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The Earl of Surrey’s Dynastic Line

The Earl of Surrey’s Dynastic Line

Owing to some ambiguities in the works of Ordericus Vitalis, the most important contemporaneous source, there is some uncertainty about the point at which William de Warenne received the earldom of Surrey and became the first earl of Surrey. Vitalis suggests at one point in his narrative that some sort of grant within Surrey was conferred by William the Conqueror a few years after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. This point is echoed by Edward Augustus Freeman in his seminal work on the Norman Conquest. However, other historians, including William Hunt in his article in the Dictionary of National Biography, have argued that there is nothing in the records of the Conqueror’s reign to suggest that Surrey bore the title of earl at this early date.

Most historians are of the opinion that Vitalis was correct, when, some pages later in his study, he gave William II the credit for conferring the title upon Warenne in 1088 as a reward for a lifetime of faithful service, or perhaps more particularly for Warenne’s role in helping to suppress the great rebellion of that year staged by the followers of Robert Curthose. Although Warenne held the title for only a few months before his death on June 24, 1088, it did validate thirty-five years of faithful service to William the Conqueror and William II and placed him and his heirs among the elite lords of the realm for many years to come.

Most members of the Surrey dynasty, including Warenne’s son and grandson, the second and third earls of Surrey, respectively, worked closely with the Crown; a few labored in the other direction. All, however, were conspicuous for their actions, whether on the battlefield or within the government. It was not until John de Warenne, the eighth earl of Surrey, died in 1347 without issue and was succeeded by a nephew, Richard FitzAlan, the earl of Arundel, that the Warenne line died out. Not long thereafter, the earldom of Surrey fell into abeyance. In the sixteenth century, the title was revived and given to the current holders, the dukes of Norfolk, who, in memory of the Warenne family, have incorporated the Warenne coat of arms into their own.


See Also

Odo of Bayeux

Alanus Rufus

William II

Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy

First Earl of Surrey

by Larry W. Usilton

Norman military leader and landowner

The first earl of Surrey’s service to William the Conqueror and his son, William II, enabled Surrey to achieve a position of prominence and great wealth in post-Norman Conquest England. For his years of faithful service, he received vast tracts of land, important posts within the government, and the earldom of Surrey.

Sources of wealth: Conquest; government; real estate

Bequeathal of wealth: Children

Early Life

The first earl of Surrey was born William de Warenne around 1030. He was the son of Ralph, an insignificant member of the Norman aristocracy, and Emma, a woman about whom nothing is known. Even so, some studies assert that his lineage can be traced back to the family of Duke Richard I of Normandy. The surname “de Warrene” is almost certainly derived from the village or fortress of Varenne situated on the river of that name between Dieppe and Rouen.

First Ventures

If Surrey’s story is not one of rags to riches, it is at least the story of a self-made man. His family inheritance was meager, consisting of a small amount of land in the vicinity of Rouen that remained in his father’s hands until his death around 1074. Thereafter, Surrey shared the land with an elder brother named Ralph. Almost nothing is known of Surrey’s youth, though there is every reason to believe that he had to don the trappings of warfare and master the art of horsemanship at an early age to survive in a strife-torn land. By the mid-1050’s, Surrey had sufficiently proven his mettle, enabling him to earn a position of leadership in a Norman army dispatched to repel the French king and his allies, including his kinsman, the rebellious Roger of Mortemer. The invasion was thwarted and Mortemer stripped of his lands and castles. Some of these lands, including important castles at Mortemer and Bellencombre, were given to Surrey by the future king of England, William the Conqueror. Surrey was now a victorious general and a propertied lord. More important, he had gained the trust and patronage of the most important man of his day.

Mature Wealth

Little is known of Surrey’s activities between the Battle of Mortemer in 1054 and the Norman Conquest in 1066, though it seems likely that his stature as a warrior continued to grow. Ordericus Vitalis, a monk chronicler, reported that Surrey was among the “illustrious nobles” summoned to advise William on the possibility of an invasion of England in order to claim the crown which William felt had been promised to him years earlier by his cousin, the recently deceased Edward the Confessor. Vitalis also lists Surrey as one of the men who fought by William the Conqueror’s side in his 1066 victory against the English usurper King Harold II in the Battle of Hastings.

When William the Conqueror returned to Normandy in the spring of 1067, Surrey was one of four magnates entrusted with the governance of the realm in the king’s absence. In this capacity, Surrey worked hard during the next twenty years, first for William the Conqueror and later for his son and successor, William II, in order to tame a land that was always ready to revolt. In 1068, Surrey marched against the English rebels in Yorkshire, and in 1071 he was among those dispatched to the fens of East Anglia to put down an uprising led by the outlaw Hereward the Wake. Although Hereward escaped the battlefield, the resistance was crushed. Other tasks soon followed. In 1075, Surrey and Richard de Clare, another trusted Norman lord, marched into Cambridgeshire to suppress an uprising led by Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralph, earl of Norwich.

