IT is difficult to believe that so interesting a genealogical question as the origin of this famous house should have remained as yet undetermined. I have shewn above (p. 166) that we can identify in Domesday Gilbert and Ralph de Neville, the earliest bearers of the name in England, as knightly tenants of the Abbot of Peterborough; but the existing house, as is well known, descends from them only through a female. It is at its origin in the male line that I here glance. The innumerable quarters in which, unfortunately, information of this kind has been published makes it impossible for me to say whether I have been forestalled. So far, however, as I can find at present, two different versions are in the field.

First, there is Dugdale's view that Robert fitz Maldred, their founder, was “son of Dolfin, son of Earl Gospatric, son of Maldred fitz Crinan by Algitha, daughter of Uchtred, Earl of Northumberland, who was son-in-law to King Æthelred.” This was, apparently, Mr. Shirley's view, for, in his Noble and Gentle Men of England he derives the Nevilles from “Gospatric, the Saxon Earl of Northumberland,” though he makes Robert fitz Maldred his great-grandson, as Rowland had done in his work on the House of Nevill (1830), by placing Maldred between Dolfin and Robert fitz Maldred. Even that sceptical genealogist, Mr. Foster, admitted in his peerage their descent from this Earl Gospatric.