Sir John atte Wode, Knt. - Knights in the atte Wode line

This is the link to volume 1

https://archive.org/details/knightsofengland01shawuoft

The Wikipedia page has citations to chase

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Atte_Wode

Atwood, Elijah Francis, Ye Atte Wode Annals, Sisseton, SD: Atwood publishing Co., June 1928

Got a very good review here

https://journals.psu.edu/wph/article/download/3262/3093

William Shaw says in the preface of his book, Knights Of England A Complete List...that he spent four of the worst years of his life sorting and compiling the records of names of those men knighted from the earliest records to his current time, but that the records he found from many sources were: in such a mess that they are woefully inaccurate, incomplete, and in some cases false. Large portions of the records of knighthood have been left out, he says, and he invites anyone to fine missing names and add them to public records. So the "complete list" is far from complete and in accurate. It is no wonder the the dates when knighthood was bestowed on Sir Wm. Atte Wode and other knights is unknown.

I have found the names of two knight in my husband's ancestry, Sir William Atte Wode and Sir John Atte Wode. Has any one else found knights in the Atwood/Atte Wode line?

Error, it should say "Complete Record."

Part of the problem is that before the Tudors, the rule was that "any (and only a) knight can make a knight", which means that Shaw, and we, are dependent on extant records to determine who was referred to as a "knight", and in many cases the circumstances of knighting can no longer be found. (He left off Sir Thomas Malory, who was indisputably knighted, because it can not be determined when, where, or by whom.)

The Tudors, starting with Henry VII, made the granting of knighthood an exclusive prerogative of the Crown (militant orders, e.g. the Hospitalers, excepted). This simplified record-keeping, except that the records are still spotty down to 1600 or so.

A knight's wife is referred to as "Lady." However the honorific Lady can also refer to the wife of a Lord. I had heard that the lord and lady of a manor, or other estate, was not necessarily a noble. I had not heard that a knight could dub another a knight. I was under the impression that only nobles and royals could bestow knighthood. I learn something new, (and in this case old).

What is a hedge knight?

A hedge knight is something George R.R. Martin thought up. It's loosely based on the 12th century practice of knights who weren't in service to somebody going out on the tournament circuit to try to make names for themselves.

One of them did, a fellow called William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke.

He's the reason King Richard the Lionheart is only the *second*-best fighter of the 12th century - they met head to head once, when Richard was still just a Prince and up in arms against his father, and William won. Then he loyally served Richard *and* his no-good brother John, and helped keep England from falling to pieces under their misrule. His last service to the kingdom was actually in the 13th century, when he secured the throne for John's underage son, Henry III - this involved running Frenchmen out of England at the age of 70.

Back to Sir John Atte Wode... His father is said to be James Atte Wode. And the name changed to Atwood and other spellings in later generations.There are also several spellings to the given name and surname of his mother: Isabel, Isabella, de Mule, De Muals and others. Which names used in the Atwood Annals for this generation? Isabel Atwood is said to be my husband's 13th grandmother.

The upper reaches of this tree are suspect, and there is at least one place where the parents are probably wrong (Sir William Atte Wode, d. c. 1346 - cited as the son-IN-LAW, not son, of Peter Atte Wode and Alice - which means Juliana, his wife, was the "Atte Wode" and he wasn't).

The derivation of "Atte Woode" from "Wyckhurst" is *highly* suspect, because the elements do *not* match - whoever provided that "information" was very ignorant. "Wyck" = "wich" = "village"(hat tip to philologist JRR Tolkien and the derivation of "Gamgee"), and "hurst" = a low hill - so "Wyckhurst" actually meant "(from the) village on the hill".

Furthermore, "Atte" in a Middle English surname is usually an indicator of a family that scrambled its way up the social ladder from a position of no importance. It was *never* synonymous with "De" (which is Norman - "Atte" is Saxon), and would only be treated so by someone wanting to give themselves or their ancestors undeserved airs. (There has been a lot of that over the centuries, starting well before Tudor times.)

re: a Hedge Knight: It's also where the term "Freelance" (from free lance) came from. (see: the Greatest Knight, by Thomas AsBridge.

