The family had no coat-of-arms2, although at least one Casebolt apparently was the right-hand man of a knight whose family did have a coat of arms.3 One enterprising American company made up a fake Casebolt coat-of-arms, featuring a grotesque bald mannequin head, to sell to trusting American members of the family. Similarly, their The Amazing Story of the Casebolts in America contains no Casebolt history at all, other than a phrase or two taken from a secondary source which in turn had simply repeated the tiny bit of information given in Reaney's Dictionary !4
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1 Around New Years 2001, I heard from an English Casbolt that an Australian Casbolt claimed to have discovered an authentic coat-of-arms, but to date I have seen nothing.
2 Ashley, p. 40: "the term yeoman was commonly used in legal and other documents to denote the status above that of the 'husbandman' and below that of the 'gentleman'. Yeomen either sprang from old free-tenant families long settled on the lands of their fathers or made their way up. Though they sometimes supplemented their incomes in other ways and aimed to collect a stock of money and implements -- they have been called ambitious small capitalists -- in essence they were hard-working farmers. The typical yeoman was a modest freeholder cultivating his own land, usually a few hundred acres of arable and pasture; but the term also included tenants on copyholds or similar lease, that is to say with a lengthy security of tenure. The distinction between the yeoman and the husbandman may simply have been in the average size of their holdings, for the husbandman was sometimes described as a 'petty farmer' or 'meaner farmer'. The sons of yeomen were often reckoned to be husbandmen."
3 Waters, England, II:857. Thomas Casbolt was left 20 pounds in the will of Sir Edward Pinchon, knight of Writtle, Essex in 1626/7. The entry is in the section of the will leaving bequests to servants. Thomas is the first one mentioned and received four times as much as any other servant. Consequently, it is very likely that Thomas was chief steward for Sir Edward.
4 Taylor.
Copyright 1992- RAK
CASEBOLT -- An American Family
Page 1-10
Chapter 1 - Origins
Last revised: 26 March 2001
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