Ernle
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Ernle was the surname of an English landed family descended from the lords of the manor of Earnley in Sussex. One branch of the family settled in Wiltshire in the 14th century. In the 17th century, a descendant of this line was created a baronet by King Charles II of England (see Ernle Baronets).
[edit] Overview
The Sussex branch of the family gave rise to Sir John Ernle or Ernley, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas (1519-1521), during the reign of King Henry VIII of England, whose career and family connexions are detailed in the DNB and its successor, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The surname has many variants, including Erneley and Ernly. Though apparently extinct as a surname in the United Kingdom, it has been actively preserved as the second component of the quadruple-barrelled surname, Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (see double-barrelled surname), borne by descendants of the 17th Baron of Dunsany, whose wife was Ernle Elizabeth Ernle-Erle-Drax, née Grosvenor, a female-line descendant of the Wiltshire Ernle family.
As demonstrated in the foregoing passage, it is also employed by descendants of the family and others as a given name. Examples include Ernle Bradford, the writer, and Alfred Ernle Montacute Chatfield, 1st Baron Chatfield, PC (1873-1967), and his son Ernle David Lewis Chatfield, 2nd Baron Chatfield (b. 1917), (see also Baron Chatfield), and Sir Ernley Blackwell, KCB, legal assistant under-secretary of State at the Home Office (1906-1931).
Additionally, it was also used as the name for the barony granted to Rowland Edmund Prothero (1851-1937), who was created the 1st Baron Ernle, on 4 February 1919, for whose career and family history consult L.G. Pine's New Extinct Peerage.
A one-name study of all instances and variants of the name world-wide is being conducted.
[edit] Sources
- Victoria History of the County of Sussex
- Victoria History of the County of Wiltshire
- Burke's Landed Gentry (sub Money of Much Marcle, and Drax)
- Burke's "Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies"
- Burke's Peerage and Baronetage (see Chatfield, Barony of, and Dunsany, Barony of, and, in pre-1937 editions, Ernle, Barony of)
- L.G. Pine's, New Extinct Peerage (for the barony of Ernle held by R. E. Prothero)
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (for biography of Sir John Ernley, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas)
- Who's Who (various editions)
- "From Whippingham to Westminster" (biography of R. E. Prothero, later 1st and last Baron Ernle)
