Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 15 July 2026 by Allen Gurney

Robert Gournay (fl. c. 1370–1420)

View research notes

Second son of Edmund Gournay; the line descends through him when his brother Sir John's son died without heirs.

Born
c. 1370, Norfolk. Second son of Edmund Gournay (G23) and Katherine de Wauncy. 1
Died
c. 1420 or later. No death date recorded in any source consulted. Active generation estimated from son Thomas I (fl. c. 1408–1450). 2
Occupation / Status
Younger son of a prominent Norfolk legal family. Identified with the Robert Gurnay recorded as a landholder and local juror around Little Cressingham, west Norfolk, 1400–1406. 12, 18, 19
Buried
Unknown. No record. 2
Marriage(s)
Joan de Norwich. No further details on her family, parentage, or dates have been found. 4

Highlights

  • One of the hardest ancestors to identify. The genealogist Daniel Gurney could only write that Edmund Gournay had "a second son, whom we believe was named Robert," resting on a single herald's pedigree drawn up in 1622. Yet a modern review of Norfolk's own land and court records reveals a Robert Gurnay around Little Cressingham — in a 1405 land settlement and on five local juries between 1400 and 1406 — the only man of that uncommon name in the county in his generation, and in his family's own region. On the convergence of name, date, and place, the pedigree's careful research stands behind a real and locally-rooted man. 5, 12, 18, 19
  • A second son — which is why he is lightly recorded. In Robert's England the eldest son took the land, the title, the offices, and the paperwork they generated. His elder brother John got West Barsham and a public career; Robert, the younger, was provided for quietly and left only a faint trail. The thinness of his record is exactly what you would expect of a gentry second son — not a gap in the story, but the normal shape of the evidence. 3
  • The whole later family descends through him — by an accident of death. His brother Sir John Gurney V seemed to carry the line: sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, member of Parliament, husband of a rich London heiress. But Sir John's only son died as a boy, the senior line failed, and the entire estate passed sideways to Robert's son Thomas. A man who left only a faint record of his own became the hinge on which the family turned. 6, 13
  • The world he moved in is documented in brilliant detail. His father Edmund was a leading lawyer retained by John of Gaunt — drawing a fee even from St Benet's Holme abbey — and the Norfolk steward of the earls of Arundel; his brother served Gaunt in Aquitaine in 1394; his son rode in John Holland's retinue at Agincourt in 1415. Robert lived his whole life inside that web of Lancaster-and-Arundel connection, Norwich and Lynn business, and family soldiering. 9, 10
  • The family's red cross runs straight through him. The Gurney arms — a red engrailed cross on silver — were borne by his crusader ancestor, sealed on a document by his grandfather, and displayed by his father joined with his mother's Wauncy coat; his son carried them on and added a gurnard fish as a pun on the name. No seal of Robert's own survives, yet the heraldic thread is unbroken on both sides of him — a visible token of the continuity the pedigree records. 11

Children

Name Dates Mother Notes
Thomas Gournay I fl. c. 1408–1450 Joan de Norwich G21 in direct line. Nephew and heir to Sir John Gurney V on John's son Edmond's death under age. Married Catherine Kerville of Watlington, Norfolk. Father of Thomas Gournay II (G20). 8

Narrative

Robert Gournay was the second son of Edmund Gournay, and in the England of his day that single fact explains why he is so lightly recorded. Land, title, public office, and the records they threw off all passed to the eldest son — here, Robert’s brother John. A younger son was settled more modestly and left a far fainter mark. So when the family’s Victorian genealogist came to write Robert down five centuries later, he could manage only “a second son, whom we believe was named Robert.” For a long time that bare phrase was all of him. But the trail is not empty. 1, 5, 3

