Your correspondent HONORE DE MAREVILLE has wandered too far in going to the
Morea to search for this title. Clare in Suffolk was one of the ninety-five
manors in that county bestowed by the Conqueror upon Richard Fitzgilbert,
who (as well as his successor Gilbert) resided at Tunbridge, and bore the
surname of De Tonebruge. His grandson Richard, the first Earl of Hertford,
fixed his principal seat at Clare, and thenceforth the family took the
surname of De Clare; and in the Latin documents of the time the several
members of it were styled _Ricardus_ (or _Gilbertus_), _Dominus Clarensis_,
_Comes Hertfordiensis_. The name of the lordship thus becoming the family
surname, it is easy to see how in common usage the formal epithet
_Clarensis_ soon became Clarence, and why Lionel, the son of Edward III.,
upon his marriage with Elizabeth de Burgh, the grand-niece and heiress of
the last Gilbertus Clarensis, should choose as the title for his dukedom
the surname of the great family of which he had now become the
representative.