THE ORIGIN

by Roger T. Eubank

The Very Reverend Archdeacon Walter Frederick Ewbank of Carlisle wrote "We came into Cumbria with fire and sword in the tenth century, well before the Conqueror, & finally settled near Kirkby Stephen, at a bleak and remote hamlet still called [High] Ewbank."

Archdeacon Ewbank was referring to the Vikings who conquered northern England in the 800s and 900s and who mixed with the native Saxons and formed a joint line of rulers. "The Conqueror" was the bastard William of Normandy who led his robber barons to steal the Saxon-Viking Kingdom of Angland in 1066; and Cumbria is the name of combined Counties Westmorland and Cumberland.

Other family researchers think that the Ewbanks were Saxon or even Norman. Lady Anne Clifford, the mid millennium Countess of Pembroke and hereditary High Sheriffess of Westmorland, was a Norman descendant. She maintained that the Ewbank family was also Norman. The 1700s historian of Westmorland, Rev Thomas Machell, said "The Countess was wont to say that the first of the [Ewbank] family came in with the Conqueror."

The Hall of Names of Torpoint says the Ewbank family "is believed to be descended originally from the Boernicians. This ancient founding race of the north dated from the year 400 A.D. "Their homeland "was a tract of rugged territory stretching from Carlisle in the West to Berwick in the east. The name Ewbank is one of the oldest border surnames or clans."

One of the Westmorland’s oldest legends also indicates that the family resided there well before the Norman invasion.