Varey - The French Connection

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A paper detailing the results of a research effort to establish the link(s) between UK Vareys and their supposed origins in France.

VAREY - THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Written by James Frank Varey - November 1999

Our search for a family origin in France was originally sparked off by my Father. Family tradition, passed to him by his Father, has it - simply - that the family came from France, but with no indication as to when or from which part. His supposition, based on no particular evidence, was that the first Vareys to enter this country must have been Huguenots, but once we started digging, this idea was quickly discounted. The Vareys were well established in Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire by the middle of the 16th. century, long before the Huguenot influx which followed the revocation of The Edict of Nantes in 1685. However, to make quite sure, we checked Huguenot sources in London (mostly membership lists for the French churches in London), but without finding any Vareys.

We therefore started looking at earlier possibilities which might explain how the Vareys came to be established in England. We could find no evidence of an indigenous origin; Varey is not a place-name in England, nor a name linked to an occupation; nor does it appear to be descriptive of any physical peculiarity. It is plausible therefore that it is an import, and since the name is well known in France from at least the 9th. century, we decided to start our researches at that end.

The history of the name Varey in France, in one or other of its variant forms, is open to some speculation. It may derive from the Varasci, a Germanic tribe from the Varais, one of the Alamanni group of tribes, mentioned by the Romans, who - in one of the later barbarian invasions - settled around Besançon. They were "reduced" by the Franks around the year 600, but might perhaps have left some traces of their presence. An alternative - and the etymology might support this - is that the name originated with a Gallo-Roman (i.e. Celtic) landowner called Varus or Varius, in the region of Bourges.

Whatever the derivation, by the 9th. century, in the reign of Charlemagne, Varey was already identified as a fortified site in the modern Department of Ain, in south-east France, some 25 kms. SE of Bourg-en-Bresse and 60 kms. NE of Lyon. Around 1150 a chateau had been built on the site by the Coligny family, but as so often happened, the chateau had a chequered history, with frequent changes of ownership. It was besieged in 1325 by the Comte de Savoie, fighting against the forces of the Comte de Geneve and the Dauphin, and again in 1595 during the Wars of Religion. It was burnt down during the Revolution and was abandoned for some fifty years, but was rebuilt in the mid-19th. century and is now a centre for the treatment of mentally disturbed children. Varey is to-day a small village, dominated by the chateau, with a subsidiary hamlet, the Abergement de Varey, about kms to the SE.

In the earlier years, of course, Varey was merely a place-name. Indeed it was not until the mid-15th. century, with the ennoblement of Guillaume de Varey and his family in 1448, that it was formally established as a family name.

In our search for French Vareys with a possible connection with England, our efforts focussed on two separate groups, one centred on Lyon, the other near Bourges. Our attention was first drawn to the Lyon group by a letter dated 1364 (a copy of which is in the British Library) written by Thomas de Varey while he was a hostage in England. The circumstances were complex. In September 1356, Prince Edward, the Black Prince, with a marauding Anglo-Gascon force of some 8,000 men, was cornered near Poitiers by a much larger French force, led by King Jean of France, and comprising the flower of French chivalry. In a most unlikely outcome, the French were defeated and King Jean was captured, taken to England and held to ransom. The ransom demands were extortionate, the negotiations protracted, and it was not until the middle of 1360 that the Treaty of Bretigny fixed the terms of a settlement. Apart from the surrender to England of vast areas of France, a monetary ransom of three million gold écus (an astronomical figure in those days) was agreed. Payment was to be guaranteed by forty hostages, all wealthy bourgeois, four from Paris and two each from eighteen other cities, including Lyon. The hostages were held in captivity, but not in prison. They also appear to have rotated, new hostages being substituted from time to time for those already in England.

Thomas de Varey was sent as a hostage from Lyon early in 1364, and in spite of having been awarded an annual pension of 1,000 francs while he was in England, he found social life in London expensive. By July 1364 he was in debt and wrote to his associates in Lyon asking for more money.

This at first sight seemed a plausible origin for the Varey clan in England, but the records show that Thomas returned to Lyon in April 1369 and there is no indication that he made any further visit to London. However, his prominent position in Lyon led us to investigate other members of his family, principally through documents available in the Municipal Archives at Lyon - specifically "Le Patriciat Lyonnais au 13e et 14e Siècle - Les Varey" by Guy de Valous, published in 1973. They were indeed prominent!

• Bernard de Varey, captured with others in 1350 during an attack on Lyon, was described as belonging "aux plus honorables et aux plus riches families". Nine years later we find him in charge of the fortifications of the city against the Tard-Venus, a powerful company of brigands terrorising central France.

