CHAPTER VII.

The House of Vipont,--"/Majora canamus/."

The House of Vipont! Looking back through ages, it seems as if the House
of Vipont were one continuous living idiosyncrasy, having in its
progressive development a connected unity of thought and action, so that
through all the changes of its outward form it had been moved and guided
by the same single spirit,--"/Le roi est mort; vive le roi!/"--A Vipont
dies; live the Vipont! Despite its high-sounding Norman name, the House
of Vipont was no House at all for some generations after the Conquest.
The first Vipont who emerged from the obscurity of time was a rude
soldier of Gascon origin, in the reign of Henry II.,--one of the thousand
fighting-men who sailed from Milford Haven with the stout Earl of
Pembroke, on that strange expedition which ended in the conquest of
Ireland. This gallant man obtained large grants of land in that fertile
island; some Mac or some O'----- vanished, and the House of Vipont rose.

During the reign of Richard I., the House of Vipont, though recalled to
England (leaving its Irish acquisitions in charge of a fierce cadet, who
served as middleman), excused itself from the Crusade, and, by marriage
with a rich goldsmith's daughter, was enabled to lend moneys to those who
indulged in that exciting but costly pilgrimage. In the reign of John,
the House of Vipont foreclosed its mortgages on lands thus pledged, and
became possessed of a very fair property in England, as well as its fiefs
in the sister isle.