(The husband of the younger daughter, Saer de Quincy, was created Earl of Winchester.)

However, Simon IV de Montfort was never formally recognized as earl, due to the antipathy between France and England at that time.

In 1267 the title was created a second time and granted to the king's youngest son, Edmund Crouchback.

Crouchback's son Thomas lost the earldom when he was executed for treason in 1322, but a few years later, it was restored to his younger brother Henry.

(The two passages of the earldom via females illustrate the medieval practice by which such inheritance was allowed in the absence of male heirs.)

Matilda, however, soon died, and the title passed to John of Gaunt, husband of her younger sister, Blanche, who was later created Duke of Lancaster.

The title of earl was then recreated for Thomas Coke (pronounced "Cook"[2]), but it became extinct when he, too, died without heirs.

In 1728 he was raised to the Peerage of Great Britain as Baron Lovel, of Minster Lovel in the County of Oxford, and in 1744 he was created Viscount Coke, of Holkham in the County of Norfolk, and Earl of Leicester, also in the Peerage of Great Britain.

This was despite the fact that the 1784 creation of the earldom held by the Townshend family was then still extant (then "usurped" by John Dunn-Gardner), hence the territorial designation "of Holkham".

His younger son, David Arthur Coke was a friend of the author Roald Dahl but was killed in action during the second world war in December 1941.

As of 2015[update] the titles are held by his son Thomas Edward Coke, the eighth Earl, who succeeded in that year.

The traditional burial place of the Coke family is a plot situated on the south side of the churchyard of the Holkham parish church of St Withburga.