The manor of Kilkhampton is supposed to have belonged to the Grenville family from nearly the time of the Conquest; Dugdale says, that they were seated here in the reign of William Rufus. Richard de Grenville, who came over with William the Conqueror, is said in the pedigrees of the family to have been a younger brother of Robert Fitzhamon, Earl of Carbill, Lord of Thurigny and Grenville, in France and Normandy, and to have been lineally descended from Rollo, Duke of Normandy. It is on record that Richard de Grenville held certain knights’ fees at Bideford, in Devonshire, in the reign of Henry II. We have not found any record of the Grenville possessions at Kilkhampton of an earlier date than the _quo warranto_ roll before mentioned; but it appears that it had at that time been long in the family: they continued to reside at Stowe, in this parish, for many generations, and frequently served the office of sheriff for the county. William Grenville, or Grenfield (as the name was at that early period generally written), son of Sir Theobald, became archbishop of York, and distinguished himself as an able statesman: he died in 1315. Sir Richard Grenville, son of Roger, (who was himself a captain in the navy, and lost his life, as Carew tells us, in the unfortunate Mary-Rose) was a celebrated military and naval commander in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He first distinguished himself in the wars under the Emperor Maximilian against the Turks, for which his name is recorded by several foreign writers. In the year 1591, being then Vice-Admiral of England, he was sent in the Revenge, with a squadron of seven ships, to intercept the Spanish galleons; when, falling in with the enemy’s fleet, consisting of fifty-two sail, near the Terceira Islands, he repulsed them fifteen times in a continued fight, till his powder was all spent; his ship, which sunk before it arrived in port, was reduced to a hulk, and himself covered with wounds, of which he died two days afterwards, on board the vessel of the Spanish commander. Sir Richard’s grandson was the brave and loyal Sir Beville Grenville. This distinguished officer was one of king Charles’s generals in the West, and shared the glories of the successful compaign in Cornwall, in the autumn of 1642; in the summer of the following year he lost his life at the battle of Lansdowne, near Bath. Sir Richard Grenville, who had been created a Baronet in 1631, was, after his brother’s death, made General of all the King’s forces in the West. He was an active and zealous officer, and so particularly obnoxious to the Parliamentary party, that he was perpetually the subject of abuse to their journalists, who seldom spoke of him but by the appellation of _Skellum_ Grenville. During the dissensions between the civil power and the military in 1645, Sir Richard Grenville was superseded and imprisoned by the advice of Sir Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon. That noble author gives a very unamiable character