A little ploughed field in the parish of St. Erme, about five miles north of Truro, on a farm still called Killigrew, is the site of the old residence of this distinguished family. Their place knows them no more; and even their own name is, with the sole exception just referred to, and in one or two instances where it appears as a Christian name of some of their remote descendants, 'clean blotted out.' Yet it was once--as the old Cornish word implies--'a grove of eagles'; for we shall find that their race soared high, and produced examples of each of the distinguished classes noted above; and that their memory is worthy of their tombs in Westminster Abbey, and of a local monument--the pyramid which one who married into the family and assumed the name, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, erected at Falmouth in 1737-38.[51] There is some reason to believe that the family was of royal descent. The first of the name whom I have been able to trace, is one Ralph Killigrew, said to have been a natural son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, by his concubine Joan de Valletort. Hence, so it is said, the double-headed spread eagle and the 'border bezanty' of the family arms.[52] Henry, Otho, Simon, Thomas, John, and Maugan are other Christian names of very early Killigrews. Lysons gives the following instances of their being at an early date possessors of lands in Cornwall: John de Killigrew, of Killigrew, had £20 a year or more in land in 1297; Henry de Killigrew held a military feu in Orchard Marries (? Marrais) in the hundred of Stratton in 3rd Henry IV. (1402); Rad. de Killigrew held a 'feod. parv.' at some place in the hundred of Powder; Henry, son of Maugi de Killigrew, had a similar tenure in Trewyn, in the same hundred--and they retained the Manor of Killigrew till 1636, so Lysons says. I may add, as an early instance of the name being mentioned, that there was a Richard (or Michael) Killigrew, one of a riotous lot of junior scholars at Merton College, Oxon, about the year 1350.