. Now, since there is aspread of 117 years from the Battle of Hastings to the year 1183, itseems clear that the same person could not have taken part in that battle and lived until 1183.

Before 1066

In my opinion, John Dickey has done the best job to date ofdescribing the Waller origins. His book is highly recommended reading forany Waller researcher. It is out of print but the Mormons have it onmicrofilm. Go to a Family History Center near you. (ask at any Church ofLatter Day Saints) When you get to the FHC tell the nice Mormon Sister that you want thefollowing microfilm: number 1321014, item number 8, Title, "Waller, Afamily History" by John Dickey.She will help you fill out a card, chargeyou $2.75 and there will be a 7-10 day wait while it is shipped from SaltLake City. These ladies are wonderful. They will call you when theyreceive it and teach you how to use a microfilm reader if you needassistance. After the time of Charlemagne, who was crowned in 800 A.D., WesternEurope was besieged with a second wave of incursions by Vandals andNorsemen and, for nearly 300 years, orderly government practicallyceased. It was in the year 911 A.D., when sea rovers from Scandinavia, under Rollo, their leader, sailed their viking ships into the estuary ofthe River Seine to establish what would become a mighty state, the Duchyof Normandy,They called themselves "Normans", a softened form of "Norsemen". Intheir new environment, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more thanall, of the knowledge and refinement of the Latin people they found inthe new country. They established domestic order, long unknown in theFrench Empire. They took up Christianity and thereby tapped the greatestreservoir of learning to be found in the Medieval World, the writings ofthe Clergy. They abandoned their native speech and adopted the OldFrench, in which Latin was the dominant element. They quickly raised thenew language to a dignity and importance it had never known. Theyestablished it in writing , in poetry and in romance. The Normans lived in a state of polite luxury, in contrast to thecoarse vulgarity that existed all about them. They displayed theirmagnificence, not in riotous living, but in large stately edifices, richarmour, gallant horses and a spirit of chivalry which found it's highestexaltation in the Norman Knights, distinguished for grace of bearing andmilitary adroitness. In the Duchy of Normandy, the social system was based on the conceptof a warrior aristocracy, animated by ideas of chivalry, knit together ina system of military service, rewarded by titles to land. Theassociation of land with fighting power, the acceptance of Papalauthority and the rise of cavalry, composed of steel-clad knights and nobles mounted onwell-trained horses, brought Normandy to a dominant position in war, andnew forces were created which could not only conquer, but also rule.

Such was the home of the Valer clan and it's distinguished son,Alured de Valer, whose black shield bore three gold walnut leaves betweentwo narrow silver stripes, who was destined to join battle under Williamthe Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, that fateful day in October, 1066. William took advantage of a quarrel over the throne of Anglo-SaxonEngland to attack. The ensuing battle of Hastings was so decisive that itis impossible to reckon our history without those fateful four hours.When darkness fell on October 14, 1066, William had earned the lastingtitle of "Conqueror" and a new flow of concepts began that wouldinfluence men's lives for centuries to come. The Battle of Hastings is well recorded by chroniclers, who weregenerally Monks, working in both prose and poetry, but not the least ofthese records is the 231 foot long Bayeux Tapestry, a mammoth piece ofembroidery, stitched with colored wool threads on a linen background,said to have been made by William's wife, Matilda, and now displayed inthe Cathedral of Bayeux, which was consecrated only 11 years after thebattle. Thanks to this tapestry, we may surmise that the Valers ofNormandy, in 1066, were tall, powerful men with swarthy complexions anddark hair which was shaved from the back of the head to a line slightlyabove the tops of the ears. As trusted vassals of the Duke and capable fighters, they held ample landed estates,worked by their own serfs, while they lived in feudal splendor.

