This blog has been prepared for potential members of the Trethewy Society as an introduction to the history and background of the Trethewys.
The Trethewy Society is run for and by people who have a personal interest in the origins and history of the Trethewys, almost certainly a single family in the wider sense of the word. The Society has no connection with those dubious commercial organisations that claim to offer family information but which in fact provide generalisations that might apply to any family and which are intended to gratify the customer. (An Internet search for items concerning "Trethewy" etc. may produce advertisments from firms offering Trethewy arms and early history, both of which are wrong. In their ignorance such firms call heraldic arms crests when in fact crests are relatively unimportant devices lying above the shields and their charges which are the significant part of the arms. )
THE NAME
It is usual now to have a fixed spelling for a family’s surname, but this is a consequence of the spread of literacy and of other social changes that took place in the nineteenth century. Before then names were written at the discretion of the writer in any of the several ways that might produce the right sound. This was unnoticed by the illiterate majority, and while literate families might prefer a particular spelling there was no insistence that it should be used. In consequence, when spellings did become fixed, different branches of the same family were often using different spellings for the same name.
The name that we are now considering has been spelled in many ways but Trethewy and Trethewey are the two more usual forms. Trethewy was favoured in the late middle ages and is still used, which is why it is being used for the Society. Trethewey is more recent and is now the more common of the two spellings. Trethewie, Tretheway and other variants also occur.
Trethewy is basically a Cornish place name and the first people to whom it applied evidently lived in a place so named. There are several such places and so several families could have received the name independently, though present-day Trethewys and descendants of known Trethewys probably form a single family, their name coming from a place in Lanlivery.
The name contains elements from the Brythonic group of languages, old Cornish, Welsh and Breton, which are southern representatives of the so-called "Celtic" languages. The elements are tref - (suffixes omitted) and Dewy. Tref-, a word related to the English place-name element -thorpe, denoted a small habitation, the precise meaning changing as social conditions changed. The final f is usually lost in compounds. Dewy was a personal name corresponding to Davy or David. The initial D is replaced by th, a change of the sort that often occurred in the Brythonic languages when words were placed together. The meaning is thus ‘‘Davy’s home.’’
An earlier form of tref- was treb- which suggests that it is linked to tribe, in its original form perhaps denoting the inhabitants of a treb-. The etymological structure of treb- suggests that it might originally have denoted a group of three dwellings, perhaps arranged in a defensive triangle. (Thus it could contain elements also seen in trio and build.)
MEDIÆVAL TRETHEWYS
There are several references to persons and small family groups called Trethewy in documents of the later middle ages. We cannot be sure that all were related to one another. However, several held important official positions and as public service ran in families these are likely to have been related. Henry Trethewy was an agent of the royal Duke of Cornwall and acting sheriff of Cornwall in the 14th century. He stated that his father, grandfather and great grandfather were all called John Trethewy. The importance of the family at that time suggests that it was a Norman family with an unknown name that adopted the name of the place where it lived, but there is no proof of this.
Accounts of the activities of the mediæval Trethewys are given in various Society Newsletters. At the end of the period we can identify three or four generations in a single family, ending with the Thomas Trethewy about to be considered.
THE CORONER WITH MURDER IN MIND.
It is likely that all of the Trethewys of the modern era and their descendants have a common ancestor in Thomas Trethewy who is said to have lived from about 1425 to 1485. He married Elizabeth the widow of William Reskimer who had died aged 34 in 1471. The Reskimers were a distinguished family who for centuries had lived at Reskimer in the Cornish parish of Mawgan in Meneage. As a result of his marriage, which was very soon after William’s death, Trethewy became the effective master of Reskimer, at least until his stepson John Reskimer came of age.
In 1472 Trethewy, though a coroner for Cornwall, entered into a dispute with his neighbour John Vyvyan of Trelowarren in the same parish over land rights, and evidently plotted the latter’s death. His followers tried to ambush Vyvyan, his family and servants when they were on a pilgrimage to a local holy place, and one of the servants was killed. Later, Trethewy’s followers ransacked Trelowarren. A more complete account is given in A.L. Rowse’s Tudor Cornwall. Trethewy and his wife failed to respond to the consequent indictment and were attainted along with some of their associates under a parliamentary act. They were therefore outlawed and jailed, and their property was forfeit. Following a supplication to Parliament the attainder was annulled. The supplication is reproduced in the published Parliamentary Rolls for the 12th and 13th years of the reign of Edward IV, pages 52-4. The supplication confirms that Elizabeth was Reskimer’s widow.
One of the grounds for clemency put forward in the supplication was that Elizabeth was ‘‘so grete with child.’’ If this and any subsequent children were Trethewy’s only children then the distinguished Cornish family of Arundel is ancestral to the later Trethewys, for Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundel. She is shown on the Arundel pedigree in J.L. Vivian’s Visitations of Cornwall at the top of page 6. Trethewy was aged about 46 when he married Elizabeth and so of course there may have been children by an earlier marriage.
