The Rockett Story

Where the surname comes from

The Rockett surname is one of the oldest in the English-speaking world. It is recorded in Domesday Book, the great survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086, which means that someone bearing it was already in England within twenty years of the Norman Conquest. By the end of the twelfth century, branches of the family held land in at least five English counties and were intermarrying with the Earls of Essex.

The name has had many spellings over the last thousand years — Rochelei, de la Rochelle, de Rupella, Rokele, Rokesle, Rokeles, Rokill, Rokell, Rockwell, Rochwell, Roket, and finally Rockett — and most of them are simply scribal variants of the same root.

The root itself is Norman-French, and it means little rock. In Latin it is written Rupella, from rupes, a rocky outcrop. In Old French it is la Rochelle, the diminutive of la roche, a rock. The Anglo-Norman scribes of the twelfth century would write whichever form felt natural in the document they were drafting. The same individual, in the same year, can appear as Ricardus de Rupella in a chancery roll and as Sir Richard de la Rokele in a vernacular charter.

That sentence comes from Francis Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, published in 1805, describing a land transaction at Shimpling in 1237. Blomefield was a meticulous antiquary who had the original fine roll in front of him. The parenthesis is his own, and it is the clearest single statement in the published record that Rupella and Rokele are the same name.

So what does the surname mean?

It is a toponymic surname — a name taken from a place. The family is named after a rocky place, somewhere small enough to be a little rock. But which rocky place? That has been the central question of three centuries of family historians, and the answer is now reasonably clear: it is not the same place for every branch.

The many spellings

If you bear the Rockett name and have hit an archive search-engine that demands an exact spelling, this is the list of forms you should also try. They are all the same name. They are arranged below in roughly chronological order of when each spelling was most common.

The Latin forms (Rupella, de Rupella, de Rochella, de Rochello) dominate twelfth- and thirteenth-century chancery documents. The Anglo-Norman forms (de la Rokele, Rokesle, Rokell) dominate fourteenth-century English documents. The modernised forms (Roket, Rocket, Rockett) emerge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By 1600 the spelling has largely settled into the family of forms still in use today.

The Norman origin

The most-supported account of where the family came from, based on the surviving documents, is this. They were Norman gentry, established in Normandy before 1066, who came to England with William the Conqueror or one of his close lieutenants. They were either themselves a cadet branch of the Counts of Eu — one of the half-dozen great comital families of pre-Conquest Normandy — or were tied to that family by close service and marriage. The Counts of Eu came to Hastings with sixty ships under Count Robert of Eu, who is named in Wace’s twelfth-century Roman de Rou as one of the senior commanders at the battle.

By 1086 a man named Malgerius held the manor of Rochelei (modern Ruxley) in Kent, in Domesday Book, as a tenant of Bishop Odo of Bayeux. By 1130 a Humfrid de Rochella witnessed the foundation charter of Walden Abbey in Essex for Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville I, and held land in Dorset. By 1166 a William de Rochel held three-quarters of a knight’s fee on the Mandeville Essex honour, sitting in the same charter alongside William de Eu (four fees, a substantial old enfeoffment) and Hugo de Eu (one new fee).

The byname trick

One of the strongest clues to the family’s comital-Eu connection is the Norman-French custom of bearing two names at once. The same individual would be styled by his seat in one document, and by his kin in another. The historian Philip Morant, writing in 1768 with access to deeds that no longer survive, recorded that William de Rokella, who held South Ockendon in Essex about 1175, was “in some deeds styled William de Eu”. In 1234 a sworn jury at the parish of Willingale Doe in Essex named a William “Do” or “de Augo” as parson of the church, treating the two forms as the same byname.

This is the documentary substrate for the parochial name Willingale Doe itself: the “Doe” in the village name is a hardened spelling of de Eu, “of Eu”. The parish was “Willingale of the d’Eu family”, the same way that nearby Willingale Spain was “Willingale of the Espayne family”. The fact that the Rokeles held this manor and were sometimes also called de Eu is the strongest single piece of evidence we have that they were comital-Eu cadets, or married into the comital family early enough to inherit the byname.

The specific Norman seat is not known

What we do not know is the exact rocky place in Normandy that gave the family its principal byname. La Rochelle-Normande in the Cotentin, sometimes named in earlier family histories, is now ruled out: a separate Norman family (the Heriz) only adopted de Rochella as their byname between 1162 and 1213, and Domesday Malgerius bears the Rochelei form already in 1086, almost a century earlier. The English family cannot be named after a French place that did not yet have the name when the English family already did.

Candidate seats remain La Rochelle-Barneville in the Manche, La Rochelle-Louviers in the Eure, and various lost or renamed rocky-place toponyms in the Pays de Caux and the comté of Eu itself. The question is genuinely open and would be answered by access to Marie Fauroux’s 1961 edition of the Norman ducal acts before 1066, Elisabeth van Houts’s 1992–95 edition of William of Jumièges, or Katharine Keats-Rohan’s Domesday People — all of which exist in print but are not freely online.

Joining the Mandevilles

By the early twelfth century the family is firmly attached to the most powerful magnate house in eastern England: the Mandeville Earls of Essex. Geoffrey de Mandeville I, ancestor of the earldom, founded Walden Abbey in or around 1130, and Humfrid de Rochella was one of his witnesses. Adams (2013) speculates that Humfrid was a household knight, since he witnessed for Geoffrey more than once and is named alongside other senior Mandeville retainers.

