From
Fortunes1:
[Joseph] Hunter [author of History of South Yorkshire, which covers the Bosviles] gives quite a lot of charters in which the name of Sir John de Bosville appears, and also speaks of a deed in which he styles himself "Dominus Johannes de Bosevil" and quit-claims to Thomas de Dichton, his seneschal, all demands "ab initio mundi ad finem seculi"!2 and he tells of a valuable charter making gifts of lands to Peter his son, to which John’s seal is still appended. The device is a heater shield having the five fusils in fess but no charge in chief; there was an inscription round it, but it is broken away.
...the Bosvilles attended the King, as their lands held of no baron, "except Brierley, a manor of the King’s demesne, of which a temporary gift had been made by the King to William le Flemming, one of his Low Country commanders"; and the King had also made William le Flemming patron of the living of Darfield, "for the first Rector of Darfield upon Record was Sir William, son of Robert, instituted 1230, presented by William Flandrensis."
Hunter says (South Yorkshire, vol. ii. page 109) that a Swein de Darfield before 1185 gave eight acres in Ardsley to the monks of Bretton. This Swein, Hunter thinks, may be an ancestor of Hugh de Darfield, the father of Alicia, wife of Sir John Bosville, and says it is not impossible that in this line we have the progeny of Alsi, the King’s tenant at Darfield at the time of the Doomsday survey.
Speaking of the gift to the Bretton monks, the Memoirs record that it was to make a pool or dam in the River Durr and to have a mill. Elsewhere in the Memoirs we are told that Darfield is named from this River Durr flowing through fields.
Family LIfe
Sir John and Alicia (Darfield) de Bosville had six children. John the eldest married "Agnes" and they had a son, Sir James Bosville of New Hall; this son died unmarried and gave New Hall to his cousin Robert, Constable of Pontefract. In this Deed of Gift he calls himself Sir James Bosville of Middlefield (so says Hunter: Godfrey Bosville says of Micklefield), and gives to Robert, son of Peter Bosville, all his manors of New Hall and all his lands and reversions in Darfield, Wombwell, Ardsley, Barnsley and Gresbrook; dated at New Hall on the Friday next after the Feast of the Purification, 3 Edward III. 1329. Godfrey Bosville says that James leaving so much to Robert can only be accounted for by the supposition that Robert had married the daughter and heiress of James, but Hunter says James died unmarried.
Of the other six children of John and Alicia, the second son Robert and fourth son William, both living in 1296, seem to have left no issue. The two daughters were Matilda, who married Sir Roger FitzThomas, and Catherine. It was Peter, the third son, who carried on the family in the early days of the fourteenth century when Edward I. was king.
Footnotes
[1] The Fortunes of a Family (Bosville of New Hall, Gunthwaite and Thorpe), Lady Macdonald of the Isles, Edinburgh (1927)
[2] 'From the start of the world to the end of time'
- 1235