Recent study of William Flower’s The Visitation of Yorkshire (1563–1564) has certainly thrown up some unexpected curiosities.
The appearance of an entry linking "Beaumont" as the "Earls of Chester" on Page 18 of William Flower’s The Visitation of Yorkshire (1563–1564) was certainly a surprise. The error, and I do believe that it is an error, is not mentioned in the foreword. I believe that it is due to a highly specific, late-medieval genealogical error regarding the maternal ancestry of the Barons Dacre of the North.
Page 18 of this specific visitation outlines the pedigree for "Dacre of the North." Within that lineage, the early Tudor heralds appear to have mistakenly recorded an early ancestor as marrying a daughter of the "Beaumont Earls of Chester." It seems to me that the Heralds conflated two separate entities.
The entry appears to be a historical error born from the conflation of two powerful Anglo-Norman magnates who lived during the 12th century:
The Real Earls of Chester: The early Earls of Chester were from the d'Avranches and Meschin families (such as Ranulf de Meschin and Ranulf de Blondeville). They were never Beaumonts.
The Beaumont Earls: The House of Beaumont famously held the Earldom of Leicester (alongside the Earldom of Warwick).
Because both the Earls of Chester and the Beaumont Earls of Leicester were top-tier Anglo-Norman barons who frequently intermarried, fought, and held vast, overlapping estates across the Midlands and the North of England, later Tudor heralds drafting the Dacre lineage seem to have confused the two titles into a single blended identity.
When William Flower conducted his tour of Yorkshire in 1563, he relied heavily on family rolls, oral traditions, and older, unverified manuscripts supplied by the families themselves to construct deep medieval roots. Many families sought to anchor their lineage to prestigious Conquest-era or Magna Carta-era barons.
Over centuries, accurate names often blurred: a real marriage to a daughter of a Beaumont (Earl of Leicester) or a Meschin (Earl of Chester) was misremembered or mistranscribed as a "Beaumont Earl of Chester." Rather than correcting the error, the heralds appear to have recorded it as presented, cementing a fictional title into the official pages of Yorkshire's genealogical history. Incredible!
At the end of the pedigree there is an heraldic note which provides a quarterly blazon:
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