By 1166, the year of the great Cartae Baronum survey ordered by Henry II, William de Rochel was holding three-quarters of a knight’s fee on the Mandeville Essex honour, on the same parchment as William and Hugo de Eu. By 1175 a William de Rokella was on the royal payroll at Burcstal in Bedfordshire, drawing forty shillings a year as a Crown pensioner — the same exchequer bracket reserved for Faramus of Boulogne, the Hospitallers of Wissant, and Woburn Abbey. The family had arrived at the royal household.

The making of an earl-tier kinsman

What is certain is that the family married into the kindred of Geoffrey Fitz Peter, Justiciar of England and Earl of Essex. The exact marriage, though, is not recorded. Genealogists reconstruct it as a William de la Rokele who, around 1170, married a daughter of Geoffrey Fitz Peter (by his wife Aveline de Clare, daughter of Roger de Clare, 1st Earl of Hertford) — but that daughter is unnamed in the surviving sources, and the “Joane fitzPiers” sometimes given for her is a modern conjecture, not a documented name.

What the records do prove is the kinship itself. Sir Richard de Rupella, the Justiciar of Ireland, calls John Fitz Geoffrey (a son of Geoffrey Fitz Peter) his avunculus — mother’s brother — in a deed of 1264; and Robert Adams (2013) shows from the other side that Richard was first cousin to John Fitz John and Maud Fitz John, “both being grandsons of Geoffrey Fitz Peter.” So Richard’s mother really was a Fitz Peter daughter, which set the family inside the earl-tier web of the Fitz Geoffreys, the Clares, the Bohuns and the Bigods. The precise marriage that first brought them in is a reconstruction; the kinship it produced is documented fact.

This is the kinship that explains everything that follows. The Rokele family is not nouveau-riche gentry rising through royal service. They are inside the senior baronial-network of England by the 1170s, and they stay there until at least the 1463 Aldham conveyance signed by Geffrey Rokell esquire.

Marriages into the nobility

Marriage was the central currency of medieval magnate society. A family’s standing can be read directly from the families it married into over time. Here are the documented Rokele/Rokesle marriages, drawn from Inquisitions Post Mortem, Patent Rolls, and the antiquarian works of Morant and Cleveland.

There are no peasant marriages on this list. By the standards of late-thirteenth-century England, the Rokele family was operating consistently within the second-rank baronial and senior-knightly circles — not the very top tier of belted earls, but their close cousins and household intimates. Adams (2013) calls this stratum the “sub-tic gentry”: just below the parliamentary-summons line, but firmly inside the magnate-orbit world.

Famous people in the family

The Rockett family in the medieval centuries produced a striking number of figures of national and even international importance. Six of them are worth knowing.

Malgerius de Rokesle — Domesday 1086

Malgerius is the earliest Rockett anywhere on the documentary record. Domesday Book, completed in 1086, names him as the holder of Rochelei — the modern Kent parish of Ruxley — as a tenant of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother. He held the manor by the unusual military tenure of finding watch and ward at Dover Castle. According to Edward Hasted’s History of Kent (1797), Malgerius “assumed the surname of Rokesle from his possession and residence at this place”. He was the founder of the Kent branch of the family.

Sir Richard de Rupella — Justiciar of Ireland, 1261–65

By far the best-documented Rockett of the entire medieval period. Sir Richard had three careers, one after the other, each of which would have been a peak for a lesser man.

First, in the 1240s and 1250s, he served Henry III in the duchy of Aquitaine. The royal records of Bordeaux name him as Treasurer of Aquitaine, as Seneschal of Aquitaine, and as Bailli to the king’s eldest son Edward (the future Edward I). He drew a twenty-pound annual Crown pension at the Michaelmas Exchequer, “to sustain himself in our service”, and the king gave him thirty marks for a horse. He was granted Crown legal exemption from being placed on assizes, juries, or recognitions — a privilege reserved for top-tier royal servants. The chancery dated his charter at Bordeaux on the second of September.

Second, by 1255 he was Treasurer of Ireland under Henry III, and by 1261 he was Justiciar of Ireland — the king’s deputy in the lordship of Ireland, the chief Crown officer of Dublin. He served as Justiciar until 1265. The chancery rolls preserve his charter of 15 June 1270 at Ballycolin, naming his vill of Disert as a gift to St Mary’s Abbey Dublin, with his son William witnessing as “Domino Willelmo de Rupella, filio meo”.

Third, somewhere between 1265 and 1272, he exchanged his Essex manors of Willingale and Plesingo for Irish land granted to him by Prince Edward in person. The deed survives at the British Library as Harley Charter 45 D.7. This is the moment the family’s centre of gravity moves from England to Ireland.

On 24 June 1268 he took the cross at the parliament of Northampton, alongside the Lord Edward (the future Edward I) and dozens of other English magnates, for what would become the 1270–72 crusade to the Holy Land. He died at South Ockendon in Essex on 7 December 1276.

Gregory de Rokesle — Lord Mayor of London

Gregory de Rokesle — descended from the Kent line of Malgerius, not the Essex line of Sir Richard — was Lord Mayor of London in 1274–81 and again in 1284–85. He was Keeper of the King’s Exchange of London, Assay Master General of the King’s Mint, and a partner of the Florentine banker Orlandino di Poggio in the Great Recoinage of 1279 under Edward I. He died in 1291 and was buried in the choir of the Greyfriars (later Christ Church) in London, of which he was a major benefactor. His monument has been long defaced.

Walter de Rokele — Templar Knight, 1308

Walter was a sworn Knight Templar at the preceptories of Templecombe in Somerset and Sandford-on-Thames in Oxfordshire when, on Edward II’s orders following the Papal Bull of Pope Clement V, the Templar order was suppressed in England in January 1308. Walter was arrested with his brethren and committed to the Tower of London. He gave testimony to the official inquisition into Templar practice, and after the dissolution of the order he transferred to the Hospitallers, drawing a Hospitaller pension still recorded in 1338 in the great survey of Prior Philip de Thame. He was probably from the Buckinghamshire branch of the Rokele family (Adams 2013). Robert Adams names a second Templar Rokele — William — arrested in the same operation.

