The Early History of the Stricklands of Sizergh

Book excerpt: The following study by a very able Anglo-American historian and antiquary upon the early generations of the ancient Westmorland house of Strickland of Sizergh is of more than passing interest to both American and English readers. The Stricklands are one of the comparatively few English families still flourishing in their ancestral home which possess a proved pedigree reaching back into the twelfth century. Their present seat, Sizergh Castle, came into their possession in the thirteenth century by the marriage of the heiress of d'Eyncourt of Sizergh with a Strickland, and their muniment room contains charters and other family documents dating from the twelfth century. Such families are rare in the England of the twentieth century. To Americans the story of their origin has an absorbing interest. Not only were the Virginia Washingtons, the ancestors of the great George, directly descended from the earlier members of the house, but Edward Carleton, the early settler of Rowley, Mass., as has been shown by Professor Hazen, was a great-grandson of Walter Strickland of Sizergh (died in 1569), the head of the house in the middle of the sixteenth century. -- Foreword.