On Wednesday, March 2, 2016 at 4:25:35 PM UTC-8, Peter Stewart wrote:
>
> The pedigree is bogus beyond the line to Hamelin, as it starts with the
> misstatement that he was an illegitimate son of Henry II
Yeah, I din't worry about that since the it blew up before you ever got close.
> I doubt that any connection of the Warennes of Ightfield to the Norman
> seigneurs of Varenne could be proven.
Depending on what you mean by proven, there are as many as 4 breaks (going from memory - not at home right now):
1. The last (most recent) generations of Warenne of Ightfield are confused - the documentation doesn't match the pedigrees, and they used the same names too much to be perfectly clear who is whom. There can be little doubt that the later Ightfield Warennes descended from the earlier ones, but it is a bit of a muddle in between. One can produce a working reconstruction, but that is not the same as a proven line. (I posted on this problem here many years ago.)
2. If I recall correctly the connection between Ightfield and Whitchurch Warennes is reasonable, but I don't recall if there is specific documentation that raises to the level of proof.
3. The descent of the Whitchurch Warennes from the Domesday holder is again reasonable, but seemed a little bit like 'connect the dots' to me - it wouldn't surprise me if there was a missed generation, inheritance by a nephew, etc.
4. The Domesday holder, may well have been akin to the Varenne seigneurs. The naming pattern is consistent, but also makes proof near impossible, because there were too many of the same names (William, Ranulph, etc) to allow a person in a continental document to be definitively identified with the Domesday tenant (and a vassal family from Varenne would have drawn form the same name pool, so nothing short of an explicit statement of relationship would do).