William de la Rokele — the probable author of Piers Plowman

This identification, the central thesis of Robert Adams’s 2013 book Langland and the Rokele Family, is the most important contribution to Langland scholarship in fifty years. The poet of Piers Plowman, one of the three or four great English poems of the fourteenth century, was a man named William Langland, son of Eustace de la Rokele of the Buckinghamshire branch.

The argument runs: the documentary record names a William de la Rokele — son of Eustace, who was Langland’s father by independent attestation — who served as parson of Easthorpe in Essex 1352–53, then as parson of Redgrave in Suffolk 1356–c.1362. In November 1350, while still a layman, he and his wife Cristiana obtained a portable altar from Pope Clement VI, a permission that was sometimes sought during the recurring waves of the Black Death by those preparing for sudden death. He went to Brittany in 1368 in the retinue of Thomas Beauchamp II Earl of Warwick. The dialect-evidence of the poem, the Bohun-Beauchamp connections it presupposes, and the inside knowledge it shows of London law and the Despenser estates of Hampshire, all converge on him.

If Adams is right, the poet of Piers Plowman was a member of the Rokele family. He was great-great-great-grandson of Sir Richard the Justiciar.

Geffrey Rokell — the fifteenth-century survivor

The last well-documented Rokell of the medieval period is Geffrey Rokell, esquire, of Colchester. We can follow his career across forty years. In February of one of the early years of Henry VI’s reign (about 1422–29), he was among the men pardoned forty shillings in the king’s hanaper for acquiring the manor of Pycotes in Ardleigh, Essex, without licence. On 21 December 1463, three years into the reign of Edward IV, he and the abbot of St John’s Colchester conveyed Aldham Hall and Hoggekyns farm to Robert Tey, esquire, and Elizabeth his wife. His arms were recorded on a window or monument of Aldham church: Gules, a fesse lozengy ermine, between three martlets argent. See the shield drawn in proper colours →

He is the last member of the family to appear in this kind of senior-knightly Essex context. After him, the documentary record of the senior English branches grows sparse.

A crown in the family tree — Maud de Rokele to Lady Jane Grey

The senior English line carried Rokele blood into the very heart of Tudor royalty. When Philip de la Rokele died in 1295, his heir was his daughter Maud (born in Ireland in 1286), who married Maurice le Bruyn and carried the family’s manor of South Ockendon in Essex into the Bruyn family — the manor was even renamed “Bruyns” in memory of the match. Five generations on, the Bruyn line ended in an heiress, Elizabeth Bruyn (d. 1494), who married Sir William Brandon — Henry Tudor’s standard-bearer, cut down at the king’s side at Bosworth Field in 1485. Their son was Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII’s closest friend, who in 1515 married the king’s sister, Mary Tudor. Charles and Mary’s daughter, Frances Brandon, was the mother of Lady Jane Grey — the “Nine Days’ Queen” of 1553. The same descent runs on through the Grey and Seymour lines to the Dukes of Somerset and, by marriage, to the Percy Dukes of Northumberland — so Rokele blood is carried in the British aristocracy to this day.

The Irish branch

Ireland is where the family’s centre of gravity moves. From the middle of the thirteenth century the senior English (Cluster B) line plants itself in the lordship of Ireland through Crown office; over the following hundred years it sinks roots into the lower Suir valley — the borderland where Counties Waterford, Kilkenny and Tipperary meet — and it is there, in the parishes of the lower Suir, that Rocketts are still found today. This is the most detailed and consequential chapter of the whole story, and the one most directly connected to the living family.

Sir Richard de Rupella, the king’s deputy in Ireland

The figure who anchors the family in Ireland is Sir Richard de Rupella, the same man who served as Treasurer and Seneschal of Aquitaine. By 1255 he was in Dublin as deputy to his maternal uncle John FitzGeoffrey, the Justiciar of Ireland, and serving as Treasurer of Ireland. In August 1258 Theobald Walter Butler granted him “all Omany” (Ormond Deed 124) — the earliest direct Butler–Rockett land grant, and the start of a working relationship with the house of Ormond that would shape the family for three centuries. By 1261 Richard was himself Justiciar of Ireland, the king’s chief officer in the lordship, and he held the office until 1265.

His tenure ran straight into the great baronial war between the Geraldines and the de Burghs. In 1264–65 Richard was captured — alongside Theobald Butler — by Maurice FitzMaurice FitzGerald, and held during the upheaval that paralysed the Dublin government. He recovered, and in 1270 granted the vill of Disert to St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, in a charter witnessed by his son as “Domino Willelmo de Rupella, filio meo” (“Lord William de Rupella, my son”). Between 1265 and 1272 he exchanged his Essex manors for Irish land granted to him by the Lord Edward in person, and he remained tied to Ireland until his death at South Ockendon in 1276.

What that 1264 deed actually was. It was a pious gift, not a property quarrel. As Justiciar, Richard gave up — “quit-claimed” — his right to appoint the priest (the advowson) of the church of Kellistown, written in the deed as Kenlesten in Fotherid (in Co. Carlow), and granted it to the Augustinian Priory of Kells in Co. Kilkenny. He made the gift “for his soul and the souls of his ancestors and heirs, and especially for the soul of John son of Geoffrey, his uncle” — the customary medieval bargain by which a benefactor hands property to a religious house so that its canons will pray for his family in perpetuity. It is precisely that dedication clause, naming John Fitz Geoffrey as his avunculus (mother’s brother), that makes an otherwise routine grant the cornerstone of the family’s Irish kinship. (Calendar of Ormond Deeds, no. 63; the Latin avunculus reported by G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, vol. 3, p. 232.)

