The Knight with Two Names
A Y-DNA lead, a ten-shilling entry, and a trail towards William the Conqueror’s court.
I first became interested in the Paulet family through the FTDNA I-Z140 YDNA project. A tester with the surname Pallette belonged to Z140. His 1000 year traversing family tree led me towards an extraordinary medieval identity puzzle, with records on both sides of the Channel. One of the clues was a debt of ten shillings. At the other end of the inquiry stood the court of William the Conqueror.
The lineage we were investigating led back to Sir William Paulet, the first Marquess of Winchester, who lived from about 1483 to 1572. The old Geni tree carried the family further into medieval Somerset. At its early end stood an Alexander with two identities: de Paulet and de Aunou. If those names belonged to the same man, the English family might have preserved a Norman history that its later surname no longer revealed.
Justin Swanstrom, a Geni curator with extensive experience of historical genealogy, worked with me on the Latin sources. We spent weeks following references through records on both sides of the Channel. The point at which a name appeared to change was the point at which the investigation became exciting.
My surviving research files preserve that search: old histories, printed Latin accounts, family-tree screenshots and a modern DNA comparison. Returning to them now, I can follow the trail again, including the places where a persuasive pedigree runs ahead of the document beneath it.
Before Alexander, there was Hercules
The family already possessed a much grander origin story. In Arthur Collins’s Peerage of England, the account of the Dukes of Bolton begins with Hercules, lord of Tournon in Picardy. He supposedly came to England with a Plantagenet prince, acquired Paulet and gave his descendants their English name. The story then passes through Williams and Walter into the familiar English family.
The opening is memorable. It also presents a problem: a printed pedigree is the claim to investigate. Its elegant succession of fathers and sons cannot substitute for the records that identify them. In the account I was testing, Alexander de Aunou occupied the place where that older tradition had put Hercules.
The competing beginnings gave the inquiry its shape. Which origin could be followed through contemporary names, land and obligations?
Ten shillings in Normandy
One of the clues is almost disappointingly short. In the Norman Exchequer material assigned to 1184, among entries recording payments and liabilities, a clerk entered the name Alexander de Puilleta. A later edition gives the line as:
De Alexandro de Puilleta 10 sol. pro plegio.
In ordinary English: from Alexander de Puilleta, ten shillings in connection with a pledge or surety. There is no account of his arrival in England, no family history, no explanation of the name. The clerk recorded what mattered to the administration.
The entry can be checked in the older printed page and a later edition. My archive also contains Stapleton’s 1840 Magni rotuli, where it appears on page 120 in abbreviated Latin. These are different printings of the same medieval entry. The spelling had been interpreted as a form of Paulet or Pawlett. The question was whether this man could be identified with an Alexander recorded as de Alno in Somerset.
That question matters because medieval names could follow land. A person known through one estate might appear elsewhere under another place-name. Finding two forms was a lead; the estates, relatives and dates had to explain why the forms belonged together.
The land behind the name
The English evidence brought the investigation to Pawlett, near Bridgwater. A return of 1212, preserved in the Book of Fees, records that an earlier King Henry had granted Pawlett to Fulk de Alneto. It also recalls a grant of nearby Grandon to a Fulk of that name. The connection between an Alneto and the English place behind the Paulet surname was therefore present in the administrative record.
The return is precise about one thing that a modern summary can easily blur. It describes service assessed at half a knight’s fee. That is a military obligation attached to land, rather than a statement that Fulk owned exactly half the village. In 1212 the Pawlett holding is recorded under Maurice de Gant. To follow the family, I had to follow the history of the holding as carefully as the spelling of the surname.
There was also a Somerset return by Alexander de Alno, normally dated to 1166. It survives in the Black Book of the Exchequer. Alexander explains the knight-service due from his fee and describes an earlier grant by his father to his father’s brother, Hugh de Alno. Here was something closer to a family speaking through its own obligations: a father, a brother and a parcel of land, remembered because the king required an answer.
I wanted to know whether this was the Somerset side of the man who appeared as de Puilleta in Normandy. His return supplied a relative to pursue. It did not name his father. That missing name became more important than another generation added to the tree.
There was scholarly support for looking at a Somerset Aunou. A Leeds doctoral thesis by Wendy Stevenson, completed in 1974 and preserved among my files, explicitly calls the Somerset representative Alexander de Aunou. She distinguishes his family from an Alneto holding in Lincolnshire. The distinction matters: similar names can conceal separate people.
Following her footnote brought another complication. Collinson’s history of Somerset discusses Alexander at Compton-Dando, calls him de Alno and Danno or Dando, and names Robert as his son. That gives us a further identity and a family context to compare. It does not itself call him Paulet. Before treating Alexander as the bridge between the two pedigrees, I need those estates and relationships to agree.
An older claim worth testing
In revisiting the research, I found that the proposed identification had a longer printed history than my first account suggested. In 1874, The Norman People had already argued that the Paulets descended from the house of Aunou and identified Alexander de Alno with Alexander de Puilleta. The book pointed readers towards the knight-service returns and Norman accounts.
That changed the question I needed to answer. An earlier genealogist had proposed the bridge. Our work with the records had to establish how much weight it could carry. The useful evidence lay in the small entries behind the confident printed conclusion.
The Geni tree preserved the proposed route, including successive Fulks and an Alexander joined to the English Paulets. Yet the early English generations differ between that tree, the nineteenth-century account and the later county history. Repeated names are treacherous here. Before a William can become someone’s father, I need to know which William he was, where he held land and who inherited it.
