Robert Steward (dean)

"However, it has been suggested that his real ancestry involved a promotion from the keeping of pigs to the holding of manorial courts" (i.e. the chief function of a steward of a lord of a manor during the feudal era).

"A minor gentry family in late medieval Norfolk, their fortune, as well as their pedigree, was made by the time-serving prior, who assigned generous tracts of dean and chapter lands within the Isle of Ely to numerous relatives".

However the pedigree was declared bogus by "that redoubtable genealogist" Dr Horace Round, who "had great pleasure in refuting ... (and) proved beyond that these Stewards were originally pig keepers in Norfolk hence (Sty ward), probably of illegitimate descent and nothing to do with the King's family".

[12][13] Some of his later relatives used the coat of arms of Stewart, Hereditary High Steward of Scotland,(Or, a fess chequy argent and azure),[14] from whom the Stuart monarchs of Scotland are descended, for example William Stewart of "Wisbech, in the Isle of Ely", Cambridgeshire, whose daughter married Sir William Cook, 2nd Baronet (c.1630-1708).

The idea that the Stewards were connected with the royal Stuarts and descended from a Scottish prince shipwrecked on the Norfolk coast in 1406 is a non-starter.

He complied with the religious changes under both the staunchly Protestant King Edward VI and the Roman Catholic Queen Mary, retaining his deanery until his death on 22 September 1557.