John Russell (knight)

Sir John Russell (died c. 1224) was an English nobleman, household knight of King John (1199–1216), and of the young King Henry III (1216–1272), to whom he also acted as steward. He served in this capacity as custodian of the royal castles of Corfe (1221 and 1224) and Sherborne (1224) in Dorset and of the castles of Peveril and Bolsover in Derbyshire. He served as Sheriff of Somerset in 1223-1224. He was granted the royal manor of Kingston Russell in Dorset under a feudal land tenure of grand serjeanty. Between 1212 and about 1215 he acquired a moiety of the feudal barony of Newmarch, (shared with John de Bottrel/Bottreaux) the caput of which was at North Cadbury, Somerset, in respect of which he received a summons for the military service of one knight in 1218.

The parentage and ancestry of Russell is unknown, despite the existence of historical writings and pedigrees to the contrary, which are now considered fictitious. His progeny has for many centuries, due to these pedigrees, erroneously been believed to include the Russell Dukes of Bedford. It was as a result of the generous patronage of the Dukes that various elaborate and fanciful Russell pedigrees were produced, which in order to compliment and flatter a Duke's great status sought to provide him with an ancestry stretching back to the feudal barony and beyond. Thus did the unrelated and comparatively minor family of John Russell of Kingston Russell fall to the attention of the best funded heralds and genealogists through the last few centuries, and thus was a great deal of research into his family undertaken and recorded. Where results and genealogical linkages could not be found or proved the researchers simply invented them, in order to justify their funding and please their patron. The fanciful pedigree invented by the York Herald Le Neve which was prepared for Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford (died 1627), was further embellished in the Regency era by the man of letters Jeremiah Wiffen (1792–1836), appointed in 1821 librarian at Woburn Abbey to John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, whose 1833 work, containing for the most part much valuable research, "Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell", in connecting the Duke's family to that of John Russell's of Kingston Russell was deliberately fictitious. Wiffen's device was the invention of a second marriage, with consequent progeny, for Sir Theobald Russell (died 1341), great-grandson of John Russell. The deliberate genealogical fraud is forensically described by J. Horace Round, one of the earliest of a new breed of scientific genealogists, in his 1901 article "The Origin of the Russells".

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