Talk:Eustace Folville

The Folvilles -- an important source on the family
The most detailed study of the Folville family is by George Farnham and A. H. Thompson, 'The Manors of Allexton, Appleby and Ashby Folville', Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society, Vol. 11, pts 7-8 (1919-20), at pp. 453-75. (This contains an abridged pedigree chart. A slightly fuller chart is in Farnham, Leicestershire Medieval Pedigrees, Leicester 1925, p. 3. Both the article and the last-mentioned book are based on an exhaustive serach in the primary sources. Because the article's subject is the descent of the manor, it is necessarily much more detailed on the family than Stones's article.)

Sadly, Farnham's book was privately printed and is very rare, though there is a copy at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. But the article is downloadable from the Leicester University website, and works if the following is pasted into the browser:

http://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/ManorsPagesfromvolumeXIpart7-8-2.pdf

Among points of interest (raised in the article) are:

1) P. 456: Eustace Folville (ancestor of the family, and grandfather of the first generation of criminal brothers) 'was murdered in his chamber in the manor house of Ashby at midnight' on 24/5 Nov 1274 by an assassin, instigated by his wife, Juliana. He was 'stabbed ... to the heart with an Irish knife'. (This may be of interest in light of the family's violent future, though reflects more directly on his wife's character than on that of the Folville family as such.)

2) Although the brothers (Farnham lists Eustace, Richard, Walter, Robert and Lawrence in his pedigree at p.475) involved in the 1326 murder of Beler were the children of Eustace and Juliana, at least one of the next generation of Folvilles (Geoffrey, d. 1369/70) 'seems to have inherited the violent instincts of his family' (p. 466).

3) Geoffrey (and his brothers Henry and John) served in Edward III's expedition to Crecy and Calais (1346), apparently with distinction. Farnham says (p. 463): 'Their names appear on the Norman roll for 20 Edward III (1346) as receiving pardons on [the Earl of] Warwick's testimony for any offences committed before the war, in consideration of their service abroad'.

FOLVILLE FAMILY: DESCENDANTS

Re the Folville family in general, it may be of interest that, although the main malefactors identified by Farnham as murderers of Beler are not known to have had any recorded descendants, there are living descendants of Mabel Folville, the sole heiress of the aforementioned Geoffrey d. 1369/70, who married John Woodford). [See Farnham and Thompson, pp. 467ff. And Ian Payne, 'The Woodfords of Ashby Folville and Muston', Genealogists' Magazine, Vol. 24 no. 4 (Dec 1992): 129-35.]

Among the famous descendants of the earliest Folvilles are members of the Villiers family of Brooksby, Leicestershire (including George, Duke of Buckingham) and Lady Katherine Parr, wife of Henry VIII. (Like the Woodfords above, both were descendants of the coheirs of John Beler, d.c.1421, of Eye Kettleby. John's ancestor Ralph Beler d. after 1216, had married Emma, daughter of Walter Folville and sister of the William Folville with whom Farnham begins his pedigrees. [See Farnham and Thompson, p. 454; and Farnham, Leicestershire Medieval Pedigrees, pp. 3 and 32.])

Folville0116 (talk) 09:20, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Article Overhaul Nov 2015
As of Nov 2015 the Eustice Folville article is high in biased second hand quotes and unreferenced material and low in facts with primary references. Although colourful it is not of Enyclopaedic quality so an overhaul is due. Main areas to be changed are;


 * Family - most of this to be moved to the new article for John Folville father of the gang.
 * New Background section - Mortimer & Isabella's rebellion against Edw II/Dispencer is vital to understand the context of the execution of Beler and survival of the Folvilles.
 * Fact based account of the gang - instead of the gang's deeds being described by secondary sources it is to be replaced with facts taken from the Patent Rolls, etc and secondary sourced material cut down
 * General Toning down - a lot of the statements are highly subjective in the rest of the article so a general toning down of flamboyant phrases undertaken

Please 1) wait for the Under Construction Banner to be removed before making any of your own changes and 2) if you want to re-add anything only do so if there is a reference for each sentence Verifiability and preferably to a primary source.

Thanks Sliven2000 (talk) 11:20, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Problematic "Background Section"
Hi-- Just wanted to drop a friendly note that the background section on this article is fairly biased and is drawing from a historical prejudice against Edward II, offering an opinion on his and Piers Gaveston's character which does not have an academic consensus. For example, the reference to Gaveston's "corruption and abusive nature" is very specious and the entire discussion of this period glosses over a great deal of the constitutional struggles which underscored Edward II's reign--as well as the extent to which his difficulties with the barons descended from his father's relationship with and limitations of them, as well as the financial situation left behind by Edward I. Long story short, to phrase Edward II's reign as a series of "injustices" is extremely biased, historically inaccurate (even the most cursory look at the most recent biographies of the king, by Seymour Phillips and Kathryn Warner bears that out), and grossly misleading. I'm not trying to advocate a lionization of a fairly controversial historical figure, but it's never worthwhile to engage in blank condemnation either, especially when, due to circumstances (like the historical prevalence of the Lancastrian accounts of Edward II's reign) the academic picture of him is far from uniform. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.189.183.115 (talk) 05:25, 21 March 2016 (UTC)