Sir Gilbert Jocelyn

Sir Gilbert Jocelyn was born in the 11th century.

Edith S. Wessler claimed that Sir Gilbert's father was born in the Chateau de Josselin, Josselin, Brittany, France, and came to England in 1042 with King Edward.¹ According to the genealogist Roger D. Joslyn, this lineage came from an account published in 1912 by Laura Elmendorf Skeels which was "inventive."²

According to an article by Elizabeth French in the July 1917 issue of The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Sir Gilbert was a wealthy Norman knight who came into England with William the Conqueror, married the daughter of a Saxon thane (a free retainer of an Anglo-Saxon lord), and settled in Lincolnshire.³

Referring to Sir Gilbert's son Gilbert (later Saint Gilbert of Sempringham), a thirteenth-century manuscript stated His father was born in Normandy, his mother a lady of Sempringham. His father, as they say, was a Norman knight which came to this land with King William at the Conquest and married the lady of Sempringham (translated from the Latin original into English by John Capgrave in 1451, and retranslated into modern English by Eric W. Iredale in 1987.)⁴

Eric Iredale's book states that Jocelin, a wealthy Norman knight, married a Saxon lady "of lower rank" who lived at Sempringham.⁵ In the Domesday Book of 1086, he was listed as a landowner in the parish of Sempringham: Gocelin, Alfred's man, has 1 team there (in demesne), and 14 sokemen on 2-1/2 carucates of this land, and 8 villeins and 2 bordars, and the fourth part of 1 church, and 11 acres of meadow and 7 acres of underwood, and now worth 40 shillings; tallage 20 shillings.⁵ Alfred was "Alfred of Lincoln."⁵ Meaning of terms: in demesne = held by the lord; sokeman = freeman; carucate = measure of land in Danish counties for tax purposes; villein = villager, member of the peasant class; tallage = tax due to the lord of the manor.⁶

In 1100 Jocelin de Sempringham built the Church of St Andrew on the site of a more ancient Saxon church; the chancel was about the same length as the nave.⁵

Roger Joslyn, a certified genealogist, in correspondence quoted by Carol A. Kroeger in her Josselyn Family History, warned that the family lineage before about 1248 is suspect because it is from pedigrees in the Visitations, with little or no primary documentation to back it up.⁷ In a 2004 article he wrote ". . . the best published genealogical account of 1635 New England immigrant Thomas Josselyn remains that by Elizabeth French . . . For Thomas's earliest ancestry, Miss French relied on the published visitations of Essex, the pedigrees of which probably cannot be verified before about the year 1200."²