THE FOUNDING OF THE FAMILY 3
same by force of arms. Edward III., however, referred the dispute to the heralds, who solemnly adjudged the right of bearing these arms to Sir John Sitsilt, as heir of the blood, lineally descended from Sir James Sitsilt, Lord of Beauport, who was killed at the siege of Wallingford in 1139. In his Workes of Armorie (1597) Bossewell gives transcripts of these proceedings, adding that he has himself seen in the possession of Lord Burghley the original writing, " being written in parchment, according to the antiquity of the time."
Here again it is surprising to find that the names of neither of these distinguished disputants occur in any of the rolls of arms ; and although such disputes did undoubtedly occur in the middle ages, yet, to sum up the matter in the words of Blore, " the evidence should be very decisive indeed, which would induce one to credit such a dispute having been maintained by a member of a family, concerning at least eleven generations of which there does not seem to be a single public record, or another private document, even if those noticed by Bossewell really existed " or rather, we may say, if they were really authentic. In fact, as Mr. Oswald Barron points out, the whole pro- ceedings are based on the famous suit of Scrope against Grosvenor.
This version of the ancestry of the family may therefore be dismissed. Two other theories must be mentioned before we pass on to surer ground. One of these was propounded by an ingenious Frenchman in the seventeenth century, who
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