Adam de Birkin
Adam de Birkin (a.k.a. FitzPeter)
A vavasour (free mean) of English, Danish and Norman descent who held the manor of Birkin, near Knottingley in the Barkston Ash wapentake of the West Riding of Yorkshire, from the de Lacy family of Pontefract.
Adam married Maud de Caux, daughter of Robert II de Caux, Warden of the Forests of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, in 1165.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Peter Birkin, son of the Dane Asulfr, may have inherited the small estate of Birkin from a relative (the Domesday holders are Aelfric in 1066 and Gamal son of Barth in 1086). Peter held the lands from the Lacy family's Honour of Pontefract rather than by freehold.
If Asulfr inherited the entirity of Gamal's estate, their lands were extensive - Gamal held 20 manors in Yorkshire, mostly in the West Riding, in 1066; by 1086 he held lands in six manors directly from the Crown, and land in 20 others from the Baron of Pontefract.
Nevertheless, they were not a knightly family but vavasours - freemen holding land of a baron - placing them on the cusp between commoners and lesser gentry.
The family was upwardly mobile. Asulfr chose a Norman name for his son, and arranged marriage to Emma de Lascelles, sister of the Norman knight John de Lascelles. Peter and Emma married around 1135. She brought with her a further 24 carucates of land (about 2,880 acres, - roughly two knights' fees) in Snaith and Sitlington as her marriage portion.
Adam was the oldest of Peter and Emma's four sons, and he was a minor when the estates passed to him on Peter's death in 1143. In the assize of 1166, Adam owed Henry de Lacy the service of one knight for his lands.
In 1179 Adam engaged in trial by combat with Simon de Lascelles (his uncle?) to gain his mother's lands; Adam was victorious in the duel. While Emma's date of death is not known, she would have been about 60 if she died in 1178, which may have prompted the battle over her marriage portion between Brikin and Lascelles.
Around 1165 Adam married Maud de Caux, younger daughter of Robert II de Caux, Lord of Laxton and hereditary Keeper of the Forests of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Maud's maternal grandfather was the Earl of Derby. Adam and Maud had six sons (the first of whom died as a child) and a daughter before he died in 1185.
Adam was a frequent benefactor to the Priory of St John in Pontefract, making at least 6 small grants of land or revenues (half a mill in Stainborough, a few acres in Midgely and so on this may have been prompted by ambition rather than piety - the prtioy was founded by the Lacy family, his liege lords.
He also granted lands in Leeds to his younger brother Thomas.
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