Hugh de Moreville, Lord of Cumberland

• http://cybergata.com/roots/3008.htm

The first person recorded with this name in Scotland is Hugh de Morville. He came from the Burgh on the Sands, in Cumberland, sometimes around 1100, and acquired extensive possessions in Tweeddale, Lauderdale, the Lothianas, Clyesdale, and especially in Cunningham, Ayrshire. He also held the hereditary office of lord-high-constable of the kingdom. He was a witness to Inquisitis Daridis, 1116.

In 1140, Hugh de Morville founded the abbey of Kilwinning, in Cunningham. In 1150, he founded Dryburgh abbey. He died in 1162. By his wife, Beatrice de Beauchamp, he is said to have acquired still greater possession than his own. He had a son, Richard de Morvill, and a daughter who married Richard de Germin.

~The Scottish nation: he Scottish Nation: Or, The Surnames, Families, Literature, Honours, and Biographical History of the People of Scotland, Vol. III, pages 730-731

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_de_Morville,_Lord_of_Cunningham_a...

Hugh de Morville, Lord of Cunningham and Lauderdale (d.1162), from the Cotentin Peninsula, accompanied David I of Scotland to Scotland. Barrow ponders on "the rise in only one or at most two generations of an obscure knightly family from the unfashionable side of Normandy to the highest baronial rank in the Scottish realm."[2]

His parentage is said by some to be unclear, but G. W. S. Barrow, in his Anglo-Norman era states:

"it seems probable that the father of William, and the first Hugh de Morville, was the Richard de Morville who witnessed charters by Richard de Redvers for Montebourg and the church of St. Mary in the castle of Néhou in the early twelfth century."[1]

Quoted from Keith Stringer, ?Morville, Hugh de (d. 1162)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu:2048/view/artic..., accessed 25 May 2007]:

The constableship and the stewardship were the key lay offices to emerge from David I's refashioning of the royal household, the focal agency of government, and Morville's influence appears to have ensured his pre-eminence over the steward as the more senior figure at court and in the conduct of business. In wartime the constable was responsible with the earls for leading royal armies under the king, and Hugh may have been in post by 1138. He participated prominently in King David's invasions of northern England in that year, and was one of the five magnates, including three Scottish earls, compelled to surrender hostages under the Durham treaty of 1139. His first recorded appearance as constable, however, was on 1 November 1140; and, curiously, David's first known constable, Edward son of Siward, remained in office alongside Hugh until c.1144. When from 1141 David and his household switched from war enterprise to the political consolidation of the Scoto-Northumbrian realm, there is strong evidence that he entrusted Hugh de Morville with the strategically vital lordship of north Westmorland. Its caput was Appleby, where Hugh possibly built the twelfth-century keep. He also seems to have held superiority over Kendal or south Westmorland. He served Malcolm IV from 1153 as assiduously as he had David I, and he remained constable until his death or shortly before it, when he took the canonical habit at Dryburgh.

Hugh de Morville married Beatrice, one of the Beauchamps of Bedford, who figures in a famous anecdote by William of Canterbury. It tells how Beatrice succumbed to an illicit passion for a youth named Lithulf, and how, finding her advances rejected, she revenged herself by persuading Lithulf to come into her husband's presence with his sword drawn, in consequence of which he was condemned to be boiled alive. Little confidence can be placed in the historicity of this story.

Hugh and his Morville successors introduced into Scotland numerous fellow Anglo-Normans, several of whom founded notable Scottish dynasties, including the Haigs and the Sinclairs. But the Morville family failed in the male line in 1196, thirty-four years after the death of the elder Hugh, presumably at Dryburgh Abbey, in 1162.

Hugo de Morville, Constable of Scotland, was from Morville at Manche, Normandy.

He was tenant of the honour of Huntingdon between 1118 and 1129. He was founder of the abbeys of Kilwinning and Dryburgh. He was constable of Scotland after 1140.