A family of Crown officers: the Waterford shrievalty

Sir Richard was not the only Rockett in Irish royal service. William de la Rochelle was Sheriff of County Waterford in 1262–63, and a mesne lord in Munster with interests in Co. Cork. He died owing money to the Crown, and his descendants spent years petitioning for the restitution of lands seized for those debts. Remarkably, the office stayed in the family: a later Richard de la Rokelle was Sheriff of County Waterford again in 1343 — an eighty-year, two-generation association with the Waterford shrievalty, in the very county that would become the family’s direct-line home.

The Ketyng land fight

The most revealing of all the Irish records is not a tragedy but a fight over land — a Rockett family fight to stop their patrimony being taken over by a man who had married into the family. It is worth setting out carefully, because it is easy to tell back-to-front.

The lands at the heart of it were Rockett property, and they were not trivial. The estate was Fydoun (Fiddown, in the barony of Iverk, Co. Kilkenny) together with Adlongport (also spelled Adlangport) — an extensive riverside manor on the Suir “in the direction of Clonmel”, almost certainly the old riverine Woodstown, the Viking longphort site west of Waterford city, and not the coastal Woodstown beach near Dunmore East with which it has sometimes been confused. These lands reach back to a charter of King John in 1199 granting Adlongport to Elias fitz Norman — a full vill with its woods, meadows, moors, marshes, mills and fisheries, and its own court and gallows. They had come into Rockett hands by 1289, when they were held of the Crown by John fitz Robert de la Rokele, a tenant-in-chief. When he died, his sister and heir, Margery de la Rokele, carried the inheritance — and Margery had married a Tipperary man, James Ketyng.

Margery died. Under a rule called the courtesy of England, a widower could keep his late wife’s inheritance for the rest of his own life — but only if she had borne him a living child. So Ketyng moved to take over the Rockett lands for life, swearing that Margery had given birth to their daughter Roesia. If that were true, the Rockett patrimony would be locked out of the family for a generation. The Crown’s escheator seized the lands instead, and the Rockett interest was to keep them from passing to Ketyng. What followed was six years of litigation across three counties:

• A jury at Clonmel in 1289 swore that Margery had borne no child at all — neither before nor after the marriage. Ketyng’s claim failed and the lands stayed out of his hands.
• Ketyng went to Westminster, bought a fresh writ, and in September 1292 had the matter re-tried in Connacht — “where James has good friends”, as the record drily notes. That jury found the child had been born.
• A final inquisition at Cashel in February 1295 heard witnesses say the daughter Roesia had been born at Dundeir in Connacht, sent to the house of Philip le Mareschal in Tipperary, and lived “some fifteen days or more” — long enough that men “saw the child and heard her voice, crying.”

While the juries contradicted one another, a Crown servant named Hugh de Bruges quietly petitioned for the disputed lands as a reward for good service, and Adlangport and Fydoun were granted to him at the extent. The Rocketts did not let go. A generation later, in the Iverk extent of 1314, we still find a Rockett — John de la Rokell — holding Fiddown “by suit of court at Ballybramoth”, with James de Keting recorded only as holding it “by the law of England”: that is, clinging to the life-interest the curtesy claim was built on. The fee was the Rockett’s; the Ketyng claim was the encumbrance on it. The family had kept the land in the family.

The end of the senior English-Irish line

Sir Richard’s descendant Philip de la Rokele held Irish manors — Aththrym (Trim) and Suthkyn — and died around 1300. His only heir was a daughter, Matilda (Maud), who married Maurice le Brun; his widow Joan first went to court and won back her one-third dower, worth some £40 a year — then, on 6 April 1302, she quit-claimed even that to Edmund le Botiller (Butler), formally releasing the family’s last claim on the Connacht lands for good (most likely settling for a one-off payment rather than holding distant Irish land as a widow in England). With no surviving Rockett son, the senior English-Irish line passed by the female side into the le Brun family. The Rocketts who remained in the Suir valley were the cadet and tenant branches — and it is from these, not the extinguished senior line, that the modern family descends.

The Iverk free-tenants and the Butler squeeze, 1299–1374

In 1299 a John de la Rokele appears as a pledge in a Tipperary court, standing surety alongside the Butler, le Poer and Ketyng families — the exact network around the Fiddown lands. By 1314 the Iverk barony of Co. Kilkenny held two Rockett free-tenants: John de la Rokell at Fiddown and William de la Rokell at Kelroske. Then the ground shifted under them. In March 1319 the barony’s own lord, Roger fitz Miles, formally surrendered — “quit-claimed” — the entire seignory of Overk to Edmund le Botiller, head of the Butler family, and John de la Rokele stands among the witnesses to the deed. This was not the Rocketts giving up their own land; it was their overlord being changed over their heads — from the local fitz Miles barons to the far more powerful Butlers. But the family did not prosper under the new lordship: within a year the Grant family held the lands the Rocketts had occupied, and the Rocketts began their slide from free tenants to dependants of the Butler earls.

