William Malet

  General Notes:

~Weis' Ancestral Roots. . ., 234A:26, he was steward to and favorite of King Henry II. He held the barony of Curry Malet, Somerset and other lands in Kent, Cambridge, & Sussex. He was a signer of the Constitutions of Clerendon in 1164. ¹⁶⁰

~Carl Boyer's Medieval English Ancestors of Certain Americans, pg. 142, father of Gilbert and son of Robert. Boyer names his brother as Baldwin Malet who married Emma. ⁷²²

  Noted events in his life were:

• Background Information: Taken from Notices of an English Branch of the Malet Family, by Arthur Malet, pp. 73-71 :. ⁹⁵⁶
"Robert Malet of whom we have record up to 1150 was succeeded by his son William Malet, and who, sometime in the reign of Stephen ( I cannot fix the precise date), between the years 1135 and 1154, was one of the witnesses to that King's Charter to the Church of St. Benedict of Ramsey. [Dug., Baron., vol. I, p.3] In the second year of Henry II, A.D. 1156 [Colinson, vol. i, p. 31] he paid the sum of £25 for Danegeld in the county of Somerset, and in the 12th year of Henry II, A. D. 1166, he certified for the assessment of the aid for marrying the King's daughter to upwards of twenty-two knights' fees of the old feoffment, and upwards of two knights' fees on the new. [ibid.] For all these in 14 Henry II, A.D. 1168, he paid the sum of £15 12s. 10d. Reckoning in addition to these the fees he held of the Abbey of Glastonbury [Sir A.M.'s MSS, Vol. II., pp. 1-2] in number twelve, he held thirty-four knights' fees in Somerset, the Honour in Kent, and four knights' fees in Sussex.

"The Rev. R.W. Eyton in his Somerset Domesday Studies calls William Malet the steward and favorite of Henry II. He was one of the recognitors of the Constitutions of Clarendon, one of thirty-eight nobles whose names are attached to that remarkable document, the provisions of which (though ten of the sixteen clauses were disallowed by the Pope) are, in the words of Mr. Stubbs, 'no mere engine of tyranny or secular spire against a churchman; they are really a part of a great scheme of administrative reforms, by which the debateable ground between the spiritual and temporal powers can be brought within the reach of common justice, and the lawlessness arising from professional jealousies abolished. That they were really this, and not an occasional weapon of controversy, may be further inferred from the rapidity with which they were drawn up, the completeness of their form, and the fact that notwithstanding the storm that followed they formed the groundwork of the later customary practices in all such matters.'

"I find in Sir A. M.'s MSS. an entry that William Malet married Maud, a daughter of Robert Mortimer, but there is no reference to any source from which to trace any further particulars. He left a son Gilbert, who succeeded to the barony."