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Nevilles of Billingbear: The 1833 Printed Pedigree at Royal Berkshire Archives

Image Controlled Print And Archive Catalogue Ready Controlled Descriptive primary object and source context packet

Nevilles of Billingbear: the 1833 printed pedigree

The object and its exact archive placement

Royal Berkshire Archives D/EN/F41 is the large printed pedigree photographed in the BRO image corpus. Its heading and dating line read:

NEVILLES OF BILLINGBEAR.

BROUGHT DOWN TO JULY 23, 1833.

The title was checked directly against all three surviving photographs at original resolution. Those photographs show one physical sheet under weights on a reading-room table. They are alternate captures of the same object, not three separate pedigree sections.

The Royal Berkshire Archives catalogue record describes D/EN/F41 as:

Printed pedigree of the Neville family, from Sir Henry (d.1593) to 1830.

It records the extent as one document. The title, printed form, first principal ancestor, descendant range, and single-document extent match the photographed sheet. This resolves the former “unmapped printed reference item” description.

A date discrepancy that must remain visible

The catalogue assigns the file the date 1830 and says that the pedigree extends to 1830. The sheet itself says that it was brought down to 23 July 1833.

These statements are not necessarily irreconcilable. The descent may terminate with children born by 1830 while the compiler revised or certified the sheet in 1833. But that is an explanation to test, not a fact to insert. The controlled record therefore preserves both dates:

What the sheet actually maps

The pedigree begins with Sir Henry Neville, second son of Sir Edward Nevill of Aldington, who died in 1593. It then separates his marriages and carries the Billingbear descent into the generation of Sir Henry Neville, the Elizabethan and Jacobean diplomat.

From there the sheet maps children, marriages, offices, deaths, and collateral descendants through the seventeenth-century Billingbear family; Henry Neville Grey; Richard Neville Aldworth; Richard Aldworth Neville, second Baron Braybrooke; and Richard Griffin, third Baron Braybrooke, together with their descendants. Visually, it is not a general medieval Neville pedigree. Its organizing line is the ownership and transmission of Billingbear into the Aldworth Neville and Braybrooke families.

That structure makes the sheet valuable in several ways:

It is not contemporary proof of a Tudor or Stuart relationship. Every individual box is a research lead until checked against an earlier record.

The Braybrooke–Audley End context

Richard Griffin, third Baron Braybrooke, published *The History of Audley End* in 1836, only three years after the update date printed on the sheet. On pp. 54–56 he narrates the same succession that dominates the pedigree's lower half: the Nevilles of Billingbear; the grant to the first Sir Henry Neville; Henry Neville Grey; Richard Neville Aldworth's succession to Billingbear and adoption of the Neville name; and the later Braybrooke family.

The chronological proximity, family authorship, and close sequence of names make the third Lord Braybrooke's 1830s historical work the strongest present context for the pedigree. They do not yet prove that the photographed sheet was printed as a plate for the 1836 book. The checked Internet Archive witness does not expose this exact foldout, and no printer's line is visible on the sheet.

The next source test is physical bibliography: inspect complete copies of the 1836 book for omitted, bound, or separately stored pedigree plates and compare typography, paper dimensions, and descendant endpoints.

The earlier Henry Grey pedigree at Audley End

The Essex Record Office catalogue record `D/DBy F61` preserves a different but closely related genealogy archive. It describes a pedigree compiled for Henry Grey of Billingbear, including extracts from the Waltham St Lawrence and Evenlode parish registers, pedigrees certified on 12 April 1729, Neville arms and quarterings, and a broader descent from the medieval earls. The record also notes loose 1834 genealogical papers in the hand of the third Lord Braybrooke.

This is important context for the printed sheet. It demonstrates that the Audley End family archive held both an earlier evidentiary pedigree for Henry Grey and fresh genealogical work by Lord Braybrooke in the exact period when the 1833 sheet was updated. It does not establish that D/DBy F61 and D/EN/F41 are the same object; they are different records in different repositories.

Research implications for the Neville project

The sheet should replace vague references to a “modern printed pedigree” in other AI Topics. It is specifically an 1833 family-historical document preserved as RBA D/EN/F41. Its value is not that it independently proves Henry Neville's ancestry. Its value is that it captures the Billingbear family's nineteenth-century genealogical synthesis and points back toward the parish, probate, heraldic, and family-archive witnesses used to construct it.

For Shakespeare-related topics, the correct use is similarly precise. The sheet can identify which Neville branches and historical names the Billingbear descendants claimed as their family line. It cannot, by itself, prove that Sir Henry Neville interpreted or used those relationships in reading or writing a play. That separate argument must rest on early genealogy, documented family knowledge, and exact Folger-controlled dramatic passages.

Verification record

Public sources