Musgrave family

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The Musgrave family was a prominent Anglo-Scottish Border family with many descendants in the United States of America, Australia and the United Kingdom a so-called Riding or Reiver clan of Cumberland and Westmorland. The earliest record of the Musgraves is Gamel, Lord of Musgrave, noted as being "of the county of Westmorland and divers manors in county Cumberland, living in the time of King Edward the Confessor (1042-1065) predating the Norman Conquest."^{[This quote needs a citation]} The Musgraves though often Wardens of the West March during the times of the Reivers and among the fourteen most notorious of the reiving clans were known locally as de’ils (devils) dozen and consisted of the following families: Armstrong, Bell, Carleton, Dacre, Elliot, Graham, Johnstone, Kerr, Maxwell, Musgrave, Nixon, Routledge, Scott and Storey.

Whether the family origin is Anglo-Saxon, Norman, or Strathclyde Briton is unclear. The family name may be derived from several etymological possibilities. The surname is of toponymic origin, from the Anglo-Saxon mus for "mouse" and grav for "mossy plain". The historian William Camden said that they gained their name from the village of Great Musgrave, where they settled, but Arthur Collins suggested that the name was a variation of the title margrave, meaning march-warden.^[1]

The Coat of Arms probably adopted by the Musgraves during the 13th century depicts six gold annulets, three, two and one, on a blue shield. The first recorded spelling of the family name is believed to be that of Alan de Musegrave, which was dated 1228, in the "Curia Rolls of Northumberland". A branch of the family lived in the mansion of Edenhall - a mythology probably based on Tennyson's Poem "The Luck of Eden Hall" whose fortune was assured by a lucky glass beaker which survived from the 14th century — the Luck of Edenhall.^[2][3]