The Barons revolt allowed the St. Leger family to offer ransom/release aided by the English Master Templar Roger St. Leger on 30 Aug 1216. Lord of Fairlight.'
The Christian name Jean runs in the French St. Leger family. Another, Sir Jean De St. Leger, accompanied Robert, Duke of Normandy on the First Crusade 1096. Another St. Leger rode with Philip Augustus in Palestine in 1191. A map of Jerusalem 1099-1147 during the times of the Crusades, shows a "Leger's Pool" just outside St. Stephen's Gate. Geoffrey De St. Leger fought with Richard I of England in Palestine from 1186 to 1201 or 1202. He was present at the siege of Acre in 1187. Ralph St. Leger, Lord of Ulcombe also too part in the siege of Acre in 1187.. His tomb still exists in Ulcombe Church. He returned to England around 1201. As his son carried the same name there are confusions but a Ralph St. Leger was a signatory to Magna Carta in 1215.
Sir Thomas Saint Leger was a Knight of the Order of the Bath and Ambassador to France. He along with Louis XI and others signed the treaty of Pecquigny, ending the Hundred Years War. He married Anne Plantagenet, Duchess of Exeter. Upon Edward IV of England's death in 1483, St. Leger was beheaded by Richard III of England. He and Anne, who had died giving birth to their only child also named Anne, are buried in The Roos Chapel, St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.
He inherited Lundy Eggesford, Annery, Monkleigh in Devon and other properties in Kent and Sussex from his maternal grandfather the Earl of Ormond. A chief courtier to King Henry VIII, his wife was Lady in waiting to Catalina of Aragon and they both attended the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" in France. They also attended the coronation of Anne Boleyn, his cousin on 29 May 1533 in Westminster Abbey. His son was awarded many lands in Devon in Exchange for Kent property owned by his grandmother. "Served" at Exeter Cathedral.
Born by 1516, first son of Sir George St. Leger of Annery by Anne, daughter of Edmund Knyvett. He was only a boy when his father and grandmother arranged that he should marry a daughter of the wealthy royal favourite Sir William Compton, the bride was to bring a dowry of £2,346 and both families were to settle lands on the couple. The marriage did not take place, seemingly because Catherine Compton died, and it was replaced by a match with Catherine Neville, a grand-daughter of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham. St. Leger was married by 1535 and within two years he had livery of an inheritance comprising lands in nine counties. He served in the French campaign of 1544. According to Sir William Paget, Henry VIII on his deathbed chose St. Leger for creation as a baron, but the Council revised the King's plan after his death.
It was not until he was about 40 that St. Leger entered the Commons but he was to sit in every Parliament save one for the 30 years which followed. His election in 1555 may have owed something to the prominent part he had played in the rounding up of the Carew rebels at the beginning of the previous year, this had earned him the thanks of Queen Mary and a place on the Devon bench. Himself linked by marriage with the Carew and Courtenay families, and returned for Dartmouth with the outgoing sheriff James Courtenay, St. Leger is likely to have enjoyed most support from James Bassett, the court favourite who sat in this Parliament as one of the knights of the shire. The names of Courtenay and St. Leger are conspicuously absent from the list of Members, among them many ‘western’ men, who voted against one of the government's bills. For the rest of Mary's reign St. Leger was an active local official, and when early in 1558 Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford was made lord lieutenant of Devon and Cornwall, Sir Thomas Denys and St. Leger became his deputies.
He went to Ireland in 1567 & 1569 in the reign of Elizabeth I, his cousin, at the time of the revolt of O’Neill. An enigmatic and obscure document states that the Queen "gave" to her Lieutenant John St. Leger "certain lands" joining the castles where her garrisons were occupied by the Butlers. He was to supply eight hundred men to lay siege to the castles. Had the Queen given her cousin a free hand to try and regain his Irish lands?
St. Leger had both added to and consolidated his possessions in Devon, especially through grants of ex-monastic lands, but in later life he parted with much of his property and he died in the mid 1590s a poor man.