"Free lance" is actually much later and probably comes from the "condottiere" period (13th-15th centuries). It hasn't been traced back in print farther than 1716 (and even that is arguable, since most sources will credit its coinage to Sir Walter Scott).

"Hedge knight" is a totally modern coinage - if it were authentically medieval, you may be sure Malory would have used it to describe one or more of his villainous robber-knights. He does not.

Not to put too fine a point on it, "hedge knight" is probably a back-formation from "hedge wizard", an expression that has its roots in fantasy fiction and fantasy roleplaying games.

It's easy to get careless with popular terms that you think are older than they really are, but too blatant a misuse will hit the alert reader like a brick to the head. (Katherine Kurtz bricks the reader *at least* once per Deryni novel. Ursula LeGuin was right to call her out on her insensitivity to language.)

I believe the Atte Wode / AtteWode / Atwood family became landed gentry or yeomen, who acquired much of their wealth as soldiers that collected plunder, and recognition for valor in battle. Since it is not known when they were knighted, and they gained the position of body guards of kings, it seem the most logical for their climb in social circles.

Interesting conversation. Thank you.

Yeomen were *not* gentry, they were freeholders who owned their own land (sometimes a lot of it). Getting into the gentry required owning land, having money, being around long enough that all the locals started to look up to you, and - most importantly - acquiring a coat of arms.

This was easier in earlier, less formal times, when someone with the land, money and respect could get away with designing his own. But by the late 14h century the rules had started to codify, see the "Scrope vs Grosvenor" case" - and in the second half of the 16th century and into the 17th the College of Arms started making random sweeps (the "Visitations") to check up on which families were entitled to bear arms (and with which differences), and which weren't. They tended to go easy on people who could present a pedigree showing at least three generations of using the same arms, but anyone who couldn't meet even that low standard got fined and his name got written down so he couldn't try to sneak by again.

The College of Arms also could, and would, design and register arms for men who had made (a lot of) money and wanted to buy respectability. They made notes of that too.

Some of the more venal heralds would even help people *fake* a pedigree to justify a coat of arms - usually New Money upstarts with a name similar to an Old Aristocracy family that had faded from the scene. (One of the Garter Kings of Arms did exactly that for himself and *his* family!)

A footnote for Colonial families that bears repeating: the College of Arms never had any jurisdiction over the Colonies, and as soon as people figured *that* out - which didn't take long - they started assuming arms to their liking whether they had any right to them or not (often they didn't).

That, by the by, is how the (George) Washington family came to use the arms of the (by then extinct in the main male line) Washingtons of County Durham. George's ancestors are thought to have been a cadet branch that migrated down into the Midlands via Lancashire, but the proofs have always been on the sketchy side and their position in the order of precedence is uncertain. Nobody in the Colonies was going to argue the point, though.

Atte is sliding together “at” and “the” (Middle English).

From https://www.reddit.com/r/OldEnglish/comments/85d0kv/what_does_the_w...

I actually just finished reading a book called Life in a Medieval Village, and in one chapter, it discussed the surnames of some villagers. The other commenter was right in saying that is a toponymic surname, with the literal meaning of “at the [place]” (examples from the book would be Atte Bridge and Atte Mill).

The Atte Wode/Atwood, and generations in between, used the oak and/or acorns as their personal arms until John Atwood aka Wood lost his inheritance and settled in New England in the 1600's. Members of a family could have a coat of arms with a slight variation for each individual in any generation, but not all of them were knighted. The Atte Wode/Atwood family did acquire a lot of land and built large estates called Hooley House and Sandersted (spelling? I don't have the book now) and other property in Surrey, England during the 1300's. From what I have read in the Atwood Anneals they spent a lot of time in the service of the kings during the Hundred Years War, at which time they gained a lot of wealth. They went from yeomen in the early 1300's to landed gentry in the later 1300's.