The next sixty years trace a slow decline from landholders to claimants to retainers. In 1352, two Rockett knights — Sir Richard de la Rochelle and William de la Rochelle — still sat on a Waterford jury. In 1359 a Richard de la Rokelle had to strike a deal with Richard Dodde to “aid his claim” to lands at Dounnmore: a man trying to recover land he no longer simply held. Then, on 13 January 1374, William son of Richard de la Rokele, knight, made the final break: he quit-claimed his manor of Balybothy (near Clonmel) to James, 2nd Earl of Ormond, and acknowledged receiving forty marks of silver for it — the price of a surrender, not a stipend as it might first appear. With that, the senior Iverk-and-Clonmel branch sells up and drops out of the records. This is not the end of the Rocketts in Ireland — the family’s Waterford seat at Rocketts Castle carried the name on into the seventeenth century — but it is the last manor we can document for this senior medieval branch before the two-century gap that follows. In three generations it had gone from free tenants of Iverk, to claimants, to a knight cashing out his final manor.

Mayors of Waterford

As the rural landholding slipped away, the family’s strength moved into the city. John Rocket was Mayor of Waterford in 1393, and is recorded again in 1412. The Rocketts had become a civic and mercantile family of Waterford City — a pattern that would hold for the next two centuries.

The missing link, c.1374–1520

It is between the late fourteenth century and the early sixteenth that the thread is hardest to follow — but this is a gap in the surviving records, not a disappearance of the family. Much of Ireland’s medieval archive no longer exists: the 1922 destruction of the Public Record Office in the Four Courts fire consumed the chancery and exchequer rolls and most of the patent and close rolls — precisely the documents that would have named a Suir-valley landholder across these generations. The Rocketts themselves do not vanish: they are recorded before the gap (the 1300s Iverk free-tenants, the sheriffs of Waterford, the mayor of 1393) and in force after it, holding their seat at Rocketts Court / Rocketts Castle and the parish of Mothel by the 1520s–60s. What the lost records have taken with them is the chain of named generations linking the two — the single most important target for future research (see Research your own line).

And the surviving late-medieval sources have been looked at: the Calendar of Ormond Deeds (to 1509) and the chancery rolls show fifteenth-century Rocketts at Iffa in Co. Tipperary (James Rokell, 1432–48) and on the Suir at Waterford (a weir held in 1458), and the printed Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland for Edward IV (1462–94) contain no Rockett at all. But the continuity shows in the land: when the seat-record resumes — with Nicholas de la Rockell, lord of Rokellscourt, in 1524 — he is dealing in Balybothy and Fiddown, the very estates the family held in 1374 and 1314. The same family was on the same ground; only the intervening names are lost. The one substantial record not yet searched is Tresham’s 1828 calendar of the Irish patent and close rolls (1216–1509), which survives only in print — the best remaining hope of putting names to the fifteenth-century lords of the seat. (The Crown pardons known as Fiants cannot help: they begin only in 1521.)

The Suir-valley patrician peak, 1593–1635

The family re-emerges into the record in the reign of Elizabeth I and James I as a substantial Catholic gentry family of the Waterford–Tipperary borderland. The senior figures are Redmund Rockett of Blackfriars (d. 1595), his son Nicholas Rocket of Atlongport (livery 1602/3), Nicholas Rockell of Blackfriars (d. c.1630), and Jacobus Rockell of Tallow (d. 3 April 1620). Their inquisitions name a tight marriage alliance with the Power family — the great recusant patrons of Upperthird — including a Latina Power who appears under the alias “Rockoll”, and Maria Rockall, recorded as a widow in 1635. The Rocketts married “up” into the Power and Butler families; this is the strongest social signal in the whole early-modern record.

Decline and the bridge to the modern family

The patrician peak did not last. Through the 1620s and 1630s the family was caught in a cascade of Stuart-era mortgages: Rocketts Castle, near Kilmeaden, passed to the Strang and Woodlock families, and after the Cromwellian settlement no Rockett appears among the named landed proprietors of the Civil Survey or Down Survey at all. The 1659 “census” records six households under the spelling “Rochwell” in the barony of Upperthird, Co. Waterford — the family surviving below the level of the landowning record, as tenant farmers on Power and Strang ground.

From there the line crosses the Suir northward and re-emerges, around 1720, in the person of Petrus Rocket of Ballytarsna, in the parish of Mooncoin, Co. Kilkenny — a tenant on the Ponsonby (Bessborough) estate, documented in the Mooncoin and Carrigeen parish registers, and the patriarch from whom the well-documented modern Suir-valley family descends.

Rocketts Castle, Portlaw and the Curraghmore lands

If the family has a single ancestral home in Ireland, it is here: a tower house called Rokelle’s Court, later Rocketts Castle, at the townland of Gortardagh in the parish of Clonagam (Clonegam), Co. Waterford — on the Suir between Portlaw and Carrick-on-Suir. According to the Portlaw Heritage Centre, the de la Rokelle family held the lands of Gortardagh from the thirteenth century, and it is from this seat that the whole south-eastern surname community ultimately radiates.

The tower house

Local tradition remembers a knight, Richard de Rokella, as the builder of a five-storey circular tower, and dates the castle to 1212. The standing structure is more likely a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century tower house raised on a thirteenth-century site — but the antiquity of the family’s presence at Gortardagh is not in doubt. The round tower gave its name to the place: the townland is still “Mayfield or Rocketscastle” on the Ordnance Survey and in Griffith’s Valuation.

