Nos. 139, 144); for his father, John Bigod, had fallen in the Scotch wars. He had livery of lands by patent, 21 Dec. 1529 (Pat. 21 Hen. VIII, p. i., m. 28), soon afterwards knighted. He spent some time at Oxford, but took no degree, though his letters show that he was a scholar. In 1527 and the following years he was in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, and under Cromwell, Wolsey’s successor in the favour of Henry VIII, was engaged in advancing in Yorkshire the king’s reforms in church matters. Nevertheless in 1536 we find him implicated (though unwillingly) in the Pilgrimage for Grace, an insurrection produced by these reforms. In January 1537 he headed anunsuccessful rising at Beverley, and for this was hanged at Tyburn on 2 June 1537. By his wife Katharine, daughter of William, Lord Conyers, he left a son, Ralph, who was restored in blood by act of parliament, 3 Edward VI, but died without issue, and a daughter, Dorothy, through whom the estates passed to the family of Radclyffe. Rastell (the chronicler) in a letter to Cromwell, 17 Aug. [1534] (Cal. Of State Papers Hen. VIII, vol. viii. No. 1070), calls Bigod wise and well learned; and Bale describes him as ‘homo naturalium splendore nobilis ac doctus et evangelicæ veritatis amator.’ His letters to Cromwell, many of which are preserved in the Public Record Office, show him to have been deeply in debt. He wrote a treatise on ‘Impropriations,’ against the impropriation of parsonages by the monasteries (London, by Tho. Godfray cum privilegio regali, small 8vo). It appears to have been written after the birth of Elizabeth and before Anne Boleyn’s disgrace, i.e. between September 1533 and April 1536. Copies are in the British Museum and in Lambeth library, and the preface is reprinted at the end of Sir Henry Spelman’s ‘Larger work of Tithes’ (1647 edition). Bigod also translated some Latin works, and, during the insurrection, wrote against the royal supremacy.
[Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII. vols. iv. and onwards; Tanner’s Bibliotheca; Bale; Fuller’s Worthies, ii. 209; Wood’s Athen. Oxon. i. 101; Wriothesley’s Chronicle, i. 64; Blomefield’s Norfolk, v. 228.]
BIGOD, HUGH, first Earl of Norfolk (d. 1176 or 1177), was the second son of Roger Bigod, the founder of the house in England after the Conquest. The origin of the name is quite uncertain. The French called the Normans ‘bigoz e draschiers’ (Rom. De Rou, iii. 4780) in contempt. The second word is said to mean beer-drinkers; the other has been explained as a nickname derived from the oath ‘bi got’ commonly used by the early Normans. But whether the family name Bigod had any connection with this term or not, it is evident that in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was punned upon in words of profane swearing (Wright’s Political Songs, pp. 67.68’ Hemingburgh’s Chronicle, ii. 121).
The first person who, bearing the name of Bigod or Bigot, appears in history is Robert le Bigod, a poor knight, who gained the favour of William, duke of Normandy, by discovering to him the intended treachery of William, count of Mortain. This Robert may have been the father of Roger, and one or the other, or both, may have been present at the battle of Hastings. In the ‘Roman de Rou,’ iii. 8571-82, the ancestor of Hugh Bigod (perhaps the above Robert) is named as holding lands at Malitot, Loges, and Chanon in Normandy, and as serving the duke in his household as one of his seneschals. He was small of body, but brave and bold, and assaulted the English gallantly. Roger Bigod is not traced in English records before 1079, but by this time he may have been endowed with the forfeited estates of Ralph de Guader, ear of Norfolk, whose downfall took place in 1074. In Domesday he appears as holding six lordships in Essex, and 117 in Suffolk. From Henry I he received the gift of Framlingham, which became the principal stronghold of him and his descendants. He likewise held the office of king’s dapifer, or steward, under William Rufus and Henry I. He died in 1107, and was succeeded by his eldest son, William, who, however (26 Nov. 1120), was drowned in the wreck of the White Ship. Roger’s second son, Hugh, thus entered into possession of the estates.
At the time of his father’s death, whom he survived some seventy years, Hugh must have been quite a young child. Little is heard of him at first, no doubt on account of his youth, but he appears as king’s dapifer in 1123, and before that date he was constable of Norwich Castle and governor of the city down to 1122, when it obtained a charter from the crown. Passing the best years of his manhood in the distractions of the civil wars of Stephen and Matilda, when men’s oaths of fealty sat lightly on their consciences, he appears to have surpassed his fellows in acts of desertion and treachery, and to have been never more in his element than when in rebellion. His first prominent action in history was on the death of Henry I in 1135, when he is said to have hastened to England, and to have sworn to Archbishop William Corbois that the dying king, on some quarrel with his daughter Matilda, had
