I spent the Sunday. Thomas Tong visited John Aclam Esquier at Moreby in 1530
https://archive.org/stream/heraldicvisitati00tongrich#page/n80/
I think we can infer from the heading that John was still living in 1530.
John said his grandmother was Cecelie, doughter to Bucley of Chesshire.
Tong's pedigrees are generally authentic - he went to the house and wrote down what the informant said on a blank sheet (they didn't always). This is not to say the information was historically correct.
The original records may be at the College of Arms. Tong or somebody else had it all copied into a big book which already contained other material. Later this book passed through other hands, including Flower's. The book was less than half-used, so some of those other hands filled up the blank pages with their own stuff. However, they don't seem to have mutilated Tong's 1530 Visitation.
The big book ended up as MS 1499 in the Harley collection at the British Museum, catalogued at length by the amazing Humphrey Wanley
https://archive.org/details/CatalogueOfTheHarleianManuscripts2/page/n87
The Visitation is items 12-49, and this is where the printed book was taken from. Sadly they didn't print the rest of the manuscript (a lot of it would be junk, but it would serve as a warning to the worshippers of heralds).
The editor, Longstaffe, notes that whoever copied the Visitation into the big book slipped up in the Acclam pedigree. He skipped a chunk by jumping from the words "Margaret maried to" in one paragraph to the same words in the next paragraph.
What was left said "Richard ... had John and Margaret, maried to [omission] Thomas Hokysworth" etc, and so this is how Alice Danby's 3 daughters came to be her sisters-in-law.
Luckily the copyist was still asleep on the next page, where he copied out Acclam again (properly) when he should have been doing Palmes.
Flower was pushing 65 when they made him Norroy, as a reward for long service, assuming he'd have the work done by deputies and wouldn't last long. Risky - he clogged up the promotion ladder until he was 90.
When it came to Visitating Yorkshire in the 1560s, he decided there was no need to visit families already done by Tong. So he copied out Tong's pedigrees from the big book (converting them into chart form) and added the latest generation at the bottom, by correspondence or grapevine. This collection is C 9 in the College catalogue, but Garter had it at home when he died. It turned up in an attic in Northumberland in 1911 and was printed as Surtees 133 in 1920
https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/103699-visitations-of-the-north-or-some-early-heraldic-visitations-of-and-collections-of-pedigrees-relating-to-the-north-of-england-pt-02?offset=7&viewer=1&medianame=FL7895714_267422_pt02_000006#page=182. (Acclam p.159, pdf p.182)
Flower didn't suss out the 3 girls - he showed them in both places.
The heralds made other partial visitations and collections, and by 1580 they had at least 10 Yorkshire books. Not convenient, so Flower or Glover combined them into The Only Book of Yorkshire Pedigrees You'll Ever Need. Other people probably made additions. It's still at the College, called D 2. A copy was made, passed through other hands, escaped into the wild, passed through more hands, and was bought at auction by Sir Thomas Norcliffe, whose kinsman edited it as Harleian Soc 16 with the misleading title "Flower's Visitation 1563-64". (It contains a lot of additions by the other hands, many of which are total junk.)
So the chart here
https://archive.org/stream/visitationofyork00flow#page/n11/
is a 2nd generation copy of the chart in C 9 (Surtees 133), which Flower made in the 1560s by copying Tong's and updating it. This explains the similarities in the wording between this pedigree and Tong's (and some of the spelling, though the spelling wasn't copied slavishly).
But the original copyist noticed that Flower had duplicated the 3 girls in C 9, guessed wrong, kept the sisters and lost the daughters. Also, Buckley has become Bulkley.
Glover did a big and genuine Visitation in 1584-85, generally starting with blank sheets and having them signed off by the informants. One of the informants was John Acclom (who married Isabel Palmes). He gave a pedigree back to his great-great-grandparents, Richard and Margaret.
At some point, D 2 or the copy of it was in the hands of Ralph Brooke, who added a new long elaborate Acclam pedigree at the back
https://archive.org/stream/visitationofyork00flow#page/370/
Norcliffe is wrong when he says Brooke took this from Glover's Visitation. The first page is a fake. Round up all the Acclams you can find (not many) in available early records (not many, at that time), sort them in date order, string them together as father and son (without evidence), and marry them all out of their league.
The 2nd page might have more scraps of truth in it, but you can't trust the way they're put together. Eg, at the top there are two different heiresses both married to William de Atons, which looks like two different versions of one story.
On the next page, Ralph's wife Cicely is now a Fairfax, and a source is cited. But it's all very odd. It's not a normal marriage contract. It's not clear why Cicely, already the wife of Ralph, would be making indentures with her own father, and 1463 seems too late to be the date of the marriage. Perhaps the source could have been misinterpreted.
Foster published Glover's Visitation in his own style in 1875
https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/219604-the-visitation-of-yorkshire-made-in-the-years-1584-85-to-which-is-added-the-subsequent-visitation-made-in-1612-by-richard-st-george-norry-king-of-arms-with-several-additional-pedigrees-edited-by-joseph-foster?offset=8&viewer=1&medianame=FL112970_TN-62955_000001#page=126
He improved the Acclam pedigree, p.109 (pdf p.126) by adding 6 generations above Richard and Margaret, taken from Harleian MS 1571. This is Mundy's copy of Glover, with additions by Mundy (an arms painter).
This is different. The William with the 18 heirs general is split into 2 Williams, uncle and nephew. The nephew is given a son and heir John, who marries the Fairfax girl and has Richard. Ralph disappears.
So we have a choice. Somebody has researched this version and got it right, and when John was visitated by Tong in 1530 he was all muddled and didn't even know the name of his grandfather. Or, John got it right and Mundy's version is just somebody being creative.
Incidentally, Tong's pedigree gives Richard a real daughter Margaret, married to a Ralph de Ingmanthorpe. But after getting mixed up with her niece, she was lost and never recovered.