The seat in the records, 1520s–1600s

Whatever the truth of the thirteenth-century tradition, the Rocketts are the documented sept of this place right through the sixteenth century: this was unmistakably the family’s principal seat in the Suir valley. The records track it under a chain of spellings of the one name — Rokelliscourte (1523), Rocketts Court (1561), Rocketts Pointe (1594–95), Rocketts Castle (1596), and finally Mayfield — an unbroken thread of nearly four centuries on the ground. The earliest holder we can actually name is Nicholas de la Rockell, “lord of Lamport and Rokellscourt,” Co. Waterford, gentleman, recorded in the Calendar of Ormond Deeds in 1524 and again before the council at Waterford in 1541. Tellingly, the lands he was then dealing in — Balybothy and Fiddown — are the very estates of the medieval line: Balybothy, quit-claimed by the senior line in 1374, and Fiddown, the family’s Iverk free-tenancy of 1314. The same family was still holding the same ground. The Crown pardons known as the Fiants of Elizabeth I then name a succession of holders: Redmund and James Rockett, brothers, “of Rocketts Court” in 1561; James Rockell of Mothel in 1566–67; Richard and James Rockett of Rocketts Court, and James fitz Piers Rockett of Mothel, in 1569; and Redmund Rockett of Rocketts Court, whose inquisition post mortem was taken on his death in 1593–94. Far from a blank, the sixteenth century is precisely where the Rocketts of Rocketts Castle are best attested — a settled gentry sept holding the seat and the surrounding parish of Mothel.

Calendar of Ormond Deeds (ed. Curtis), vol. IV (1509–47), deeds 92, 94, 96; Calendar of Fiants of Elizabeth I, nos. 331, 936–37, 1303–04; Inquisitions Post Mortem of Co. Waterford (RIA OS EI/76); Power, Place-Names of Decies (1907).

Curraghmore and the Power connection

Clonagam parish is the parish of Curraghmore, the great seat of the Power (de la Poer) family — later the Beresfords, Marquesses of Waterford — and the largest demesne in the county. The Rocketts of Rocketts Castle were neighbours, tenants and marriage-allies of the Powers. The cleanest surviving record of their gentry standing is the funeral entry of James Rockell, who died in 1619 having married Katherine Power: a match into the dominant family of the district, and the last clear notice of the Rocketts as gentry before the storms of the seventeenth century.

The Sherlock marriage and the slide into debt

The last of the line to hold the castle in the old way is remembered as John Rockett, “the Last Heir”, who married Mary Sherlock — tying the Rocketts to the foremost Old-English merchant-gentry family of Waterford. But the family fell into debt, and in the early 1600s the estate was mortgaged to two Waterford merchant houses, Woodlock and Strang. When they foreclosed, Gortardagh was split between them as “Gortardagh Woodlock” and “Gortardagh Strang.”

Cromwell, Sir Algernon May, and Mayfield

The Confederate wars and the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s swept away Woodlock and Strang too — both, like the Rocketts, Catholic Old-English. Under the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, the Strang portion was granted in 1666 to Sir Algernon May, who renamed it Mayfield. The May family sold Mayfield to the Rev. John Thomas Medlycott in 1795; the Medlycotts still held “Rockett Castle” in 1840 (Freeman’s Journal) and 1858 (Leinster Express). The old tower burned in the 1840s, and a new Mayfield house was built nearby about 1863.

By later accounts of the lands lost in the Stuart mortgages and the Cromwellian confiscations, the Rockett estate at Gortardagh had run to something on the order of 1,200 acres — a substantial demesne, consistent with the family’s standing as gentry of Clonagam before its fall. The medieval charters record the family’s standing rather than an acreage; this later figure is the best surviving measure of the estate’s scale.

The Rocketts who stayed

The Catholic Rocketts were the dispossessed party in the 1650s, not beneficiaries of the settlement, and they were not transplanted to Connacht. They simply dropped from gentry to tenant-farmer status and stayed in the same parishes. By Griffith’s Valuation in the 1850s — two centuries after losing the castle — Rocketts were once again farming the very townland of their lost seat: Thomas, John, William and James Rockett all held land at “Mayfield or Rocketscastle”, with more Rockett households scattered through Clonagam parish at Coolroe, Clashganny, Killowen and Knockane. They had lost the castle but never left its shadow.

One surname, many lines

It is worth being clear that Petrus Rocket of Ballytarsna is the patriarch of one Rockett line — the one this project’s family descends from — not of the surname as a whole. The Rockett name is a whole community spread across both banks of the lower Suir: substantial clusters at Portlaw, Carrick-on-Suir, Waterford City, Tramore, Dunhill, Kilmacthomas, Clonea-Rathgormack, Drumcannon and Mothel in Co. Waterford, and Mooncoin, Carrigeen and Ballyneale across the river in Kilkenny and Tipperary. The working hypothesis — supported by the tight geography and by the family’s own tradition — is that these lines all descend from a common sixteenth- or seventeenth-century ancestor at or near Rocketts Castle, with Petrus’s Mooncoin branch one tenant-cadet among many.

Sources: Portlaw Heritage Centre, “Rocketts Castle”; Landed Estates Database (NUI Galway), “Mayfield / Rockett’s Castle”; Griffith’s Valuation, Clonagam parish, Co. Waterford; the 1619 James Rockell funeral entry (Genealogical Office / NLI); Freeman’s Journal (1840) and Leinster Express (1858); and the 1958 Edward J. Rockett letter preserved in this project’s research files.

The Bordeaux branch

One of the most surprising findings of the recent research is that the family also had a Bordeaux branch. In 1266 the constable of the castle of Bordeaux, Adam de Norffolk, issued letters patent confirming the sale of a house with quay on the “Rue de Rokella” in Bordeaux. The seller was Peter Martini de Rokella, whose father, also named Peter Martini de Rokella, was already deceased. The buyer was a Bordeaux citizen named Peter Burd. The house was held of the king of Aquitaine for one penny annual census and one penny relief at every change of lordship, payable at the feast of St Severin in the king’s chapel at Bordeaux.

