ABSTRACT
An ancient family of landed gentry, centered in Herefordshire, whose English ancestry can be traced to the eleventh century; the Scudamores of Holme Lacy, their most important Elizabethan branch, were elevated to the peerage in the seventeenth century (‘Lucas-Scudamore of Kentchurch’ in Burke’s Landed Gentry 1965-; ‘John Scudamore’ in DNB). The name was variously spelled in the sixteenth century (Skydmore, Skudmore, Scudamour, etc); by the 1570s, however, it was becoming normalized to Scudamore, the spelling most in keeping with the family motto, scutum amoris divini (the shield of divine love). Upton found a correspondence between this name and Sir Scudamour in The Faerie Queene; and Todd, taking his claim from Upton, asserted that Spenser had ‘immortalized…the noble family of Scudamore’ (Var 3:290, 2:223).