Read closely, two independent witnesses bring a real man into view. The family’s own historian, Daniel Gurney — whose nineteenth-century compilation, though a secondary work, has proved careful and accurate wherever it can be checked — recorded that Edmund had a second son of this generation, “whom we believe was named Robert.” Quite separately, Norfolk’s land and court records preserve a Robert Gurnay around Little Cressingham, in the stretch of central Norfolk where the family had long held land — barely a dozen miles from their manor of Gurneys and Swathing at Hardingham, a holding the junior Gurney line had kept for generations. In 1405 he joined in a settlement over land and grazing rights there and at neighbouring Hopton, and between 1400 and 1406 he sat five times on local juries summoned to report on the lands of men who had lately died — once for an inquest that took in Little Cressingham itself. He is the only person of that uncommon name anywhere in Norfolk in Robert’s generation. No surviving record states his parentage in so many words; but a reliable pedigree and the contemporary record, pointing independently to the same rare name, the same years, and the family’s own country, together place him securely. Behind the pedigree’s careful “we believe was named Robert” stands this landholder and juror of Little Cressingham. 1, 12, 18, 19

Faint as Robert’s own record is, the people around him are documented in extraordinary depth — and they tell us what his world was like. His father Edmund was a lawyer of county-wide standing: retained by John of Gaunt to help run the Duke’s East Anglian estates, drawing a fee even from the Broadland abbey of St Benet’s Holme, and standing counsel to both Norwich and Bishop’s Lynn. The family held their manor of Harpley of the earls of Arundel — whose Norfolk estates Robert’s elder brother John would himself come to steward. His mother Katherine was the heiress who had brought the manor of West Barsham into the family. Robert grew up, in other words, in the most prosperous and best-connected household the Gurneys had ever kept, moving in a world of lawyers, sheriffs, merchants, and magnate servants. 7, 9

The public face of his generation was his elder brother, Sir John Gurney V. While Robert kept to the background, Sir John was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1399 and again at his death in 1408, escheator (the crown officer who handled estates that fell back to the king) and justice of the peace, a friend of Sir Thomas Erpingham, and member of Parliament for Norfolk in the Coventry parliament of 1404. He married Alice Heylesdon, daughter and heir of a wealthy London mercer, and with her came the manors of Hellesdon and Drayton, houses in Norwich, and a City of London warehouse called “La Selde Coronata.” He carried the family’s Lancastrian loyalty into the field too, taking out letters of attorney — authorising agents to manage his affairs while he was away — for John of Gaunt’s 1394 expedition to Aquitaine. Robert, for his part, married Joan de Norwich — a name that points toward the Norwich civic world his father served, though the records keep nothing of her beyond it. The two brothers are the story of this generation: one in the full light of the public record, the other almost entirely in its shadow. 6, 4

The family’s own emblem ran straight through Robert even where its paperwork did not. The Gurney arms — argent, a cross engrailed gules, a red scalloped cross on a silver field — had been borne by his ancestor Sir John de Gournay on crusade with the future Edward I, sealed by his grandfather Sir William, and displayed by his father Edmund joined with the Wauncy coat his marriage had brought in, in glass at Norwich and at Denton church. Robert’s own son Thomas would carry the same cross and add a gurnard fish for a crest, a pun on the family name. No seal of Robert’s survives, but the heraldic line is unbroken immediately above and below him — a small, concrete sign that the pedigree’s claim is sound. 11

Then came the turn that made this quiet younger son matter. Sir John V was reappointed sheriff on 15 November 1408 and died less than three weeks later, on 4 December. His only son Edmund, just ten years old, “followed him to the grave not long afterwards,” and the senior line failed with him. The whole estate Edmund Gournay had assembled — West Barsham, Harpley, Hardingham, the Suffolk lands at Depden, the London warehouse and the Heylesdon manors — passed by right of blood to Robert’s son Thomas. Whether Robert lived to see it we cannot say; his dates are too vague. But that is much of the point: the line continued not by any achievement of Robert’s, but by where he stood within it. And the dense lattice of family ties around him — to Lancaster and to Arundel, to Norwich and to Lynn, through marriage, soldiering, and shared arms — is exactly what lets us trust that descent even where Robert’s own record stays faint. 6, 13, 14, 10