So by 1266 the family had been in Bordeaux long enough for a street to bear their name. By the early fourteenth century, two of them — Rusteyn and Amaneus de la Rokele — came up from Gascony to fight in Edward I’s Scottish wars.

The Rôles Gascons (the chancery records of English-held Aquitaine), edited by Francisque Michel in 1885, also list a Gascon town named Rokella, alongside Bordeaux and Saint-Macaire and Sainte-Bazeille and Langon, in a 1240s royal letter. The Bordeaux Peter Martini family is most likely a local Gascon family of Bordelais merchants who took their byname from that local Gascon “rocky place”, independently of the English Cluster B.

It is a striking coincidence: in the same century, three different rocky places in Europe — one in Kent (Ruxley), one in Aquitaine (the Gascon Rokella) and an unidentified pre-Conquest seat in Normandy — each gave its name to a different family with the same byname pattern. Heraldic evidence (different shields and tinctures) shows that the medieval heralds treated them as distinct families, not branches of one.

Crusades and the military orders

Three Rockett family members are documented at moments of the medieval crusading and military-religious tradition.

Sir John de Rokesle, of the Kent line, is named by Hasted’s eighteenth-century History of Kent as having fought at the siege of Acre in 1191 alongside King Richard I. Hasted’s source was Philipott’s 1659 Villare Cantianum and Strype’s edition of Stow. The primary medieval witness is not currently in the digitised record, but the antiquarian tradition is too strong to dismiss outright.

Sir Richard de la Rokele, the Justiciar, took the cross at the parliament of Northampton on 24 June 1268, alongside the Lord Edward (later Edward I) and many other senior magnates. He is named on the surviving roster of Edward’s expedition to the Holy Land in 1270–72. His son William remained in Dublin during the crusade as attorney for the family’s Irish affairs.

Walter de Rokele, who was a sworn Templar in 1308, transferred to the Hospitaller Order after the suppression and drew a Hospitaller pension still recorded in 1338. A second Templar Rokele — William — is named by Adams (2013) from the underlying inquisition deposition corpus.

The Rokeles’ broader kin-network — the Mandeville earls of Essex, the Beauchamps, the Bigods, the Bohuns, and the Despensers — was densely involved in the Third Crusade, the Fifth Crusade, and Louis IX’s expeditions to the Holy Land and Tunis. The pattern is entirely consistent with a family operating inside the magnate-crusading milieu of the long thirteenth century.

Where the family lived

The medieval Rockett family is documented in seventeen English counties, in three Irish counties, in one Welsh river-valley, in Normandy, and in Aquitaine. The picture below is by the major branches.

A 700-year timeline

The most important documented events in the family’s recorded history. Every entry below is from a primary source.

The Waterford line

For Rocketts of south-east Ireland descent, the documented Waterford line runs roughly as follows. This section uses the most recent research; some links between generations remain working hypotheses rather than settled facts.

The earliest Waterford-county Rokele is the William de la Rokele who served as Sheriff of County Waterford under Henry III, attested by his son Richard’s 1317–18 petition for the restitution of lands taken for William’s Crown debts. He held office sometime in the 1250s to 1270s.

By the early fourteenth century, the family is on the Kilkenny side of the Suir, in the Iverk barony, with John de la Rokell at Fidon-in-Croc and William at Kelroske (1314). By the late fourteenth century, the family produces John Rocket, Mayor of Waterford (1393), and William Rokell, Sheriff of Cross-Tipperary (1377–83), on the Waterford / Tipperary border.

Between the late fourteenth century and the early sixteenth the documentary record for this line is sparse, and the bridge between the Iverk free-tenants of 1314 and the Tudor sept at Rocketts Castle has not been closed with named generations. But the family is firmly documented at its principal Suir-valley seat from the 1520s–60s (the Elizabethan Fiants name Rocketts at Rocketts Court and in Mothel), and from 1595 the senior patrician line is fully attested, with Redmund Rockett of Blackfriars (d. 1595), Nicholas Rocket of Atlongport (1602/3), Nicholas Rockell of Blackfriars (d. c.1630), and Jacobus Rockell of Tallow (d. 1620). These all appear in the Inquisitions Post Mortem of Co. Waterford under James I and Charles I, before the family is squeezed out of the patent-class records by Stuart-era mortgages and the Cromwellian settlement.

From the seventeenth century the family’s ancestral seat in this county is Rocketts Castle at Gortardagh, in Clonagam parish by Curraghmore and Portlaw — lost to debt, foreclosure and the Cromwellian settlement, but never forgotten. The Rocketts who survived stayed in the same parishes as tenant farmers, and by Griffith’s Valuation in the 1850s were once again working the townland of their lost castle.

It is important to keep one distinction clear. The Rockett surname in the south-east is a whole community, not a single line. There are substantial, long-established Rockett families at Portlaw, Carrick-on-Suir, Waterford City, Tramore, Dunhill, Kilmacthomas, Clonea-Rathgormack, Drumcannon and Mothel, as well as across the Suir at Mooncoin, Carrigeen and Ballyneale. The line this project documents most fully — and the one its own family descends from — centres on Petrus Rocket of Ballytarsna, Mooncoin parish, Co. Kilkenny, recorded in the NLI parish registers from the 1720s. By the early nineteenth century that branch is a Mooncoin–Carrigeen Catholic farming family, with Edmund “C” crossing the Suir in 1856 to settle at Old Grange, Mothel, and many of his children emigrating to America. But Petrus is the patriarch of that line, not of the surname — the other Waterford Rockett families are cousins, almost certainly sharing a common ancestor at or near Rocketts Castle, rather than descendants of Petrus.