After Hastings, the Normans introduced into England their system ofland tenure based on military service, and William seems to have beengenerous with his knights in apportioning the spoils of war. In theyears following the Conquest, a few hundred Norman barons took over thelands of more than 4000 Anglo-Saxons. Land was the major form of wealth.Let it never be said that the Conquest was not profitable to theConquerors! Norman and Anglo-Saxon customs were combined in such a way to makethe best use of each, while avoiding the chief disadvantages. The Englishcounties or "shires" had been established by the Saxons and William theConqueror recognized these political subdivisions, but established hisown control over them by appointment of the sheriffs. As a royal official,the sheriff looked after the King's interests in his county by attendingthe county courts, collecting taxes for the King. This is of interestbecause, as we shall see, the office of Sheriff was often held by amember of the Waller Family.

The conquest had a profound and lasting effect on the Englishlanguage. The Norman nobles were the aristocracy of the land and held allpositions of honor and profit. At first, they held a deep contempt forthe Saxon population, which was returned with ardor, and clung to theLatin-French of their native Normandy. Latin remained the language of law and businessfor several generations, but though it was a powerful medium ofexpression, Normans began to find advantages in the short Saxon words,often developed from physical sounds they represented. Gradually, the tworaces mingled and inter-married and differences disappeared. The resultof the fusion of the two languages has been to make Modern English therichest and most powerful language of all times. The blending of the languages affected the spelling of the Wallername. To begin with, there was no "W" in either medieval Latin or OldFrench. To confirm this we find the name of William the Conqueror, whenit appears on the Bayeux Tapestry, spelled variously as, "Vvillelm,Vvilgelm", etc. In the Square of Falaise, birthplace of William theConqueror, in present day France, there stands a bronze statue of him onwhich his name is spelled "Guillaume Le Conquerant".

Webster's New World Dictionary has this to say about the letter W:"W, the 23rd letter of the English alphabet. Its sound was represented inAngle-Saxon times by 'uu' until about 900 A.D., then by a characterborrowed from the runic alphabet of the ancient Scandinavians called the"wen". In the 11th Century, a ligatured VV or W was introduced by Norman scribes toreplace the wen. No doubt this change took place in the years followingthe Conquest, as the fusion of the Latin-French of Normandy with theSaxon-English language was under way. Thus, we find justification for the acceptance of the name "Valers", as it appears on the Roll of BattleAbbey, and "Alured de Valer" as it appears in the Domesday Book. It wasnot until the time of Thomas Waller, who lived from about 1330 to 1390and was a four-times-great grandson of the Veteran of Hastings, that thefusion of the languages overtook the family. It was Thomas who purchased the oldSaxon Castle of Groombridge in County Kent in the year 1360, settled thefamily there and modernized the name of de Valer to Waller.

As we all know in Biblical times people only had one name. Thiscustom persisted in Greece and Rome until after the decline of RomanCivilization. With the revival of learning, or about the time of theCrusades, the need arose for family names which would identifyindividuals with greater certainty than single names. One of the veryfirst types of family names was derived from the land people owned orlived upon, or else, some geographical feature of their home-place. Atfirst, these were not hereditary surnames at all, but ratheridentification by which one could be recorded and differentiated from hisneighbors or other people. Often it was the Clergy who gave people these surnames in a time when few people could read or write. Frequently, thepeople so named by the Clergy wouldn't know anything about it at thetime. We believe this to be the way the name of Waller was developed: Inthe Latine and Old French, "Val, Valis" denoted a valley or, moreparticularly, land lying within a broad watershed. The suffix "-er", inOld French, was added to a noun to mean "a person having something to do with". Thus, the nameVal-er meant "of, or having something to do with a valley" in which theclan lived in Normandy.

In the years following the Conquest, there were countlesscontroversies among the new masters of England over the titles to theirland and how these fitted into the Anglo-Saxon laws and customs. Also,in 1085 William the Conqueror was threatened with another invasion ofEngland by the Danes, he desperately needed taxes and the assurance ofthe loyalty of his subjects. The tangled claims to land represented apoor tax base. Thus, William instituted a vast sworn inquiry into thewhole wealth of his feudal vassals. The inquest and description wascarried out with a degree of minuteness unique in that era and unequaledfor centuries to come. The results were published by scribes, in the year1086, twenty years after Hastings, as "The Domesday Book", in the 59thand next to the last year of William's life. This should explain and justify the reference to TheDomesday Book made in the opening paragraph of this work.