fore we reach, in the time of Edward I, the earliest surviving documents in which the family may be even tentatively identified. The elaborate pedigree compiled in the Heralds' College in 17011 does, indeed, begin with a definite date, 1198, temp. Richard I, as the floruit of the founder, which might be applied to the Sanson de Cari whom we have met, if there were any record to identify him, which there is not.

It seems necessary, then, for at least four generations, to be content with the tradition, although it leads us into no little confusion as we attempt to test it by authenticated records either of the Cary name or of the other Devon families with which the earliest Carys are reputed to have intermarried.

1 The pedigree of 1701 was based on the Visitation of 1620, but shows evidence of subsequent access to the Domesday book, the earliest Feet of Fines, and the Hundred Rolls, and of critical genealogical study. It may doubtless be traced to Sir William Segar, the Garter King-of-Arms, who died in 1633, for Ralph Thoresby attributes to him a somewhat similar Cary pedigree included in the Ducatus Leodiensis in 1715. Whoever was responsible, the result fully justifies the claim on the handsome parchment exemplar now in the possession of a member of the family, that what it records was "faithfully collected from the Books and Records of the College of Arms and other authentic Testimonies, and deduced down to this year 1701." The W. M. Cary Notes include a transcript of this parchment of 1701, made from the original in 1907. There is a transcript of a late seventeenth-century parchment of what seems to be a portion of the same pedigree in Crisp's Fragmenta Genealogica, 1889, i, 19. No one who has occasion to study the Carys can fairly avoid obligation also to the modern and scholarly researches of Messrs. Dymond and Robinson, as published in J. G. Nichols' Herald and Genealogist, ii-viii, though the printer of that publication did not do them justice. Neither of them attempted any archeological exploration of the origin, however.

Here, then, is what the Visitation pedigrees, examined critically and pieced out with such other scraps of evidence as can be collected, tell us of the early generations of Cary of Cary.

I. ADAM DE CARY (sometimes styled Adam de Kari and sometimes Adam Carye) is reputed to be the founder of the family and to have flourished in the time of Richard I. The Visitation of 1620, where he makes his first appearance, describes him as "of Castle Carye, Esq.," and testifies not only that he bore arms gules chevron entre three swans argent,' but that he married Amy, daughter of Sir William Trevit, knight. The Trevits were long established at Chilton Trivet and Durborough in Somerset.2 The attribution of this marriage and the fact that there were Carys in Somerset temp. Edward I and

1 The swan survives as the Cary crest, though eliminated from the arms, which certainly since the day of the Chief Baron (1356) have been argent, on a bend sable, three roses of the field. Arguing doubtless from the canting practice of the old heralds, the Rev. C. J. Robinson says (Herald and Genealogist, iv, 385) in reference to the crest: "The swan, it may be noticed, was perhaps originally adopted by the family because the bird is so much associated with the ancient Caria." This is ingenious, but the present editor has been unable to find any classical reference to the swan in relation to ancient Caria. Clazomenæ in Ionia and Mallus in Cilicia celebrated the swan in their beautiful coin types, but no Carian city did so. See Head, Historia Numorum, 2d ed., 568, 725.

2 Collinson, Somerset, iii, 89. The learned friar Nicholas Trivet, who wrote a chronicle of the reign of Edward I, and that adventurous soldier Sir Thomas Trevit, who is revealed to us by Froissart in the midst of hairbreadth 'scapes on the continent during the Hundred Years' War, were both of this family. See Dict. Nat. Biog. (reissue ed.), xix, 1161 ff.

Edward III may originally have induced the interpretation, now become almost a tradition, that the Devon Carys themselves had their origin in Somerset. This interpretation is, however, purely literary.

The classical book of Thomas Westcote, A View of Devonshire in MDCXXX, though not printed until 1845, was long passed around in MS., and, among the learned at Exeter, became the source from which the succeeding historians of Devon, Pole, Risdon, Prince, Izacke, and Polwhele, drew much of their information about the early Carys among other Devon worthies. Westcote derived his genealogical material from the Visitation of 1620, and interpreted (p. 507) the "Castle Carye" therein mentioned as the seat of the reputed founder of the family to be a reference to Castle Cary in Somersetshire. He seems to have been the first to voice this specific attribution; at all events he was followed by most of the subsequent genealogists, though they all immediately transfer the family with which we are now concerned to Cary in Devon. This unexplained transfer to another place, which had long borne the same name, soon invited question. Thus Westcote's contemporary Tristram Risdon1 describes the parish of St. Giles in the Heath as "hemmed in with the Tamar river on the one side and a pretty brook 1 Chorographical Description .. of Devon, 1714, 229.

1

called Cary on the other: whereof (if I conceive not amiss) the surname of the Carys took beginning, for in this parish that family possessed an ancient dwelling bearing their name." This seems to have convinced Prince.1 At the beginning of the nineteenth century Daniel Lysons2 confirmed Risdon's cautious suggestion with a definite judgment:

The origin of this ancient family seems enveloped in much obscurity.... It is most probable that Cary which adjoins Panston was the original place of their residence.

That Risdon and Lysons were right is now evident. Modern research has failed to identify any Adam in relation to Castle Cary or otherwise in Somerset in or about the time of Richard I. He does not appear, as, had he ever existed and held as important a fee as the Somerset Castle Cary, he surely would appear, in the contemporary lists in which one finds the Englishmen of the Angevin times who did feudal service or paid scutage to the crown: the Liber Rubeus of the Exchequer, the Pipe Rolls, the Hundred Rolls, the Feet of Fines-those sequels of Domesday whose archaic MS. and crabbed, abbreviated Latin were until the nineteenth century practically inaccessible and so mysterious that no complaisant herald was debarred by

1 Worthies, 176.

2 Magna Britannia, 1806-1822, vi, part 1, 138, 247.

fear of their testimony from gratifying family pride by bold and solemn asseveration on parchment if only it was within the probabilities and did not venture too much specification; but now those ancient vouchers are open to all the world, in fair print with exhaustive indexes, and so have served to puncture many a traditional genealogical myth.1 On the other hand, the undeniable records to which we have referred show the Somersetshire Castle Cary firmly vested in the inheritance of the family of Lovel both long before and long after the date attributed to Adam de Cary; indeed, we see that fee in the process of transfer from one Lovel to another at the very moment Westcote has conferred it on Adam.2 To this negative evidence may be added the positive fact that the papers supporting the Visitation of 1620 (Harl. MS., 1764), in which Westcote found his Castle Carye, specifically refer to the fifth generation of the Carys as residing at "Castle Carye in Devon," and so prove that the Castle Carye mentioned earlier in the same document was intended to be the same

1 A modern English archivist has picturesquely labeled Burke's Peerage a "gorgeous repertory of genealogical mythology." Mr. J. H. Round is equally severe. It is fair to say that this is less true with every new edition.

2 In the first year of King John (1199) Ralph Lovel paid sixty pounds for livery of his barony of Kary (in Somerset) on the death of his father Henry, who appears also several times in the records under Henry II. This Castle Kary continued in the hands of the Lovels until the time of Edward III. See Dugdale, Baronage, 1675, i, 637.