Compiled in this publication, which aspires to document the history of the medieval Fleming family of the British Isles, are the edited and corrected texts of four previously published books by F. Lawrence Fleming, namely: A Genealogical History of the Barons Slane (2008), A Genealogy of the Ancient Flemings (2010), The Ancestry of the Earl of Wigton (2011), and Wigton Revisited (2014), along with various essays by the same author.

The essays contained in this volume concern the early history of the Fleming family of the British Isles. My main motivation in writing these essays has been my moral obligation to compliment with additional information my two earlier publications: A Genealogical History of the Barons Slane and A Genealogy of the Ancient Flemings. This publication will naturally be of most interest to those who have already read these books and would like to learn of any more recent developments in my ongoing research into the history of the Fleming family. The ancestry of the Earls of Wigton and the Lords Fleming of Scotland has always been a hard nut to crack. Some have said that Baldwin, the first sheriff of Lanarkshire, was the progenitor of the Scottish house of Fleming; others have said differently. I contend that the progenitor of the house of Fleming was the man who is known from Scottish records as Jordanus Flandrensis. Jordan the Fleming first came to Scotland from Cumbria in England in about 1147. He would have been the great-grandson of Erkenbald the Fleming, a companion of the Conqueror in 1066. I cannot conclusively prove my contention, but I trust that the evidence I present in this publication will show that such a contention is not only plausible, it is very likely.

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A medieval tradition alleges that the various branches of the Fleming family of the British Isles are descended from the three sons of an earl of Flanders. Pitted against this tradition is the more recent allegation, first made no earlier than the eighteenth century, that unrelated families immigrated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the British Isles from Flanders and independently chose Fleming as a surname. What do historical records have to say concerning these two opposing views? In this publication it is asserted that the records are unanimously in favour of ancient tradition and that the modern allegation is nonsense. The traditional "earl of Flanders" was in reality a man named Erkenbald, the son of an exiled Flemish nobleman living in Normandy during the first half of the eleventh century. Erkenbald the Fleming came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and through him are the Flemings of the British Isles descended from one of the great noble houses of Flanders.