Links

• See "My Lines" ( http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cousin/html/p371.htm#i25750 ) from Compiler: R. B. Stewart, Evans, GA ( http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cousin/html/index.htm )
• http://www.celtic-casimir.com/webtree/10/15374.htm
• http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/ENGLISHNOBILITYMEDIEVAL3L-O.htm#_To...
• Publications of the Bedfordshire historical record society. “Beauchamp of Bedford.” Page 8 Archive.Org Beatrice de Beauchamp, who married Hugh de Morville, may have been a sister of Miles and Payn. ..link
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_de_Morville,_Lord_of_Cunninghamww...

www.findagrave.com

Hugo Hugh de Morville
BIRTH 1100
Caen, Departement du Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France
DEATH 1162 (aged 61–62)
Scottish Borders, Scotland
BURIAL
Dryburgh Abbey
Melrose, Scottish Borders, Scotland
MEMORIAL ID 86805732

Hugh de Morville was a Norman knight who made his fortune in the service of David fitz Malcolm, Prince of the Cumbrians (1113–24) and King of Scots (1124–53).
Hugh came from Morville in the Cotentin Peninsula, territory controlled by David since it had been given to him by King Henry I of England some time after 1106. It must have been sometime soon after 1106 that Hugh joined David's small French household followers and military retinue. In 1113 David became Earl of Huntingdon-Northampton (by marriage) and Prince of the Cumbrians, after forcing his brother Alexander, King of Scots, to hand over territory in southern "Scotland". David achieved this with his French followers
David endowed Hugh with the estates of Bozeat and Whissendine from his Huntingdon earldom.
Hugh was also given the lordship of Appleby - essentially northern Westmorland. After the death of Edward, Constable of Scotland, almost certainly in 1138 at the Battle of the Standard, Hugh was given this position.
In 1150 Hugh made a further mark on the history of southern Scotland by founding Dryburgh Abbey for Premonstratensian canons regular. Hugh eventually retired there as a canon, soon before his death in 1162. An ancient memorial to him in the South wall is said to mark his burial-place.
Hugh married Beatrice, the heiress of Houghton Conquest, and daughter of Robert de Beauchamp, a son of Hugh de Beauchamp of Bedford. They had at least two sons and two daughters. Hugh de Morville, Lord of Westmorland, inherited his estates of north England. He was a principal player in the assassination of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. He subsequently fell out of favour with the king and was forfeited (1174) when the Lordship of Westmorland (which he had inherited from his father who had received it from David I) was granted to his sister, Maud, whose husband was William de Vieuxpont. Richard de Morville, possibly the second son, inherited the Scottish estates along with his father's lands in the honour of Huntingdon. He also successed in the constableship of Scotland. It has been proposed that Simon de Moreville (d. 1167), of Kirkoswald in Cumbria, who married Ada de Engaine, heiress of Burgh-by-Sands in Cumbria, was a son of Hugh and Beatrice. Before 1157, Hugh II's other sister, Ada married Roger Bertram, lord of Mitford, Northumberland

The memorial mentioned here does not mark the position of his grave, it was erected by the 11th Earl of Buchan when he owned the property. In the book annals and Antiquities of Dryburgh written by David Erskine, Buchan's son, states that Buchan said "This Chapter House contains the bones of the founders, which I found very entire in Sarcophagi, placed in the centre of its area - you may believe I did not disturb the ashes of the venerable dead, but I could not resist the curiosity of the living in taking out the remains of the great Constable's staff, which lay on the right side of Hugo de Morville, and a few of the beads of Beatrix de Beauchamp; calices that were of base metal, and mouldered by time, were upon their breasts, some of the fragments of which I also took away." However, it is not known if this is true and his actual burial place.
Anonymous
Family Members

Spouse
Beatrice de Beauchamp
1118–1170

Children
Ada De Morville De Ros
1131–1170