Citations

  1. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), Part II, p. 363: "a second son, whom we believe was named Robert." Edmund's chapter; the children are listed there on the authority of the 1622 Cook (Clarenceux) Visitation pedigree (see note 5). Also Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), p. 280 (Norfolk pedigree summary). ↩
  2. No death date recorded in Daniel Gurney or any other source consulted. Active generation inferred from son Thomas I (fl. c. 1408–1450, per Daniel Gurney, Record (1848) pedigree p. 286). ↩
  3. No record gives Robert a formal Crown office or title — consistent with a younger son. His own documented activity is as the Little Cressingham landholder and juror identified in note 12. ↩
  4. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), Part II, p. 363: "a second son, whom we believe was named Robert; also a daughter Jeanne." The name Joan de Norwich for Robert's wife comes from the Gurney pedigree in the same work at p. 286. ↩
  5. The 1622 Cook (Clarenceux) Visitation pedigree. For Edmund's children, Daniel Gurney's stated authority is the genealogy of the family drawn up and certified by Robert Cooke (Cook), Clarenceux King of Arms, at the heralds' Visitation of Norfolk in 1622 — an official county pedigree, not a record made in Robert's own lifetime. Daniel Gurney's wording, "a second son, whom we believe was named Robert" (Record (1848), Part II, p. 363), signals that the pedigree did not set the second son's name down unambiguously: "Robert" is therefore in part Daniel Gurney's own reading of it, not a name the 1622 document plainly records. The original pedigree, held at the College of Arms, has not been re-examined (a standing research lead). ↩
  6. History of Parliament Online, biography of Sir John Gurney (d. 1408), historyofparliamentonline.org — the fullest modern account of Robert's elder brother and the inheritance crisis. It establishes that Sir John was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1399; member of Parliament for Norfolk in the Coventry parliament of 1404; held West Barsham and Depden (Suffolk) through his mother Katherine; married Alice, daughter and heir of the London mercer and former alderman John Heylesdon, who brought in the manors of Hellesdon and Drayton and the warehouse "La Selde Coronata"; was reappointed sheriff on 15 November 1408 but died on 4 December 1408; and that "his only son, Edmund, then ten years old, followed him to the grave not long afterwards, whereupon the family estates passed to John's nephew, Thomas" — the moment Robert's son Thomas I inherited. The biography rests in turn on the feet of fines (note 13), the Calendar of Close Rolls (note 14), the Calendar of Patent Rolls (note 15), Blomefield's Norfolk (note 16), and further manuscript sources (note 17). Source ID: hop-gurney. ↩
  7. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), Part II, pp. 357–363 (Edmund's career detail). ↩
  8. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), p. 280. Daniel Gurney, Record (1848), Part II (John V chapter) for the succession. ↩
  9. For Edmund's place in John of Gaunt's retained East Anglian affinity — "the principal legal adviser to the burgesses of Lynn," who took a fee from the abbey of St Benet's Holme — see Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity 1361–1399, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), note 19. The family held their manor of Harpley of Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel; the steward of Arundel's Norfolk estates (before 1386) was Robert's elder brother Sir John Gurney V — not Edmund — per the History of Parliament Online biography of Sir John Gurney (d. 1408). Source IDs: walker-lancastrian-affinity-1361-1399, hop-gurney. ↩
  10. The family's Lancastrian military service is recorded in the AHRC Soldier in Later Medieval England Online Database (www.medievalsoldier.org): Sir John Gurney V, letters of attorney for John of Gaunt's Aquitaine expedition, 1394 (The National Archives C61/104, m. 7); Thomas Gournay I, man-at-arms in John Holland's retinue on the 1415 Agincourt campaign (The National Archives E101/45/7, m. 1, and E101/45/18, m. 2). John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, was a grandson of John of Gaunt through his mother Elizabeth of Lancaster. See the research note Gurney / Gournay in the medieval soldier record for the full analysis. Source ID: medievalsoldier-database. ↩
