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Excerpt from Chapter 1
The Pamplin Family of Thaxted, Essex County, England
The following quote is the tentative “Preface” to Michael Ian Coyne's book on the history of the Pamplin Family in Essex County, England. Mr. Coyne is a historian, a history teacher and a Pamplin descendant of this branch of the family.
During the earlier part of the thirteenth century, many merchants from Pamplona (Pampyloun to the French-speaking) in Navarre were given license to trade along the coasts of the English-ruled French provinces. As early as 1224, one such person, Peter Ernaldi of Pampelona, was granted permission to sell his merchandise in Gascony. In 1229 we also find another merchant, Bonomy de Pampeluna, generously being given a grant from the King (Henry III of England) to trade along the same coast. By the year 1243, the King is personally carrying out business transactions with these Navarre traders, for according to the Patent Rolls, the King, whilst in residence in Bordeaus, paid a Sancho Pampilona twenty-two marks for a horse. From within the Patent Rolls we also find Henry making a request for the King of Navarre to permit Pampilonian traders a safe conduct. On the 26th of August, 1254, the King of Bordeaus gave a general license for Pampelonians to trade with Gascony.
Whilst these Plantagenet kings were mainly resident in their French provinces, business and other kingly duties were conducted from there and not England. With the loss of his French lands, the king permanently returned to England; so, too, did these Navarre traders.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, the word 'of' had been lost by many of these traders, who then seem to assume the place of their origin as a surname. It seems that the first such settlers in England became domicile in Kent, for we find that in 1280 a Peter Pampeloyne being accused of digging up part of the marsh at Menstre in Kent. In 1285 there is a mention of a Roger Pampyloun, nephew and heir of William of Boseham in Sussex. After this time, although toward the turn of the century and there after, we find Pafylon, Pamplyon, Pampillon, Pampeillon and Paunfiloun in the counties of Essex, Kent, Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire. The family line that I follow is of those Paunfilouns who finally were to settle Essex and within a hundred years to be named Pamphilon.
It was thus during the reign of King Henry III (1216-1272) that we see the expansion and development of trade in England, and with it the inevitable influx of foreign traders whom the King had already granted license to trade in France. Many towns in England began to specialize in certain trades and industries, and it is to such a town, Thaxted, in Essex, that a family of Paunfilouns eventually moved. The importance of Thaxted as a center of the English cutlery trade seems most likely to have been the principal factor which brought the family to that place. Iron bar was exported from Navarre, and research shows that quantities of the metal arrived at Thaxted via the Port of Colchester.
To be continued . . .