• Humbert de Varey, following the battle of Brignais in April 1362 (a battle fought against Les Compagnies -marauding bands of unemployed soldiers) was named as the Commander of the Guard protecting Lyon. He is also recorded as lending large sums of money to pay off the brigands, and as being the owner of thirteen houses in Lyon (one of which we identified and visited).

• Mattieu de Varey, a "chamarier" (a merchant of ornamented, luxury cloth) was a member of a delegation which went to Avignon in 1365 to solicit the support of Pope Urbain V in negotiations with Les Compagnies. (The Papacy was divided at this time, with a schismatic Pope in Avignon).

• Guillaume de Varey, nicknamed Ploton, (and father of Thomas the hostage), who was also part of the delegation to Avignon, figures in the tax rolls as a wealthy bourgeois, and in 1365 was one of the Consuls of Lyon. The Pope agreed to lend money to Lyon only on the condition that Guillaume guaranteed the loan.

And so on ...

The family wealth appears to have been built up over a period between the late 13th. and the middle of the 15th. centuries, as a result of the manufacture and trade in cloth, although the family also included some prominent churchmen and a few Army Officers. In the latter part. of the period, the social standing and the wealth of the Lyon Vareys evidently declines and they appear to be "de simples artisans et de tout petits marchands". Indeed, Guy de Valous expresses some doubt as to whether those recorded could even have belonged to the same somewhat exalted family.

By the early part of the 15th. Century, however, interest focusses on another, quite separate group of Varie, Varye, Varey, Varay or de Varey. (Spelling was still not standardised at that time. Indeed, consistency was rare before the 18th. century.) This group was centred round Bourges. An early reference records Reynaud de Varye, a rich cloth merchant of Bourges, lending money to Charles VII (King of France from 1422 to 1461) to finance his wars against the English, but it was Reynaud's sons, Guillaume and Simon, who brought the family into full prominence. Their financial support for Charles VII during the second quarter of the 15th. century, when France reconquered most of the territories ceded to England in the aftermath of the Hundred Years' War, resulted in the family being ennobled by Charles in 1448. Guillaume was the principal associate of Jacques Coeur (1395 to 1456) described as "l'homme d'affaires le plus important du moyen Age français", and with him made a fortune as a trader and financier. Guillaume was regarded as the inspirer of Louis Xl's economic policies in the 1460's and became Général de Finances (one of eight) for the whole of France. The letters of nobility issued in 1448 were granted to "Guillaume de Varie, ses frères et sa postérité", thus establishing the name as a family name.

Guillaume's younger brother, Simon, held the position of Général de Finances en Languedoc from 1473 to 1476, and an otherwise unrecorded Imbert de Varey held the same post a decade later. Light was recently focussed on Simon de Varie by the discovery and identification of a magnificent Book of Hours which he commissioned in 1445, illuminated by the royal painter- illuminator Jean Fouquet. The work was acquired by the Getty Museum in California and contains a kneeling portrait of Simon at prayer, under the motto "Vie à mon Désir" - an anagram of Simon de Varie. (When the Getty first announced its acquisition, our cousins Richard and Simon Varey, who had done all the research on the Bourges group, went to see the Curator and announced "We are the Varey brothers, and we want it back". It didn't work!)

By the middle of the 15th. century, Guillaume was one of the richest men in France, one of a coterie of merchant families who guided the country's financial administration from the mid-15th. century until the reign of François I (1515- 1547). Guillaume was firmly in favour with Louis XI (1461 - 83) and fully supported the King's policy of mercantilism and of attracting new business to France. Personally, he had business interests in Bourges, Tours, Paris, Rouen, Lyon, Marseilles and Montpellier, and was involved in arms manufacture, salt, skins, wool, silk, spices and other staples. His international business dealings included the British Isles, where he traded leather, cloth and wool.

What are we to make of all this? Guillaume was clearly active in the trade between France and England and it was not uncommon at that time to use family members as "facteurs" to handle the overseas end of the business, as being supposedly more trustworthy than strangers. It is not entirely implausible therefore to speculate that an English-based branch of the family might have been established in this way. But there is no direct evidence to support this. We know that in 1448 Guillaume de Mazoran went to England to sell pine-martens (!) and gold cloth for Guillaume de Varie; that in 1450 Etienne Caillat was despatched to Scotland to buy leather for him; and in the same year a Ludovico de Francesco Strozzi was the correspondent in London for Guillaume and Jacques Coeur. But no Vareys.

The same picture emerges in respect of the Vareys of Lyon. They traded cloth, which would undoubtedly have included England, but there is no documentary evidence. (A deceptively neat coincidence is that by the end of the 15th. century the Vareys of Lyon had been reduced to "de simples artisans" and in the 1540's there were Vareys living in Westmorland in much the same conditions).