A family remembered at Bath
A different kind of record led to Bath: a Latin memorial naming Alexander de Alneto, his wife, their son, their daughter Lucy, and descendants through Lucy. It survives through antiquarian transcriptions rather than a stone I have inspected.
The archive let me go back beyond John Britton’s 1825 history of Bath Abbey Church to Richard Warner’s History of Bath, printed in 1801. On page 48 of its appendix, Warner gives the memorial and a note assigning Alexander’s gift of Chamley to Bath to 1153. He also preserves an observation dated 7 December 1582. The medieval family reaches us through several layers of later copying.
Get Maximilian von Liechtenstein’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Warner and Britton print the son’s name as Eulius. A separate excerpt in my files, attributed to Stow, gives Fulco instead. The modern genealogy page follows that Fulco reading. The exact Stow edition still needs to be established; until the copies are collated, the different names must stay visible.
The relationship word is clearer. Filius eorum means “their son”. A modern English rendering on the web turns the son into Alexander’s father. It is a small grammatical reversal with a large genealogical consequence. The inscription also contains a line through a daughter, so its successive names cannot simply be read as one paternal chain.
This is why I keep returning to the Latin. It can preserve exactly the relationship I need, while a fluent modern paraphrase quietly points in the opposite direction.
At the Conqueror’s court
At the Norman end of the inquiry, the sources become unexpectedly vivid. The University of Caen’s authority record for Foulques d’Aunou brings together several forms of his name and directs the reader to royal and monastic charters. One of those records places a Fulk of Aunou in William the Conqueror’s English court.
The act is dated 13 April 1069, Easter Monday, at Winchester. William grants the church of Deerhurst to the abbey of Saint-Denis. The document describes its confirmation during Mass at the monastery of St Swithun. Its witness subscriptions include the king, Queen Matilda, their son Richard, leading churchmen and nobles. Among them is the formula:
Ego Fulco de Alnoo.
“I, Fulk of Aunou.” In the critical edition of the charter, the name sits within a dated act of the king, with a place, a beneficiary and a witness group. This is the Norman world I had hoped the trail might reach: people participating in the government and patronage of the conquered kingdom.
There is a further connection to the invasion itself. The medieval ship list, as interpreted in modern scholarship and recorded by Caen, credits Fulk with forty ships for William’s expedition. Wace’s later account also places the lord of Aunou in the army at Hastings. The charter, the fleet contribution and the narrative each illuminate a different part of his association with William.
The family records add another useful name. Acts for the abbey of La Trinité at Caen name Fulk with his son Foulcolin; a later confirmation associates the donation with his wife Haduissa becoming a nun. Those are relationships to reconstruct from the documents, before deciding how the numbered Fulks of a modern pedigree correspond to them.
What the Y-chromosome can bring back
The genetic starting point remains important. The public Pallette-Parlette project results contain a modern test associated with an earliest-ancestor label naming Sir William Paulet, and report a branch downstream of Z140. That keeps the historical inquiry attached to a testable paternal question.
My January 2017 comparison sheets preserve the earlier stage of that work. They place Pallette alongside Renouf and several other testers, using 37 short tandem repeat markers. Pallette and Renouf differ by five steps in the displayed comparison. The table explains why the neighbouring paternal lines invited investigation. It does not identify which medieval man they shared, and its modelled age estimates cannot decide between the competing pedigrees.
The next genetic advance would come from men whose separate, documented father-to-son lines meet in an early Paulet ancestor. Their shared downstream variants could help define the paternal signature of that family. A record linking the medieval generations would then have something specific to connect to. The broad Z140 label alone cannot identify the knight in a Norman roll.
I began with the Pallette lineage and a surname that appeared to lead back into England. The investigation brought me to a royal grant, a Somerset return, a disputed sequence of names and a witness at William’s Easter court. Each source gave me a more concrete person to look for.
The unresolved step is now sharply defined. Between the Paulets of the English records and the Aunous of the Norman charters stands an Alexander whose identity needs to be demonstrated across both names. The next person I need to identify is the man behind those ten shillings.
A note on the evidence
This account draws on my earlier work with Justin Swanström, my preserved Geni material and a fresh review of the research archive. The named entries and Norman royal connections described here can be sourced. The complete paternal route from a modern tester through Sir William Paulet to Alexander, and from Alexander to the Conquest-era Aunous, has not been independently established in this review. The live Geni source-attachment collection remained inaccessible; the supplied archive recovered important source volumes, rather than a complete export of those attachments. Precise early birth dates, the proposed two-name identity and the numbered Fulks remain questions for the dossier. AI assisted with drafting and document preparation.
Sources and further reading
- The Alexander profile on Geni
- The 1184 Norman entry: Memoires VIII, printed p. 364
- Alexander de Alno: Liber niger I, p. 96
- The 1212 return: Book of Fees I, p. 84
- Pawlett estates: Victoria County History
- William’s Winchester charter: SCRIPTA 6567
- Fulk and Foulcolin: SCRIPTA 1673
- The 1082 confirmation: SCRIPTA 6472
- Foulques d’Aunou: University of Caen authority record
- The Bath memorial tradition: Britton, p. 10
- Wendy Stevenson’s thesis: II, pp. 383–384
- Collinson’s Somerset: II, pp. 125, 166 and 421
- The earlier Paulet-Aunou argument: The Norman People, pp. 354–355
- Pallette-Parlette DNA Project
