[Illustration] From the reign of King Edward I., this family has been settled at Wadhurst, Lamberhurst, Ticehurst, and the adjoining parishes on the borders of Sussex and Kent: at Goudhurst, in the latter county, they held the manors of Bockingfield and the Pillery from the year 1413 to 1498, and in 1513 Wyleigh, in the parish of Ticehurst, was acquired by John Courthope in marriage with his wife Elizabeth, daughter of William Saunders of Wyleigh. From this marriage sprung three sons, John, George, and Thomas; the issue male of the eldest has been long extinct; from the second, who had Wyleigh, is descended the present Representative of the family; and from the third and youngest, who succeeded to the estate of "Courthope" in Goudhurst, is descended William Courthope, Esq. Somerset Herald. See Collectanea Topog. et Genealog., vol. ii. pp. 279, 363; and The Visitation of Sussex, C. 27, in Coll. Arm. ARMS.--_Argent, a fess azure between three estoiles sable_. Present Representative, George Campion Courthope, Esq. WARWICKSHIRE. +Knightly.+ SHIRLEY OF EATINGTON (ELDER BRANCH OF STAUNTON-HAROLD, IN THE COUNTY OF LEICESTER, EARL FERRERS 1711, BARON FERRERS OF CHARTLEY 1677, BARONET 1611.) [Illustration] Sasuualo, or Sewallis, whose name, says Dugdale, "argues him to be of the old English stock," mentioned in Domesday as mesne Lord of Eatington, under Henry de Ferrers, is the first recorded ancestor of this, the oldest knightly family in the county of Warwick. Until the reign of Edward III., Eatington appears to have continued the principal seat of the Shirleys, whose name was assumed in the twelfth century from the manor of Shirley, in Derbyshire, and which, with Ratcliffe-on-Sore, in the county of Nottingham, and Rakedale and Staunton-Harold, in Leicestershire, derived from the heiresses of Basset and Staunton, succeeded, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the usual residence of the chiefs of the house. In the sixteenth century, Astwell, in Northamptonshire, was brought into the family by the heiress of Lovett; and in 1615, by the marriage of Sir Henry Shirley with the coheiress of Devereux, a moiety of the possessions of the Earls of Essex, after the extinction of that title in 1646, centred in Sir Robert Shirley, father of the first Earl Ferrers; on whose death, in 1717, the family estates were divided, the Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Staffordshire estates descending with the earldom to the issue of his first marriage, and the Warwickshire property, the original seat of the Shirleys, eventually to the great-grandfather of the present possessor, the eldest surviving son of the second marriage of the first Earl Ferrers.