The basic problem, of course, is that documentary evidence - specifically records of baptisms, marriages and burials, which form the backbone of family history - does not exist in England prior to 1538, and by that time the family was fairly widespread.

There were, however, some interesting incursions of French Vareys into England, albeit at a later date. Apart from Thomas the hostage, whom we have discounted as a progenitor (see above), there was a group of some 250 French migrant iron workers, including a John de Veré, who settled in England in the 16th. century, working the iron foundries in Sussex. This John de Veré, alias "Nono" from a French forbear (also known as John Merteley, assumed to be a corruption of Marteleur, which was apparently his occupation), was buried in 1574 under the name of Old John Nonye. (This sort of confusion is one of the joys of family history!) He was naturalised as John Verry in 1544 (Westminster Denization Roll 36 Henry 8) having been in England for 21 years, giving an immigration date of 1523. At the time of his naturalisation it was stated that he was married with three English-born children. Although at this period there were iron works at Fawcett Forest, north of Kendal, there is no sufficient reason to connect the Westmorland/Northumberland Vareys, all described as yeomen, with that industry. The timing for a potential link does not quite fit either.

A further possible connection comes from the Returns of Aliens in London Henry VIII to James I. There are several indices recording the taxes imposed on foreign residents ("Lay Subsidies") and these show that from 1564 to 1591 a Frenchman, John Varye (variously called Varie, de Varrey and Varay) was resident in Tower Ward, with the occupation of "broker" - a trader - but an exhaustive search of the records of the four parishes in Tower Ward has revealed no marriage of John Varye nor the baptism of any children of his.

Is there a connection with the Northumberland Vareys? It is of course possible that the John Varrey (born ? died 1638) who heads our current family tree, was the son of John Varye, the Frenchman. The dates would fit and there is no evidence of John Varrye's baptism in Northumberland, nor in any other of the northern counties. Nor has his first marriage been traced. We only know that four of his children and his wife died of the plague in 1602/03, and that he remarried in Newcastle in 1604. So he could have been born in London in, say, the late 1560's and have moved to Newcastle (with his first wife?) prior to 1595, when his first recorded child was baptised in St. Nicholas, Newcastle. Furthermore, he was at the time of his death a "skipper" and thus may easily come from elsewhere.

But is such a connection probable? John Varrye is by no means the first member of the family in the general area: there are Vareys in Westmorland as early as 1542, Vareys in Aukland St. Andrew (Durham) in 1566, and by 1600 the name is recorded in most of its variants in Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire. From this it is clear that John Varye, the Frenchman, could not be the sole progenitor of the Varey family in the northern counties, and to insert him arbitrarily into our family tree without any supporting evidence seems unduly imaginative. (Besides, there may be a better candidate. It is quite possible that John Varrye's father was the John Varrye who was granted a pardon by Elizabeth I in 1570 for having taken part in the Earls' Revolt of 1569, and who is described in the Patent Rolls as a "yeoman of Durham". But here again, the records are missing.)

To go back even further in our search for the French Connection becomes increasingly hypothetical. Did the Vareys come to England with William the Conqueror? There is a list of the Knights who accompanied him in 1066, but there are no Vareys on it, and of course there is no record of the names of the rank and file who were with him. Nor are there - so far as we can discover - any lists of the stream of Norman soldiers and courtiers who came over in the following years.

But our failure to establish firm links does not mean that the French Connection is a myth. The hypothesis which seems to me the most persuasive is that the family came from two distinct sources. When the trading French (either from Bourges or Lyon) settled in England in the 15th. century, they may have found an earlier group of French or Norman origin already established, perhaps from as early as the 11th. or 12th. centuries, and the expansion of the two groups may have proceeded in tandem until, with the passage of time, the various spellings were assimilated and the differences in origin were lost.

1 will close this note with an intriguing thought. One of the Lyon group referred to above was Guillaume de Varey, nicknamed "Ploton". He was Consul of Lyon in 1365 and was the father of Thomas the Hostage. The word "ploton" means nothing in modern French, but a dictionary of medieval French lists it as a variant of "peloton" - a ball, a snowball (1493), a cocoon of a silkworm (1605) and also as "un enfant ou petit animal qui est très gros". The nickname is repeated lower down the Lyon tree, and judging from this I think it quite possible that Guillaume and at least some of his descendants were sturdily built (to say the least). The Parish Register of St. Andrews, Penrith, records the burial on 5th. December 1630 of John Varey, "alias Plowdin" (which means nothing in English). Perhaps the nickname remained as a sort of memory in the family and was resuscitated in the case of the Penrith John, long after the meaning of the word was lost? Just perhaps. J. F. Varey

Nov 1999