  11. The family arms — argent, a cross engrailed gules — are first attested for Sir John de Gournay I (G27), who accompanied the future Edward I to the Holy Land in 1270: Daniel Gurney, Record of the House of Gournay (1848), pp. 339–341 (citing Hearne's Leland's Collectanea, ii. 613). Sir William de Gournay III (G26) "seals with an engrailed cross" in 1294 (ibid., pedigree p. 286). Edmund Gournay (G23) bore the engrailed cross impaling the Wauncy coat (gules, three dexter hand-gloves argent), recorded in glass at Gurney's Place in St Julian's parish, Norwich, and at Denton church (ibid., Part II, p. 358). Thomas Gournay I (G21) used the same arms with a gurnard-fish crest, a pun on the surname (ibid., pedigree p. 286). Robert, as Edmund's son and Thomas's father, stands within this unbroken heraldic descent. Source IDs: dg-rec-pt1, dg-rec-pt2. ↩
  12. The identification of Robert with the "Robert Gurnay of Little Cressingham" of the contemporary record rests on the convergence of two independent witnesses. Daniel Gurney's Record — a secondary compilation, but one borne out wherever it can be tested against primary documents — independently reports a second son of this generation "whom we believe was named Robert"; and Norfolk's own land and court records independently attest a Robert Gurnay of exactly that uncommon name, generation, and family region. The supporting records are the 1405 feet-of-fines settlement (note 18) and the five inquisition juries of 1400–1406 (note 19), which place him at Little Cressingham, in the Wayland and South Greenhoe hundreds — within the family's landholding country (the Gurney manor of Hardingham about twelve miles off, with the cadet "Gurney's Manor" at Hingham and the Great Ellingham line in the same district). The one element not separately documented is the filiation: no surviving record states his parentage in so many words, and the lack of an "esquire" style carries no weight, since the same feet of fines record even Edmund the lawyer and Sir John the knight without it. Fuller treatment in the research companion. ↩
  13. Feet of fines (the West Barsham and Heylesdon settlements): Court of Common Pleas, The National Archives, CP 25(1)/167/169/1290 and CP 25(1)/168/181/262 — the conveyances underlying the inheritance that descended to Thomas Gournay I. ↩
  14. Calendar of Close Rolls, recording Sir John Gurney V's transactions and the inheritance: 1381–5 (pp. 137, 563–4, 568); 1389–92 (p. 331); 1392–6 (p. 270); 1396–9 (p. 399); 1399–1402 (p. 332); 1405–9 (pp. 385, 524). ↩
  15. Calendar of Patent Rolls: 1396–9 (p. 570); 1399–1401 (p. 478); 1405–8 (pp. 181, 301). ↩
  16. Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, vols. vii (p. 43), viii (pp. 454–5), and x (pp. 225, 411, 426): the West Barsham descent and the Heylesdon manors. Source ID: blomefield-norfolk. ↩
  17. Further manuscript sources behind the History of Parliament biography (note 6): Historical Manuscripts Commission, Lothian Manuscripts, pp. 45, 52–53; Norfolk Record Office, Register of Surflete, fol. 27; and Daniel Gurney, Record of the House of Gournay, pp. 281, 286–7, 359, 365, 374–81. ↩
  18. Feet of fines (the 1405 Little Cressingham settlement): Walter Rye, A Short Calendar of the Feet of Fines for Norfolk, Part II, no. 64 — "Robert Gurnay of Parva Cressyngham and Thomas Stodhagh v. Edward Howard and Katherine his wife, in Parva Cressyngham and Hopton"; also Francis Blomefield, Norfolk, vol. vi, pp. 108–111. The underlying record is The National Archives, CP 25/1 (Norfolk). Source IDs: rye-feet-of-fines-norfolk, blomefield-norfolk. ↩
  19. The five inquisition-post-mortem juries on which Robert Gurnay of Little Cressingham served, 1400–1406: Mapping the Medieval Countryside / Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vols. 18–19 — the 1401 inquest on the earl of Warwick's Norfolk lands concerned Little Cressingham itself. Source ID: ecipm-mapping-medieval-countryside. ↩