Sir William II Malet Lord of Curry-Malet

  Information about this person:

• Background Information. ¹⁶⁰
~Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700, 8th Edition, 234A:27-28, 261:32, William Malet was an adult by 1196, as well as the Baron of Curry Malet, Somerset, Sheriff of Somerset and Doreset in 1209 and one of the Magna Charta Surities of 1215. He was the father of Hawise Malet and Mabel Malet by his first unknown wife. He married, as his second wife, Alice Basset, daughter and coheir of Thomas Basset by his wife Philippa Malbank. His widow, Alice, married as her second husband, John Biset. William Malet's parents were Gilbert Malet and Alice Picot, daughter of Ralph Picot.

• Background Information. ⁸²¹
William Malet had one son named William and three daughters Hawise, Mabel and Bertha. William served King Richard, 1195, in Normandy, and later served King John in 1214 in Poitou. William was among the barons who rebelled against King John, and was one of the twenty-five Barons elected to make sure John observed the Magna Charta. William died sometime before 1219.

~Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry, p. 549

• Background Information: Taken from Notices of an English Branch of the Malet Family, by Arthur Malet, pp. 77-83, titled "William Malet of curry malet and Shepton Malet:." ⁹⁵⁶

William, the last of the Barons Malet of Somerset, succeeded his father Gilbert some time after 1189. The exact date is not known, but he must have been in possession 1196, for we learn from Sir A.M.'s MSS., vol. i, sup., p. 36, that he was in Normandy with King Richard in 1195, and that in the ensuing year he paid £100 for livery of his inheritance, probably not very long after the death of his father. He married Alicia, the daughter of Thomas Lord Basset, of whose family we learn [Stubb, Constitutional History of England, vol. I, cap. X, p. 313] that 'in subordination to Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, Henry [the First] raised up a set of novi homines, many of whom were, in nobility of blood, below the ideal standard of the ruling race, but who, though not among the tenants in chief of Domesday, were of good Norman descent; of these Geoffrey de Clinton and Ralph Basset were two of Henry's principal justices; the latter founded a great legal family.'

"With his wife he received as her dower the Manor of Coliton in Devon. A deed of gifts by her to the religious house of Bradley in Wilts, bears a seal consisting of a circle in which are two seals with the ends opposite to one another; the upper shield has the arms of Malet, viz., ermine, a lion passant; the second is barry wavy for Basset; round the seal is inscribed 'Sigillum Aliciae Malet, filiae Thomae Basset.' By his wife William Malet had two daughters, his co-heiresses, Mabel and Helewise." [Other sources say she couldn't have been the mother of these children.]

"Mabel, one of his co-heiresses, married Hugh de Vivonia, and was by him an ancestress of the Beauchamps, for [Sir A.M.'s MSS., vol. i, sup. 2, p. 40] their son William de Vivonia, called "de Fortibus," married Matilda de Kyme, daughter of one of the heirs of Sibylla de Ferrariis, one of the daughters, heirs of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. Their eldest daughter married Reginald Fitzpeter, son of Mathew, Lord of Wolverton. Their second daughter Cecilia, the eventual heiress, married John de Bellecampo of Somerset. It is from the deed of recognition of her service due to the Abbot of Glastonbury as inheriting the possessions of William Baron Malet, that we learn what service had been done to the Abbey from the barons of that name. . . . From this union, three generations intervening, came Cicely, one of the coheiresses of John Beauchamp, Lord of Hache. Of her marriage with Sir Roger Seymour sprang, after six generations, Jane Seymour[Froude, History of England, Vol. III, p. 260], Queen of Henry VIII, the mother of Edward VI, and her brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England.

"Helewise, the other daughter and co-heiress of William, married Hugh Poyntz; and secondly, Robert Mucegros. From the first marriage descended the rest of the distinguished family of that name. In the Malet pedigree drawn up in the Herald's College, in the next three generations the representative of the Poyntz family is styled Lord of Cory Malet. This leads to the supposition that Helewise must have been William Lord Malet's eldest daughter, as Cory Malet being held of the King in capite must have been the principal holding, and would naturally have descended to the senior co-heiress.

