452 THE DECLINE AND FALL the Courtenays of France. The right of wardship enabled a feudal lord to reward his vassal with the marriage and estate of a noble heiress ; and Reginald of Courtenay acquired a fair establishment in Devonshire, where his posterity has been seated above six hundred years, i*^* From a Norman baron, Baldwin de Brioniis, who had been invested by the Conqueror, Ha^^'ise, the wife of Reginald, derived the honour of Okehampton, which was held by the service of ninety-three knights ; and a female might claim the manly offices of hereditary viscount or sheriff, and of cap- tain of the royal castle of Exeter. Their son Robert mnrried the sister of the earl of Devon ; at the end of a century, on the failure of the family of Rivers,^'^'* his great-grandson, Hugh the Second, succeeded to a title which was still considered as a territorial TheEoiisof dignity; and twelve earls of Devonshire, of the name of Courte- nay, have floui'ished in a period of two hundred and twenty years. They wei"e ranked among the chief of the barons of the realm ; nor was it till after a strenuous dispute that they yielded to the fief of Arundel the first place in the parliament of England ; their alliances were contracted with the noblest families, the Veres, Despensers, St. Johns, Talbots, Bohuns, and even the Plantag- enets themselves ; and in a contest with John of Lancaster, a Courtenay, bishop of London, and afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, might be accused of profane confidence in the strength and number of his kindred. In peace, the earls of Devon resided in their numerous castles and manors of the west; their ample revenue was appropriated to devotion and hospitality ; and the epitaph of Edward, surnamed, from his misfortunes, the hli7id, from his virtues, the good, Earl, inculcates with much ingenu- ity a moral sentence, which may, however, be abused by thought- less generosity. After a grateful commemoration of the fifty-five years of union and happiness, which he enjoyed with Mabel his wife, the good Earl thus speaks from the tomb : What we gave, we have ; What we spent, we had ; What we left, we lost.^^ 1*'^ Besides the third and most valuable book of Cleaveland's History, I have con- sulted Dugdale, the father of our genealogical science (Baronage, p. i. p. 634-643). lO'^This great family, de Ripuariis, de Redvers, de Rivers, ended, in Edward the First's time, in Isabella de Fortibus, a famous and potent dowager, who long survived her brother and husband (Dugdale, Baronage, p. i. p. 254-257). loscieaveland, p. 142. By some it is assigned to a Rivers, earl of Devon; but the English denotes the xvth rather than the xiiith century.