Trethewy was involved in a considerable amount of litigation after his release and until his death in 1485. Some of this followed from his reluctance to release Reskimer and other manors to his stepson after the latter had achieved his majority. He evidently lost and then, according to C.S. Gilbert in his Historical Survey of Cornwall, went to live in St Stephen’s in Brannel which became the main Trethewy centre.
John Vyvyan acquired Trelowarren from his wife Honora the heiress daughter of Richard Ferrars. It occurs to me that another daughter of Ferrars could have been Thomas Trethewy’s first wife and a potential coheiress of the Trelowarren estate. If she predeceased her father, so failing to inherit, then Thomas could have had a grievance that led to his attacks on Vyvyan and the estate. But this is pure speculation.
A LOYAL TRETHEWY
John Trethewy, ca 1618-1671, was the most outstanding Trethewy of the modern era. He was for a period the secretary of Ralph Lord Hopton who had been the Royalist commander in the South-West during the Civil War. As a consequence he acquired Hopton's estates in Somerset, probably by lease, and he married the niece of Hopton's wife. During the Commonwealth period he acted as a Royalist agent in England and on the Continent and was in personal contact with the exiled King Charles II and his brothers. Part of his reward after the Restoration was a share in the profits from those parts of Virginia between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. Also he was given positions in the royal household. He was an associate of the Royalist Sir George Carteret, one-time governor of Jersey and Pepys's superior at the Navy Office. (Carteret was granted the area which he called New Jersey after his native island.) Trethewy's main occupation was as what would now be called an estate agent for estates of aristocrats. Also, after the Restoration, he organised the collection of taxes in Somerset and Bristol. He had no descendants.
THE HERALDS’ VISITATIONS.
Periodically in the 16th and 17th centuries officers of the College of Heralds visited counties to ensure that the people using coats of arms were entitled to them. These people had to submit substantial pedigrees showing their descent from persons known to be entitled to the arms. The last visitation of Cornwall was in 1620, when a Trethewy pedigree was submitted and accepted. The pedigrees for this visitation have been published twice, first in the Harleian Society's publication no. 9 and second in J.L. Vivian’s Visitations of Cornwall.
The Harleian version gives basic pedigrees with added notes about the family. Vivian combines the 1620 pedigrees with others from the College and with pedigrees worked out by himself. The latter are notoriously unreliable. Thus in the Trethewy pedigree children are ascribed to Richard by having been named in his supposed will. In fact the will was that of a widow Richoe, this being a Cornish female name, and the same children had been named in her husband Arthur’s will. The Trethewys named in the visitation pedigree, who were of St Stephen's, are shown as being descended from Thomas the coroner. His link to the next person, James, is not shown. Calculations based on the ages of later persons on the pedigree suggest that James could have been born about 1515-25, so that he could have been Thomas’s grandson or even his great grandson if Elizabeth was the second wife. Vivian extends the pedigree beyond the people who were alive in 1620, but as already indicated his conclusions are unreliable.
THE TRETHEWY COATS OF ARMS
The main Trethewy arms consisted of an engrailed (indented) chevron between three standing goats. These arms were used by Thomas the coroner and his ancestors, and by some of his descendants. A second set of arms was held by a collateral branch of the family in the 15th century. These arms consisted of a chevron between three trefoils. They were evidently acquired as a result of the marriage of a Trethewy to the heiress of the family that originally held them. They were passed on in the same way to another family, the Langdons, by the heiress of this branch.
LATER TRETHEWYS
The parish register books for St Stephen’s down to 1693 have been lost so that when we see the family in subsequent years it consists of several separate branches and, with notable exceptions, there is little difficulty in deciding who belongs to which branch. Copies of registers known as bishops’ transcripts or BTs were made, but most of those for Cornwall that cover the period of the missing St Stephen’s registers are lost, so that only a limited number of Trethewy entries survive. A few of the Trethewys of this period made wills naming their children. It is possible therefore to link a few of the branches or groups seen around 1700 with the Trethewys of the 1620 visitation, but not all. The most prolific group was that founded by the Richard Trethewy who married Ann Martyn at Lanivet in 1687 but his origins are uncertain. The census returns from 1841 to 1911 are published and enable English families to be traced with comparative ease down to the latter date. Further assistance is available from the indexes of births, marriages and deaths from 1837, now available on line, and of wills from 1858.
It is thus likely that anyone who has Trethewy ancestors and who can trace these to Cornwall in the 18th or 19th centuries can be found an ancestry going back to about 1700 and perhaps earlier.
MEMBERSHIP
Members receive four newsletters each year. New members receive a chart showing their ancestry so far as it is known to me. If you would like to become a member please contact me at
akent@supanet.com
