De Birmingham family
family
The de Birmingham family (or de Bermingham) held the lordship of the manor of Birmingham in England for four hundred years and managed its growth from a small village into a thriving market town. They also assisted in the invasion of Ireland and were rewarded with the Barony of Athenry. They were stripped of most of their lands in England by the notorious John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who held sway over the young King Edward VI (1547–1553).
Ansculf
Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Norman soldier Ansculf de Picquigny (or Ausculph de Penchengi, etc.) was granted many manors in the county of Warwickshire, and elsewhere, centred upon Dudley Castle. The historian Sir William Dugdale identified Ansculf (whom he confused with his son William) as a great man in the time of the Conquest as evidenced by the extent of the lands granted to him, namely twenty-five lordships in Staffordshire, twenty in Buckinghamshire, fourteen in Worcestershire, ten in Berkshire, seven in Surrey, seven in Warwickshire, four in Northamptonshire, one in Middlesex, one in Oxfordshire, one in Huntingdonshire, one in Cambridgeshire.
By the time of the Domesday Book of 1086 Ansculf's lands had passed to his son William FitzAnsculf.
Paganel
William Fitz Ansculph's daughter (and possibly his heiress) Beatrice FitzWilliam FitzAnsculph? is believed to have married Fulk Paganel (or Paganell, Paynell, etc.) and thus their Paganell descendants inherited various Ansculph estates including Dudley castle the manor of Birmingham and Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire. The flow of large parts of the Fitz-Ausculph estate to the Paganells lends itself to the theory that William Fitz Ausculph died with no surviving male heirs and so gave his lands to his daughter and her Paganell heirs. Fulk Paganell was succeeded by his son Ralph Paganell who was in turn succeeded by his son Gervais Paganell, who took part in the unsuccessful rebellion against King Henry II in 1173, during which he was killed, his lands becoming forfeit to the crown and Dudley Castle being demolished.
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This entry incorporates text from “De Birmingham family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.