Levett is a surname of Anglo-Norman origin, deriving from [de] Livet, which is held particularly by families and individuals resident in England and British Commonwealth territories.
Levett is a surname of Anglo-Norman origin, deriving from [de] Livet, which is held particularly by families and individuals resident in England and British Commonwealth territories.
This surname comes from the village of Livet-en-Ouche, now Jonquerets-de-Livet, in Eure, Normandy. Here the de Livets were undertenants of the de Ferrers family, among the most powerful of William the Conqueror's Norman lords. [1] The name Livet (first recorded as Lived in the 11th century), of Gaulish etymology, may mean a "place where yew-trees grow". [2] [3]
The first de Livet in England, Roger, appears in Domesday as a tenant of the Norman magnate Henry de Ferrers. de Livet held land in Leicestershire, and was, along with Ferrers, a benefactor of Tutbury Priory. [4] By about 1270, when the Dering Roll was crafted to display the coats of arms of 324 of England's most powerful lords, the coat of arms of Robert Livet, Knight, was among them. [5] Some Levetts were early knights and Crusaders; many members of both English and French families were Knights Hospitallers, [6] and served as courtiers. [7]
A Levett family settled in Derbyshire was extinct by the early sixteenth century. [8] A family of the name resident in Sussex at Warbleton and Salehurst [9] also held the manor of Firle [10] until it passed from family control in 1440 due to the debts of Thomas Levett, [11] whose bankruptcy also necessitated the loss of Catsfield, East Sussex. Sussex deeds indicate instances of 'Levetts' attached to place names, indicating possession by individuals and families of that name. [12] [13] [14] In 1620, John Levett, of Sedlescombe, Sussex, was forced by financial hardship to sell his half-interest in Bodiam Castle, inherited family land and property across Sussex and Kent, including at Ewhurst, Salehurst, Battle, Sussex and Hawkhurst, Kent, to Sir Thomas Dyke, for £1000; this represented the end of these Levetts as prominent landowners. [15]
Families of the name Levett (also Levet, Lyvet, Levytt, [16] Livett, Delivett, Levete, Leavett, Leavitt, [17] Lovett and others) would subsequently settle in Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, [18] Worcestershire, Suffolk, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Kent, Bedfordshire and Staffordshire.
By the mid twentieth century, only two prominent Levett families remained; that of Milford Hall, Staffordshire and that formerly of Wychnor Hall, Staffordshire (and Packington Hall). [19] [20] Milford Hall passed in the female line to the Haszard family, [21] and Wychnor Park was sold by the Levetts to Lt-Col W. E. Harrison in 1913, this later becoming a country club. [22]
The Levett-Scrivener family (descending from a daughter of the Milford Hall family) retains the ruin of Sibton Abbey, which they have made available to historical societies and researchers; [23] the Levett-Prinseps (a branch of the Wychnor Park family) were unable to maintain Croxall Hall; it was sold in 1920 and the estate was broken up. [24]
By 1871, although family tradition of a common ancestor of the Milford Hall and Wychnor Park Levett families was mentioned in the latter pedigree, the earliest listed ancestors of each family were, respectively, William Levett of Savernake, Wiltshire, page to King Charles I at the time of his death in 1649, and Theophilus Levett, who died 1746. [25] Even the 1847 edition, produced at a time when Burke's publications were inclusive of vague, unproven 'family traditions' (a practice subsequently widely criticised), [26] [27] makes no mention of any earlier ancestors or Norman origin in either family's pedigree. [28]
Individuals of the name of Levett (and its variants) appear in all social strata: John Levett, a guard on the London to Brighton coach, was convicted of petty theft and transported to Australia in the nineteenth century; English records reveal Levetts embroiled in bastardy cases or relegated to poorhouses. [29] A Francis Levett was a factor living in Livorno, Italy, travelling back and forth to Constantinople for the Levant Company. He subsequently failed at British East Florida as a planter; his son Francis Jr. returned to America, where he became the first to grow Sea Island cotton. [30]
A notable individual of the name was the unschooled Yorkshireman who, having worked as a Parisian waiter, then trained as an apothecary. Robert Levet returned to England, where he treated denizens of London's seedier neighbourhoods. Having married an apparent grifter and prostitute, Levet was taken in by the poet Samuel Johnson. [31] While Samuel Johnson adopted one Levet as boarder, he was apologizing to another better-placed Levett who held the mortgage on Johnson's mother's home in Lichfield. [32]
Today there are many Levetts (the spelling of the name varies) living outside England, including in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, [33] [34] Canada, and Ireland.
In a few cases Levetts were forced by religious belief to flee England for the colonies. Among these were tailor John Leavitt and farmer Thomas Leavitt, early English Puritan immigrants to Massachusetts and New Hampshire, respectively, whose names first appear in seventeenth-century New England records as Levet or Levett.[ citation needed ]
Individuals bearing the surname of Levett include:
These places are or were associated with Levett families or individuals:
James Wyatt was an English architect, a rival of Robert Adam in the neoclassical and neo-Gothic styles. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1785 and was its president from 1805 to 1806.
