The Bakepuiz family – whose name appears in medieval records variously as Bakepuiz, Bakepuz, Bachepuz, Bakepuis and Bakepuys – were a Norman knightly family who held the manor of Barton as under-tenants of Henry de Ferrers from at least the time of the Domesday Survey of 1086. Over the following three centuries they gave the settlement its distinctive medieval name, Barton Bakepuiz, and extended their landholdings across several Derbyshire manors. In 1381 – some years after the Black Death had apparently already reduced the settlement – the last recorded member of the family’s main line, Nicholas Bakepus, sold the estate to Sir Walter Blount, who renamed it Barton Blount and made it his principal residence.
The Bakepuiz are among the less well-documented Norman settler families of Derbyshire, and a complete genealogical record from the eleventh to the fourteenth century does not appear to survive in any single authoritative source. What follows represents the current state of documented knowledge, with gaps and uncertainties noted explicitly.
Origins: a Norman family from the Eure
Like Henry de Ferrers himself, the Bakepuiz family originated in the Eure département of Normandy, and the two families are described in local historical sources as neighbours in that district before the Conquest. Their English lands followed directly from this pre-existing connection: William the Conqueror’s grant to Henry de Ferrers included lands that Henry subsequently sub-infeudated to families from his own Norman neighbourhood, replicating in England the feudal arrangements he had maintained across the Channel. The Bakepuiz were among those families – part of a broader pattern of Norman lords bringing their own knightly tenants with them to manage and settle their new English estates.
The precise toponym from which the family name derives has not been definitively established. The various English spellings – Bakepuiz, Bakepuz, Bachepuz – may reflect a Norman French place-name in the Eure area, though this has not been confirmed in the sources available to this research. The name should not be confused with Bacquepuis, a commune in the Eure, though a connection is plausible.
The Domesday holding: Ralph de Bakepuiz at Barton
The Domesday Survey of 1086 records the manor of Barctune (Barton Blount) as held by a man named Ralph from Henry de Ferrers. Local historical tradition, supported by the family’s subsequent documented presence at Barton, identifies this Ralph as Ralph de Bakepuiz – the founding member of the family’s English line and the earliest individual named in connection with their Derbyshire holdings.
It should be stated plainly that the Domesday Book does not itself give the under-tenant’s surname at Barton: the entry reads simply ‘Ralph from Henry de Ferrers’, and the identification of this Ralph with the Bakepuiz family rests on later evidence of their possession and on the circumstantial evidence of the Ferrers–Bakepuiz connection. The identification is plausible and widely accepted in local histories, but it cannot be confirmed from the Domesday text alone. The entry records a church and two mills at Barctune, and the settlement’s 31 recorded households placed it in the upper tier of Domesday settlements by size; the Bakepuiz holding thus began as a substantial and already established manorial estate.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries: expansion and patronage
The family’s presence in Derbyshire extended well beyond Barton. Around 1100 a Robert de Bakepuiz is recorded as having founded a hospital for lepers at Alkmonton, a neighbouring settlement that also lay within the Ferrers sphere of influence – an act of religious charity characteristic of the Norman settler gentry and indicative of a family of established means and piety.
In 1165 another Robert de Bakepuiz (or Bakepuz) gave the Church of St Wilfrid at Barrow upon Trent to the Knights Hospitaller, a significant grant that cemented the family’s connection with that order. In 1288 John de Bachepuz – described in Barrow documents as the great-grandson of the original grantee – confirmed the earlier gift of the rectory and grants of land at Barrow upon Trent to the Hospitallers, doing so ‘for the souls of himself and his wife Cecilia, as well as for the souls of his ancestors’. This confirmation establishes that the family’s charitable interests and landed presence in Derbyshire were continuous across at least four generations from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century.
By the thirteenth century the manor had become known as Barton-Bakepuiz, a toponymic addition derived from the manorial family and used to distinguish it from the many other ‘Barton’ settlements across England – a naming practice typical of thirteenth-century Derbyshire.
Tenure and overlordship
Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Bakepuiz held Barton as under-tenants, first within the feudal structure of Henry de Ferrers and then of his successors, the Earls of Derby. When Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby, rebelled against Henry III and forfeited his estates in 1266, the overlordship of the Ferrers manors – including the Honour of Tutbury – passed to the Crown and subsequently to Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, and thereby into the Duchy of Lancaster. The Bakepuiz family’s tenure of Barton appears to have continued undisturbed through this change of overlord, as there is no record of their displacement.
Local history notes that the family held Barton ‘in feudal tenure to de Ferrers’ and that they ‘had the right to dispose of it’ – a phrase suggesting that, by the time of the eventual sale, the tenure had evolved in ways that gave the family effective proprietary control, though the precise legal basis for their power to alienate the manor is not specified in surviving documentation.
The late fourteenth century: sale to Walter Blount
By the third quarter of the fourteenth century Barton may already have been in difficulty. Archaeological excavations of the deserted medieval village in 1968–69 revealed occupation from the tenth to the fifteenth century, with a late-fourteenth-century shift from arable to pastoral use suggested by the development of ‘crew yards’ for winter cattle penning. Local tradition holds that the Black Death of 1348–49 devastated the village’s population, and a secondary account suggests that tenants may have been displaced to convert the open fields to sheep pasture.
Whatever the condition of the settlement, the legal transaction is well documented. In the early 1380s Nicholas Bakepus – the last recorded head of the main Bakepuiz line at Barton – sold to Sir Walter Blount not merely the manor of Barton but a substantial portfolio of Bakepuiz estates: the Derbyshire manors of Barton Bakepus, Bentley, Dalbury, Sapperton and Hollington; the advowson of the hospital of Alkmonton (the leper hospital Robert de Bakepuiz had founded c. 1100); and the manor of Allexton in Leicestershire. Nicholas offered securities of £1,000 as earnest of his readiness to complete the transaction – a sum indicative of the scale of the portfolio. Sir Walter obtained a royal charter of free warren on all his new Derbyshire estates in 1385.
Upon purchase, Walter Blount renamed the principal manor Barton Blount – the name it has retained ever since. A record of 1422 featuring Thomas Blount, Esquire, still uses the older form Barton Bakepuys, suggesting that the Bakepuiz name lingered in documentary use for at least a generation after the purchase. The purchase is variously dated to 1380, 1381 and the ‘early 1380s’ in different sources; 1381 is used here as the most commonly cited year, though editorial caution is warranted.
The name in its variants
The family name appears as Bakepuiz (general medieval usage, and the form used at Barton), Bakepuz or Bakepuze (Heritage Gateway and Church Broughton local history), Bachepuz (the 1288 Barrow confirmation), Bakepuis (secondary literature), Bakepuys (the 1422 record) and Bakepus (fourteenth-century records for Nicholas). The spelling Bakepuiz is preferred here as the form that appears most commonly in medieval Derbyshire sources and in the place-name Barton Bakepuiz. All variants refer to the same family.
A note on uncertainty
Several gaps in the family’s descent remain unresolved. The identification of the Domesday ‘Ralph’ with Ralph de Bakepuiz is traditional rather than proven from the 1086 text. The generational line between Robert de Bakepuiz (c. 1100), the Robert who gave Barrow church to the Hospitallers in 1165, and John de Bachepuz (1288) is asserted but not fully documented, and the names of family members between 1288 and Nicholas Bakepus (c. 1380) – some three or four generations – are not established in the sources consulted. The Victoria County History for Derbyshire would be the most authoritative source for the manorial descent and is recommended for any future research.