Research your own line

If you bear the Rockett name and want to trace your own ancestors, here is how to make the most of the medieval picture above.

Step one: find your immediate ancestors first

The medieval picture is interesting but it is centuries removed from any living person. Before you spend time trying to trace yourself back to Sir Richard the Justiciar, document your line as far back as the parish registers reach. For Irish Catholic lines this is usually the 1760s to 1830s. For English and American Rocketts it varies widely. The standard sources are the parish baptism, marriage and burial records, civil registration (which begins in 1837 in England and Wales, 1864 in Ireland), and census returns.

Step two: identify which branch you are likely from

The medieval Rokeles had at least four large branches, and they did not all give rise to modern Rockett families in equal numbers. The Essex / Cluster B branch, including the Irish Rokele who ended in the Suir valley, is the one that produced the largest documented modern descent. The Kent / Cluster K branch (the Mayor of London line) appears to die out in the male line by the late fourteenth century. The Norfolk branches appear to have merged into local Ingaldesthorp and other families. The Bordeaux branch is a separate Gascon family altogether.

If your family origin is in south-east Ireland (Waterford, Kilkenny, Tipperary, south Wexford), you are almost certainly from the Cluster B Irish branch — the descendants of Sir Richard the Justiciar.

If your family origin is in Essex, Norfolk, or East Anglia generally, you may be from a separate English Cluster B cadet.

If your family origin is in Kent, Sussex, or London, the Cluster K line may be relevant, but a fourteenth-century cadet bridge has not been documented.

Step three: try Y-DNA

The most powerful tool for surname-line questions is Y-DNA testing through one of the major DNA-testing companies. Y-DNA follows the father-to-son line and can show whether you share a recent or deep common male-line ancestor with another tested Rockett. A cluster of Rockett testers all sharing a Y-DNA haplogroup and a tight set of marker values would be strong evidence of a single male-line patriarch within the last few centuries; a wide spread of haplogroups would suggest, instead, several unrelated families adopting the same surname.

Y-DNA cannot, by itself, prove a Norman origin. Its value lies in comparison with other documented Rockett lines.

Step four: the gaps that still need closing

These are the open questions that the current research has not been able to settle. If you have access to any of these, you are likely to find new evidence.

• Battle Abbey Roll variants. The Holinshed (1577), Stow (1605), Leland (16C) and Auchinleck (14C) variants of the Battle Abbey Roll may name the family in different forms. Most are available in a few specialist research libraries.
• The specific Norman seat. The candidates — La Rochelle-Barneville (Manche), La Rochelle-Louviers (Eure), and the comté of Eu itself — could be tested against Marie Fauroux’s 1961 edition of the Norman ducal acts, Elisabeth van Houts’s 1992–95 edition of William of Jumièges, and Katharine Keats-Rohan’s prosopographical works.
• The 1450–1593 gap in the Irish line. Closing the chain from the 1314 Iverk free-tenants to the 1595 Suir-valley Rocketts requires Lodge MS 18, the National Archives of Ireland RC 8 series of memoranda rolls, and the Bessborough estate records.
• The Adams Langland identification. Robert Adams’s 2013 identification of William de la Rokele of Easthorpe as William Langland the poet is the largest single open question in fourteenth-century English literary studies. It can be tested against the Beauchamp household accounts and the dialect-data of the early Piers Plowman manuscripts.

Step five: read the long version

For anyone serious about the medieval Rokele family, the essential reading is Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to “Piers Plowman”, published by Four Courts Press in 2013. It is the only modern scholarly monograph on the family and its arguments are very largely the ones followed here.

Step six: contact your local archives

The Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone, the Norfolk Record Office in Norwich, and the National Archives of Ireland in Bishop Street, Dublin, all hold relevant medieval and early-modern material that has not been digitised. Visiting in person is sometimes the only way to access it.

Acknowledgements and sources

This account is built from the medieval administrative records of the English Crown, supplemented by the surviving antiquarian compilations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by modern scholarship. The primary corpora are: Domesday Book, the Pipe Rolls, the Red Book of the Exchequer (Hall 1896), the Cartae Baronum, the Calendar of Charter Rolls, the Calendar of Patent Rolls, the Calendar of Close Rolls, the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, the Liber Feodorum (Book of Fees), the Rôles Gascons (Michel 1885, Bémont 1896), the Calendar of Documents Ireland (Sweetman), Bracton’s Note Book (Maitland 1887), and the Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey Dublin (Gilbert). For the Irish branch in particular: the Calendar of Ormond Deeds (ed. Edmund Curtis, Irish Manuscripts Commission), Inquisitions and Extents of Medieval Ireland (ed. Paul Dryburgh and Brendan Smith, List & Index Society vol. 320, 2007 — which preserves the verbatim Ketyng–Rokele inquisitions), George Dames Burtchaell’s 1893 study of the Barons of Overk in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI), and Pender’s Census of Ireland 1659.

The antiquarian sources are Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1797), Philip Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (1768), Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (1805), Catherine Duchess of Cleveland, The Battle Abbey Roll (1889), and Patrick Power, The Place-Names of Decies (1907).

The modern scholarship that has been most useful is Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family (Four Courts Press, 2013). On the d’Eu / Rokele question, see also J. H. Round, “The Church and Glebe of Willingale Doe”, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, new series, vol. 8 (1903).

The research database that underlies this page contains 225 documented medieval persons across the family. Of these, 155 are Cluster B (the Essex / Ireland senior line), 43 are Cluster K (the Kent / London line), 8 are Gascon, and 19 are otherwise affiliated. 40 are female; 21 are documented before 1200; 49 are documented in the fourteenth century.