Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell | Page 3

acknowledged the independence of
the United States, was ratified by Congress; and in his fourteenth, when
he remembered with distinctness current events of a political nature, the
Commonwealth of Virginia adopted the present Federal Constitution.
The first of the Tazewells, who emigrated to the colony of Virginia,
was William, a lawyer by profession, who came over in 1715, and
settled in Accomack. He was the son of James Tazewell, of
Somersetshire, England, and was born at Lymington in that county, and
baptized, as appears from an extract from the register of that parish in
my possession, on the 17th day of July, 1690; and was twenty-five
years old on his arrival in the colony. Wills of wealthy persons, which
are still preserved in his handwriting, attest his early employment; and
his name soon appears in the records of Accomack, on one or the other
side of every case in court. Within the precincts of Lymington church,
whose antique tower and rude structure, typifying in the graphic picture
struck off by the Camden society what the old church at Jamestown
probably was, may be seen the tomb of a Tazewell, who died in 1706,
on which is engraved the coat of arms of the family,--a lion rampant,
bearing a helmet with a vizor closed on his back; an escutcheon, which
is evidently of Norman origin, and won by some daring feat of arms,
and which could only have been held by one of the conquering race. A

wing of the present manor-house of Lymington, built by James
Tazewell, the father of William, who died in 1683, is still standing.
The orthography of Tazewell, like that of the earlier Norman names
which were forced to float for centuries on the breath of the unpolished
Anglo-Saxon, has been spelt at various times in various ways by
members of the same family, and in various ways in the same writing;
as the name of Shakspeare, though a plain Anglo-Saxon name, was
spelt in four different ways in his will. Thus, in the parish register of
Buckland Newton, in the county of Dorset, the name is spelt in four
different ways; and one of the spellings, which is still popular in
England, is Tanswell, and opens up to us the true original of the name
in Tankersville, the name of one of the knights who came over with
William the Norman, and whose name is inscribed on the roll of Battle
Abbey. The process was evidently Tankersville, which, contracted, and
marked by the apostrophe, became Tan'sville; and, as the Norman
blood became, in the course of centuries, more intimately commingled
with the ruder but steadier Anglo-Saxon stream, the Norman ville gave
way to the Saxon well, and Tan'sville took the form of Tanswell; and
Tanswell and Tazewell, variously spelt, have been used indifferently by
father and son of the same family for more than three hundred years,
and are so used at the present day.[1] The late Mr. Tazewell thought
that his name was originally spelt Tazouille, and that the ancestor
emigrated from France to England before the revocation of the edict of
Nantes, and I leaned to this opinion on another occasion; but, apart
from the absence of all evidence to sustain this opinion, it is now
certain, from the autobiography of the Rev. William Tazewell,
translated from the original Latin by his grandson, the Rev. Henry
Tazewell, Vicar of Marden, Herefordshire, and published by the
Camden Society in 1852, that the family of Tazewell flourished in
England at least a century before religious disputes drew to a head in
the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. I have been particular in stating these
facts, as they illustrate the history of races, especially of those races
which composed the people of Virginia at the date of the Revolution;
and it is something to know, that a descendant of one of those men,
who, under William the Conqueror, wrested the empire of England
from the successor of Alfred, and trod down beneath their iron hoofs

the Anglo-Saxon people, aided in rescuing the colony of Virginia from
the tyranny of George the Third, the inheritor of the blood as well as of
the crown of the Norman robber.
Soon after the arrival of William Tazewell in Virginia, he married
Sophia, daughter of Henry Harmanson and Gertrude Littleton, who was
a daughter of Col. Southey Littleton, and the son of that marriage was
called Littleton, after the surname of his grandfather. This Littleton was
brought up in the secretary's office, under Secretary Nelson, and
married Mary Gray, daughter of Col. Joseph Gray, of Southampton.
With a view of being near the relations of his wife, he sold his estate in
Accomack, which has long been the property of his grandson, Littleton
Waller, and purchased land in Brunswick, of which county