A Shropshire Lad (1)

 

Robert Burnell, lord chancellor and Bishop of Bath and Wells, was born at Acton Burnell in Shropshire, six miles SE of Shrewsbury, in about 1240. Otherwise we know little about his early life, except that he was one of four brothers. It is not known who his parents were or his precise date of birth. 

Nothing is known of Burnell's upbringing or education, before his sudden appearance as a royal clerk in the 1250s. The monks of Buildwas Abbey, sometime in the fourteenth century, concocted a pedigree for Burnell tracing his family all the way back to a Robert Burnell who (allegedly) came to England with the Conqueror. 

The pedigree was an invention: "...a tribute devised by obsequious monks to gratify the pride of the Burnells in the days of their prosperity" (Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire). 

This sort of fabricated genealogy was quite common. For instance the powerful Clanvoe family, descended of the lineage of Hywel ap Meurig, forged a descent from the old lords of Deheubarth. The family was in fact descended from an obscure Welsh tenant of the Mortimers in the Middle March. 

(The pic is of Acton Burnell castle near Shrewsbury)