Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 41.djvu/121

 paper ‘On the Spheroidal State of Water in Steam Boilers’ to the ‘Philosophical Magazine,’ 1854, vii. 283.

 NORMANNUS, SIMON (d. 1249). [See .]

NORMANVILLE, THOMAS (1256–1295), judge, born in 1256, was the son of Ralph de Normanville of Empingham, Rutland, who died in 1259, when Thomas was two and a half years old (, Cal. Genealogicum, p. 81). The Normanvilles were a branch of the family of Basset of Normandy, and soon after the conquest are found in the possession of the manor of Empingham; one of Thomas's ancestors, Gerold, was a benefactor of Battle Abbey in the reign of Henry I; another Ralph was sent by John to defend Kenilworth Castle against the barons; and his grandfather, Thomas, was a crusader (Battle Abbey Roll, ed. Duchess of Cleveland, ii. 362–3; Cal. Papal Letters, i. 244). Thomas first appears in 1276 as governor of Bamborough Castle, seneschal, and king's escheator beyond Trent. In 1279 he was appointed to hear the disputes between Alexander, king of Scots, and the Bishop of Durham, and in 1281 received a grant of lands in Stamford, Lincolnshire. In January 1283 he was commissioned to ‘order and dispose of’ the services granted by the knights, freemen, and ‘communitates’ beyond the Trent (Parl. Writs, i. 761), and in 1286 he was justice in eyre to hear pleas of the forests in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire. In 1288 he was summoned to a council at Westminster to be held on 13 Oct., and on 2 Sept. in the following year he was directed to report on the condition of the daughters of Llywelyn ab Gruffydd [q. v.], then nuns at Sempringham. In 1292 he held pleas ‘de quo warranto’ in Herefordshire and Kent, and in the following year in Herefordshire, Surrey, and Staffordshire. In the same year he was directed to grant John Baliol seisin of his manors in Normanville's ‘balliva.’ Normanville died in 1295, seised of various lands in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

By his wife Dionysia, who brought as her dowry a third of the manor of Kenardington, Kent, and survived him, Normanville had one son, Edmund, who was four years old at his father's death and died without issue (Cal. Genealogicum, p. 500); and one daughter, Margaret, who thus became his heiress, and married William Basing. Examples of Normanville's seal are in the British Museum. He must be distinguished from a contemporary Thomas de Normanville, who held lands in Kent and died in 1283 (Cal. Genealogicum, p. 331;, Kent, iii. 115, &c.).

 NORREYS. [See .]

NORRIS, ANTONY (1711–1786), antiquary, of Barton Turf, Norfolk, descended from a merchant family of Norwich, different members of which had filled most of the municipal offices of that city, was the third son, but eventual heir, of the Rev. Stephen Norris, by his wife Bridget, daughter of John Graile, rector of Blickling and Waxham, Norfolk. John Norris (1734–1777) [q. v.], founder of the Norrisian professorship, was his cousin. Born 17 Nov. 1711, and baptised at St. George Tombland, Norwich, Antony was educated at Norwich grammar school, proceeding to Cambridge 4 April 1727 as a pensioner at Gonville and Caius.

On 3 Nov. 1729 he was admitted of the Middle Temple, going into residence 27 April 1730, and being called to the bar 29 Nov. 1735, at the age of twenty-four. He married Sarah, daughter of John Custance, J.P. of Norwich (who had been mayor of that city), on 18 May 1737, and had one son only, John, born 28 Jan. 1737–8, and educated at the same school, college, and inn as his father. This son, who was apparently a young man of the greatest promise, a prize-winner and a fellow of his college, fell into a consumption, and died 19 March 1762, to the great grief of his father, whose laments are touchingly expressed in his history of Tunstead (p. 74). Norris, left without child at the comparatively early age of fifty-one, had little to solace him but his love for genealogy and county history.

Possessed of ample means and leisure, ‘Nature having given him,’ as he says, ‘an almost irresistible propensity for inquiries