For his faithful service in these campaigns, William the Conqueror bestowed honors and responsibilities on his faithful servant, which made Surrey one of the greatest landholders, and, in turn, one of the wealthiest men in England. Surrey’s first truly significant acquisition, probably for his heroic actions at the Battle of Hastings, was the so-called Rape of Lewes, one of five strips of land in Sussex created by the Conqueror for his tenants-in-chief. At some point in time, an impressive castle was constructed near the town of Lewes, which became the foundation of Surrey power in England. For his efforts against the English rebels in Yorkshire in 1068, Surrey was given Conisbrough, an important royal manor formerly held by Harold II Godwinson. Most of his concessions, dutifully recorded by the king’s agents in the Domesday Book in 1086, were concentrated in Norfolk, where Surrey built a great manor house at Castle Acre. In the course of time, Surrey acquired lands in twelve counties, including Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire.

There can be no doubt that Surrey was a dutiful servant, one of the very few Norman lords whose loyalty to the Conqueror never wavered. Yet there was a less admirable side to his character. In an effort to increase his wealth, Surrey did not hesitate to take lands from the laity or from the Church, sometimes through coercion, sometimes through outright theft. He seized lands from the bishop of Durham, the nuns of Wilton, and the monks of Ely, who never forgave him and resisted his wife’s efforts years later to give them a sum of money in recompense. Between 1181 and 1183, possibly as a form of penance, Surrey and his first wife, Gundrada, a Flemish princess, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome. Although the political conditions in Italy prevented them from completing the journey, they were befriended by the monks of Cluny along the way. So favorably impressed was Surrey with their hospitality that a few years before his death, he founded a small Cluniac priory, St. Pancras, at Lewes, the first of its order in England.

Whether through legal or extralegal means, Surrey had become one of the richest men in England. He might have been content to spend his last years overseeing the management of his vast estates, manors, mills, tenants, and flocks, but it was not meant to be. In 1183, Surrey was among those dispatched to the Continent by William II to suppress an uprising led by Hubert de Beaumont, who had taken refuge in a fortress at Sainte-Susanne. Beaumont could not be dislodged and Surrey was wounded in the conflict, but the affair ended happily not long thereafter when the rebellious Beaumont was reconciled with the king. In 1088, Surrey was summoned to duty again, this time to deal with the Norman lords who had raised a rebellion on behalf of Robert Curthose, the king’s brother and the duke of Normandy. This particular engagement would cost Surrey his life. Wounded in the Siege of Pevensey, Surrey was carried to Lewes, where he died on June 24.

Legacy

According to Ordericus Vitalis, the first earl of Surrey was one of the few Norman knights who “maintained their fealty to their sovereign and gave him useful aid, both with their arms and their counsels, against the common enemy.” Indeed, as David C. Douglas points out in his biography of William the Conqueror, Surrey’s life illustrates the heights to which a Norman knight of modest means might rise through hard work and faithful service to his feudal lord in an age of warfare and shifting loyalties. For his many years of service, Surrey received large tracts of land throughout England, and, at the end of his life, the earldom of Surrey. His great wealth allowed Surrey to become a patron of several monasteries. While the Cluniacs of St. Pancras Priory might be excused for their obvious religious bias, it was their opinion that the monastery Surrey founded in Lewes was his “noblest monument.”

Further Reading

1 

Douglas, David C. William the Conqueror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. The definitive biography of the Conqueror. Bits and pieces of information relating to the Warenne family, and more specifically to Surrey’s rise to power, are scattered throughout.

2 

Freeman, Edward Augustus. The History of the Norman Conquest. 6 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1877-1879. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1977. The magnum opus of one of the great historians of the Victorian era. Although rife with personal prejudices, Freeman’s study is still used by all scholars of the Norman Conquest period.

3 

Hunt, William. “William Warenne or Warren, First Earl of Surrey.” In The Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sir Leslie Stephens and Sir Sidney Lee. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1917. Superseded by a more recent edition, the Dictionary of National Biography remains the starting point for biographical studies of English notables. Hunt’s article contains some information about Surrey not to be found in Lewis’s revised version (see below).

4 

Lewis, C. P. “William (I) de Warrenne, First Earl of Surrey.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, edited by H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. In the absence of a full-scale biography, Lewis’s entry is the most complete study of Surrey’s life.

5 

Vitalis, Ordericus. The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy. Translated by Thomas Forester. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1968. One of the most important narrative sources for the Norman Conquest and the era that followed. Most of the major details of Surrey’s life are to be found here.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Usilton, Larry W. "First Earl Of Surrey." Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy, edited by Howard Bromberg, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLIW_1388369001388.
APA 7th
Usilton, L. W. (2010). First Earl of Surrey. In H. Bromberg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Usilton, Larry W. "First Earl Of Surrey." Edited by Howard Bromberg. Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.