"The public life of William Lord Malet was very distinguished. It may be that he as Willus: Malet de Gerarville was one of the twenty-eight nobles who swore to the observance of the treaty between Richard I and the Count of Flanders in 1197 [Rymer, Fadæra, Vol. I, p. 68, A.D. 1197, 8 Ric. I]. But M. Andre' Borle' d'Hauterive in the Revue Historique' de la Noblesse [André d'Hauterice, Tom. I, p. 375] claims this signature as that of William the son of Ernest Malet; but as he claims this son of Ernest to be also the signatory to the Magna Carta, I hardly know what authority to attribute to him.

"I learn nothing more of William Malet in the reign of Richard, but in 4 John, A.D. 1204 [Sir A. M.'s MSS., vol. I, sup. I, p. 38], he paid to the King one hundred shillings for liberty to sue Wm. de Evermue for the Lordship of Swinton. In 1211 he was made Sheriff of Dorset and Somerset, which office he held for nearly four years. To this period the acknowledgment of service due to the Priory of Bruton by Henry de Careville must belong [Sir Will. Pole's MSS.]. In 15 John, A.D. 1214, he served the King with ten knights and twenty soldiers in discharge of some pecuniary liability to the Crown, which however was not fully defrayed, for we find an order in the 3rd year of Henry III directing that payment of 2,000 marks be required from Hugh de Vivonia and Robert Mucegros his sons-in-law, but allowing a deduction of £50 for the services of the aforesaid knights and soldiers.

"In 1215 William Malet was one of the twenty-five Barons names as guarantors for the due observance by King John of the Magna Carta. Then followed the war with the King, the calling in of aid from France, and the termination of the dissensions by the death of John in his march northwards. William Malet's estates had been confiscated, and he himself, with thirty other nobles, was personally excommunicate by the Pope [Rymer, Fadæra, Vol. I, P. I, p. 139]. I know not if he recovered all of his confiscated possessions during his lifetime, which must have closed at the beginning of the reign of Henry III, but there is an extract from a deed of this Baron by which he gives for the good of his soul land in Cumpton and Baddekera to the convent of Athelwine, in which he designates himself as William Malet son of Gilbert Malet; and among the witnesses are his two brothers Robert and Ralph. It is not improbable that this deed was executed shortly before his death, and if so he must have been in possession. In Sir A.M.'s MSS. [Vol. I, sup. I, p. 39] there is an entry of Sir Wm. Pole's, but I do not know on what authority that "Baron W. Malet being in arms against K. John, much of his lands in Somerset, Dorset, and Surrey were given to Hugh de Vivonia; and Dadington, com: Oxon: to Thos. Basset, whose daughter Alice he had married having with her that Lordship; but having afterwards made his peace, 9 Henry II [A.D. 1225], his lands were given to the husbands of his daughters after his death. 'I cannot reconcile this date with that in KK 7 [reference to his Appendix], which gives the date 3 Henry III, A.D. 1219, to the requisition on the sons-in-law to pay the debt owed by William Malet to the Crown, a demand which could not have been made until they had come into possession of the property after the death of their father-in-law.

"Collinson [Vol. iii, p. 462] informs us that Curry Malet, where they had a castle, was the principal residence of the Barons Malet. Curry Malet was held in capite of the King, and Shepton Malet of the Abbot of Glastonbury. Roger de Corcelle had made the two manors of the former into one, so that it was a place of some importance. There is an altar tomb at Curry Malet, of which Collinson writes: 'In the north aisle of the church [of St. James] is a large tomb, in which are deposited the remains of one of the family of Malet, but the inscriptions are quite illegible. About 60 years since on opening this tomb the corpse was found entire, with one of the legs drawn up, which corresponds with the tradition that the person interred therein had a contracted leg.' It seems to me that this tradition may have arisen from a previous examination of the tomb at some former removal. In company with my brother O. Warre Malet, at the invitation of the Rev. Leigh Pemberton, we inspected the tomb; it was in a very inconvenient place between the pulpit and the next pillar, to which (as evident from the cuttings which had been made to fit some prior site) it had not formerly belonged; it was said to have been in the churchyard previously to its removal into this situation; it was therefore probably at first in the church, then in the churchyard, and then in the church again. It has now been again moved to a place in the north aisle near the east window, but with a space all round so that it can be examined on all sides; no trace even of inscription is now visible."

William married.

William next married Alice Basset, daughter of Thomas Basset and Phillipa Malbank.¹⁶⁰ (Alice Basset died about 1263 in England ⁸²¹.)