It was said that "the derivation of Atte Woode from Wychurst is suspect". There is an easy explanation for the name change by Charles Gilbert in his, A Historical History Survey of the County of Cromwell: To which..., Vol. 2, part 1, page 462. Gilbert say "it was a custom of the early period" to change their name, when a family moved from one location to another. Wychurst is a combination of "wic', a village, and 'hurst,' a hill, therefore a village on a hill. And 'Atte' combines "at the," and 'wode' also 'wood' means forest. This indicated that the family moved from a village on a hill to the edge of a forest. Not all surnames were set prior to the 1400's.

There is that - and there's also the "son-IN-LAW" discrepancy stated by Wikipedia. Now, Wiki isn't authoritative by any stretch of the imagination, but I've encountered a number of cases (some in my own lines) where somebody married into a family *and took their name in preference to his own*.

What are the *primary* sources prior to Sir William "Atte Wode" ?

The footnotes and references were printed in too small a font for me to read.

This is a useful discussion

https://www.ancestry.com/boards/surnames.atwood/593.1/mb.ashx

Names were also changed when the meaning of a name changed and/or the name acquired an unpleasant association to another word such as Death and Hoar.
The surname Death, (originally Deeth) became a surname when an actor often played the role of death. Another name, Hoar, like the name Bald, meant venerable, and white with age. In a branch of my husband's family, Death was legally changed to Dickinson in the 1800's, (they are cousins of the poet, Emily Dickinson). When the Atwood family came to America, some of the family kept the Atwood name, some branches shortened the name to Wood, and some changed back and forth between Atwood, and Wood. Our branch of the family has been Wood since the 1600's.

It appears that I miss-remembered the meaning of Wychurst, a dwelling at a wooded knoll.

Thank you Erica for posting the link to the Atwood message board. It was suggested that more could be learned about the Wood and Atwood linage by comparing DNA. My husband has been tested by FTDNA for Y to level 37, and he has joined the Atwood group at FTDNA. We have a paper trail, and would like to find cousins to compare notes and DNA. A lot of our paper trail has been posted on the LDS site, and Geni. We believe that our Wood line is accurate, and have merged Atwood to our Wood line. The sources which we have used for American ancestry include but are not limited to: census records, vital records, wills, deeds; town registries of birth, deaths, and marriages, DAR registry, Revolutionary War Pension Rolls, Mayflower Society records, History of the Town of Prescott Massachusetts, History of the Town of Middleboro Massachusetts, by T. Weston, and other sources to prove our Wood line. Our male ancestors are well documented from current time through the 1600's. The Atwood portion of the line is harder to follow, especially the wives.

R.. Stepan's post is confusing because he does not have the names of the Atwood family (in various spellings), in chronological order. The family property goes in and out of several hands, and generations are left out. Ye Atte Wode Annals, by Elijah Frances Atwood, gives a more accurate linage, if I remember correctly.

" Ye Atte Wode Annals" has a publication date of 1928, and was apparently privately published, both of which are caution flags. Hathitrust has what appears to be a flawed copy online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89066453234;view=1up;seq=1, but even so there isn't a clear line of ancestry pastward of Nicholas Atwood in Elizabethan times.

There is also no explanation of the Wikipedia claim of "son-in-law" for Sir William Atte Wode, unless it was on what appears to be a missing page. (How annoying!)

There is also an earlier history of the Atwood family, but I do not have access to it now.

Elijah’s book is on line at Ancestry

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=14922

Ancestry.com. Ye Atte Wode annals, October 1929 [database on-line]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.
Original data: Atwood, Elijah Francis,. Ye Atte Wode annals, October 1929 : giving English history, descendants of Harman, Henry, John, Philip, Stephen, Thomas of Ipswich and Thomas of Wethersfield, sketch of John and James Astwood, of Henry Wood of Leyden and the story of Joshua 4 Bradford and the Indians, etc., with special articles bringing branches to date. Sisseton, S.D.: Atwood Pub. Co., 1929?.

Give me where you’re curious & I’ll try a page or two.

Based on the 1974 book review I posted earlier, it’s a “best of breed” book, including that he’s honest & admits what he doesn’t know.

Have you tried mining soc.gen.medieval ?