Whittington is a village and civil parish which lies approximately 3 miles south east of Lichfield, in the Lichfield district of Staffordshire, England. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 2,591, increasing to 2,603 at the 2011 Census. The parish council is a joint one with Fisherwick. The Coventry Canal borders the village to the north and east.
Prinsep may mean any of several notable members of the British Prinsep family.
This is a list of the sheriffs and high sheriffs of Staffordshire.
The Baronetcy of Gresley of Drakelow was created in the Baronetage of England on 29 June 1611 for George Gresley of Drakelow Hall, Derbyshire who was later High Sheriff of Derbyshire and Member of Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Milford Hall is a privately owned 18th-century English country house at Milford, near Stafford. It is the family seat of the Levett Haszard family and is a Grade II listed building.
Wychnor Hall is Grade II Listed early 18th-century country house near Burton on Trent, Staffordshire, formerly owned by the Levett Family. The hall has been converted to a Country Club.
Colonel Theophilus John Levett was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom, who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Lichfield from 1880 to 1885.
Thomas Levett, was an Oxford-educated Lincoln's Inn barrister, judge of the Admiralty for the Northern Counties and High Sheriff of Rutland. But Levett's chief accomplishment was as antiquarian, preserving a centuries-old chartulary kept by Cluniac monks at their Pontefract, Yorkshire abbey, and then turning it over to Yorkshire medieval scholar Roger Dodsworth for publication.
Zachary Babington was an English barrister who served as High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1713 and 1724.
John Levett of Wychnor Park, Staffordshire, was an English landowner and investor, and a Tory politician.
Packington Hall in Staffordshire was an English country house designed by architect James Wyatt in the 18th century. Originally built for the Babington family, it became the home of the Levett family of Wychnor Hall, in that same county, until the first half of the twentieth century. The Levetts had ties to Whittington, Staffordshire and nearby Hopwas for many years.
Rev. Thomas Levett served as rector of Whittington, Staffordshire, for 40 years, and as a large landowner in addition to being a clergyman, played a role in the development of Staffordshire's educational system. He was also a member of one of Staffordshire's longest-serving families in ecclesiastical circles, having produced three rectors of the parish of Whittington. The Levett family also produced members of parliament, High Sheriffs of Staffordshire, Lichfield town recorders and businessmen who were friends and contemporaries of Samuel Johnson, Erasmus Darwin, writer Anna Seward, actor David Garrick and other local luminaries. Several streets in Lichfield are named for the family.
Sir Richard Levett, Sheriff, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London, was one of the first directors of the Bank of England, an adventurer with the London East India Company and the proprietor of the trading firm Sir Richard Levett & Company. He had homes at Kew and in London's Cripplegate, close by the Haberdashers Hall. A pioneering British merchant and politician, he counted among his friends and acquaintances Samuel Pepys, Robert Blackborne, John Houblon, physician to the Royal Family and son-in-law Sir Edward Hulse, Lord Mayor Sir William Gore, his brother-in-law Chief Justice Sir John Holt, Robert Hooke, Sir Owen Buckingham, Sir Charles Eyre and others.
Sibton Abbey, an early Cistercian abbey located near Yoxford, Suffolk, was founded about 1150 by William de Chesney, High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. A sister house of Warden Abbey, near Bedford, Bedfordshire, Sibton Abbey was the only Cistercian abbey in East Anglia. It was dissolved in 1536.
Captain Egerton Bagot Byrd Levett-Scrivener (1857–1954) was a Royal Navy Flag Lieutenant and aide to Vice Admiral George Willes in the Far East. He was later promoted to Captain, and following his retirement became Bursar of Keble College, University of Oxford. Born Egerton Levett, he changed his name to Levett-Scrivener on an inheritance from his aunt of Scrivener family properties at Sibton Abbey, Suffolk, which he later managed. Levett was married to the daughter of English diplomat and ambassador Sir Harry Smith Parkes.
Thomas Levett-Prinsep was an English landowner in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. He took on the additional name of Prinsep on inheriting his uncle's holding of Croxall Hall.
Rev. Ralph Levett was an English Anglican minister who served as domestic chaplain to an aristocratic family from Lincolnshire with Puritan sympathies, who subsequently installed him as rector of a local parish. A graduate of Christ's College, Cambridge, where he became a protégé of the prominent Puritan minister John Cotton, Levett later married the sister of the wife of his friend Rev. John Wheelwright, another well-known early Puritan settler of New England.
William Levett was lord of the manor of the South Yorkshire village of Hooton Levitt, a village named in part for his ancestors, and became the owner of the patronage of Roche Abbey on marriage to the granddaughter of the Abbey's cofounder Richard FitzTurgis, a Norman baron who co-founded Roche with the great-nephew of one of England's most powerful Norman barons, Roger de Busli.
robert livett feudal coats of arms.
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