The House of Tyndall

Confide non confundar

A descent in the male line, 1010–2022

The story

The earldom ended on a hill above Winchester. A son went north.

Siward, a Dane in Cnut’s service, ruled Northumbria from the Humber to the Tweed and died at York in 1055. Eleven years later the English kingdom fell at Hastings. In the winter of 1069–70 William the Conqueror burned the North from York to Durham so thoroughly that Domesday, sixteen years on, still writes waste against village after village. Siward’s son Waltheof, the last of the great Anglo-Danish earls, submitted, rebelled, submitted again, and on 31 May 1076 William had him beheaded on St Giles’s Hill above Winchester — the only English earl the Conqueror put to death. The chronicles give Waltheof daughters and no son. The earldom passed with the eldest to a Norman husband, and the house of Siward, so far as Westminster was concerned, was finished: the last native claim on the North cut off at the neck.

It was not finished. A son the chronicles do not mention had survived: Uhtred, born about the time of the burning, who came of age with his father executed and his father’s earldom in Norman hands. He went north, into Tynedale — the country of the South Tyne west of Hexham, running up to the Cumbrian fells on the march between two kingdoms, where the kings of Scots held land and the writ of Westminster ran thin. There the record finds him, in the company of the Scottish royal house, called by the Scots the Southerner and by the clerks son of Waltheof: named for nothing but his father and the country he came from.

The valley became the family’s name and its seat. Uhtred’s sons and grandsons held it as a barony on the march from the castle at Langley, and his grandson Adam’s seal matrix, Sigillum Ade de Tindal, found in South Tyneside, is kept there still. When the barony passed to a daughter in 1233 a younger brother’s line carried the name south, by Yorkshire to Northamptonshire, and that is the line this site follows: thirty-three generations, every division marked and every gap named, from Siward to a boy born in Austin in 2022.

The story in full →

The progenitor

Uhtred fitz WaltheofLord of Tynedale · c. 1070 – after 1130

Every Tyndall in the line descends from him. The record names him three times across thirty-five years, in the business of two kingdoms.

1095At Norham, Vtredi suderne, witnessing King Edgar’s grant to St Cuthbert beside Alexander, David and Edgar Ætheling.
1113–24First-named juror of David’s inquest into the lands of Glasgow, as Uchtred filius Waldef.
1130In the first surviving Pipe Roll, paying twenty marks, three palfreys and three coursers for sac and soc: his own court in Tynedale.

Married Bethoc, daughter of Donald Bán, King of Scots. North Tynedale went with their daughter Hextilda to the Comyns and became a claim on the Scottish crown in 1291. The south stayed in the male line.

c. 1010

Siward

c. 1040

Waltheof

c. 1070

Uhtred

→ 2022

thirty generations

Follow the line from Uhtred → Why he is Waltheof’s son

PoMS 1/2/1 (Duncan, SHR 78); Charters of David I, no. 15; Pipe Roll 31 Henry I.

The English line

Eight hundred years in a field. The seal of Adam de Tynedale, and the line that left Langley.

In a field in South Tyneside a metal detectorist named Warrick Rochester turned up a small oval of copper alloy with a loop for a cord. Around its edge, in Lombardic capitals, it reads SIGILLVM ADE DE TINDAL: the seal of Adam of Tynedale. In the field are two heads in profile, turned away from one another — a moustached man in a hood and a veiled woman, taken to be Adam and his wife. It is dated on style to between 1175 and 1250, and so belongs to the first Baron of Langley, Uhtred’s grandson, or to his son of the same name who held the barony under Richard I. An expert called it “a fantastic item of national importance.” Dr Stuart Madnick, who has owned Langley Castle since 1986, bought it in 2022, and it is kept in the drawing room there: the only object in this descent that carries an ancestor’s own name.

It is also the last object of the North. When Adam II died in 1233 without a son, Langley went with his daughter to the Boltebys, and the line continued through his younger brother Robert, Treasurer of Glasgow, a clerk in the Scottish church whose sons were born before his orders. Robert’s son Richard took the mill of Startforth in Yorkshire in 1246 and was at Tansor in Northamptonshire the next year; his elder son surrendered the mill, and the younger stayed in the Midlands. At Tansor the family divided again, the senior branch keeping the manor and running out in two daughters by 1409 while the junior married into the Despensers; at Deene the elder son died at twenty and the second took the Felbrigg marriage and the Scales claim; at Hockwold the senior line kept the hall and a younger brother went into London. Five seats in three hundred years, and at every one the line passed to the son who inherited nothing.

