Fay Sampson’s Family History
This site is a work-in-progress. There is a massive amount to cover. I have included both male and female lines, and some go back 30 generations. Keep coming back for more.
I have numbered the generations working backwards from my own as (1)
Sampson Tree
WILLIAM DE KARY and ALICE BEAUMONT (24)
WILLIAM DE KARY is the only known child of John de Cary and Elizabeth Stapleton of St Giles in the Heath, north of Launceston. He was born around 1230, during the long reign of Henry III.
We know of no siblings.
His grandfather was first recorded in 1198. The Carys’ manor house was probably on the site of the present Carey Barton, overlooking the River Carey, which flows south to join the Tamar.
There is no connection between this family and Castle Cary in Somerset.[1]
At his death, among his other estates, William held the manor of West Polworth in Devon.
ALICE BEAUMONT came from a well-established Devon family. She was the daughter of Sir William Beaumont. One, usually well-researched, website, gives her mother as Marguerite de Chabot, and has her descended from Henry I and William the Conqueror through her paternal great-grandmother Matilda FitzRoy.[2] But in this case the link is not reliably sourced. Edward Beaumont’s The Beaumonts in History gives her a different lineage.[3] He names her mother as Margaret, but does not supply her maiden name.
She was born in Devon around 1240. Her family home was Ayshe manor, South Tawton, west of Okehampton. After the Norman Conquest the Devon Beaumonts originally settled at Shirwell, 3 miles NE of Barnstaple, where the family home was Youlston. But Alice’s father was a younger son and had to make his home elsewhere.
The 13th century was marked by hostility between the barons and the king, resulting in the Second Barons’ War of 1264-7. This was led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.
One of the darkest features of this century was the growing animosity towards Jews. King Henry extracted large sums of money from Jewish financiers. During the Barons’ War, Simon de Montfort’s two sons carried out a massacre of Jews in London in 1265. 500 were put to death. Others only survived because they were imprisoned in the Tower of London.
We do not know what part William played in the Barons’ War.
Alice and William were married around 1269.
There appear to be two children from this marriage, John, born c.1270, who appears in some records as William, and possibly Thomas, born around 1274.
Alice’s death date is usually given as 1273. If this is correct, she probably died giving birth to Thomas.
Other sources say she outlived William. At her death she held the manors of Kary and Pavestone near Tavistock by the seventh part of a knight’s fee.
The church of St Giles had been a chapelry of North Petherwin, belonging to the abbey of Tavistock. From 1288 it became instead a chapelry of St Stephen’s by Launceston, and now belonged to Launceston Priory. Launceston is the nearest major town to St Giles on the Heath.
William died in 1303, aged 73, leaving John as his heir.
The Devon Tax Roll for that year shows the manors of Panneston and Cary in the hundred of Black Torrington as then held by the seventh part of a knight’s fee by the heirs of Ralph and Walter de Panneston.
[1] http://www.advsolutions.com/carey/castlecariresearch.htm
[2] https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Cornwall-723
[3] Beaumont, Edward T., The Beaumonts in History. A.D. 850–1850. Oxford, c. 1929,
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