The English line, Langley to Hockwold →

The object

Legend: SIGILLVM ADE DE TINDAL — the seal of Adam of Tynedale
Form: Oval seal matrix, copper alloy, worn on a cord at the neck and pressed into wax
Field: Two heads in profile, facing apart: a moustached man in a hood, and a veiled woman
Date: 1175–1250, on style
Found: South Tyneside, by Warrick Rochester; the findspot is not published
Now: Langley Castle, Northumberland; acquired by Dr Stuart Madnick, 2022

A reconstruction after the published descriptions, not a photograph of the matrix. A photograph of the seal can replace it, by permission of Langley Castle. Reported by BBC News and the Hexham Courant, 2022.

The crossing

Captain Robert TyndallGunner to the Prince of Wales · 1576/7 – before 1622

The first of the family in Virginia, and the one the records watch most closely. He left no son. The line crossed in his elder brother.

1576/7Baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, 28 January, second son of Robert Tyndall and Anne Grymes.
1607Sails with the first expedition; writes from Jamestown to Prince Henry on 22 June as his “most humble dutifull and faithfull servaunte and Gunner,” enclosing a journal of the voyage and a chart of the river.
1608His draught of the James survives: British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I.ii.46.
1609–12Master of the Mary and John with Argall, then of the De la Warr; “Robert Tyndall, gunner” in the Prince’s household, 1610; an adventurer under the Third Charter, 1612. Tyndall’s Point on the York carries his name.

c. 1550

Robert Sr.

1575

Thomas I

1576/7

Capt. Robert

→ 2022

fifteen generations

The line in Virginia →

Records of the Virginia Company; Brown, Genesis of the United States; Hening, Statutes at Large I.

The Tyndalls come to America

Two brothers from Bishopsgate. One drew the river; the other held a hundred acres on it.

Robert Tyndall married Anne Grymes at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate in January 1574, under the walls of the Tower, and three sons were baptised there: Thomas in 1575, Robert in 1577, Reynold in 1578. The second son went to sea. As gunner to Henry, Prince of Wales, Captain Robert sailed with the expedition of 1606–7 that planted Jamestown, charted the James as far as the falls, and sent his draught home to the Prince. He mastered ships for the Company, was named in the Prince’s household and among the adventurers of the Third Charter, and left his name on a point of the York. He died before 1622 with no known child.

The elder brother carried the line. Thomas Tyndall held a hundred acres at Coxendale in the Corporation of Henrico — the settlement Sir Thomas Dale founded in 1611 and named for the Prince — a holding that marks an ancient planter or a Company share, and presence in the colony well before the attack of March 1622. Coxendale was evacuated that April and never reoccupied. Thomas was dead by February 1624, when vidua Tyndall stands on the list of inhabitants under James City. His son was pilloried at Jamestown in 1630 for giving Lord Baltimore the lie and threatening to knock him down.

Then the records burn. Henrico’s went up with Richmond in 1865, and two generations stand on chronology and the continuity of the holding and the name. The line emerges in 1654 with a birth in the parish of St James, moves up the James to Buckingham about 1700, and in the 1770s Captain William Tyndall takes it over the border into Georgia, and from there west: Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and in 1988 Austin, where this site is written.

The story in full →

Tyndall’s draughte of Virginia, 1608

Robert Tyndall's chart of the James and York rivers, sent to Prince Henry in 1608. British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I.ii.46.

Plate XLVI of Brown’s Genesis of the United States (1890), after the original: “The Draught by Roberte Tindall of Virginia, Anno 1608,” with a scale of twenty English miles. The first map drawn by a Jamestown colonist. West is at the top, so the Chesapeake lies to the left and the rivers run away to the right. Cape Henry at the lower left; King James his River above with Point Comfort and Kecoughtan at its mouth, Tindall’s Shoals, and the villages marked upriver to Poetan; Prince Henneri his River — the York — below, with Tindall’s Point where it opens to the bay. Sent to Prince Henry with the letter of 22 June 1607 and his journal; it reached the Company when Newport came home in late 1608. British Library, Cotton MS Augustus I.ii.46.

Body — the function page itself.
The Line and the Chromosome drop in here as they stand; the others are built to the same bones.

Secondary — related page, next step, or the sources for this page.

Aside — status, dates, a note.