William Levett (baron)

William Levett (also spelled William de Livet) (c. 1200 – c. 1270) was lord of the manor of the South Yorkshire village of Hooton Levitt, a village named in part for his ancestors, and became the owner of the patronage of Roche Abbey on marriage to the granddaughter of the Abbey's cofounder Richard FitzTurgis, a Norman baron who co-founded Roche with the great-nephew of one of England's most powerful Norman barons, Roger de Busli.

[11] As lords of the manor of Hooton Levitt and principal patrons of Roche Abbey, the Levett family wielded considerable influence in the region.

Quarrying its stone-rich meadows yielded large profits, as did income from its sprawling holdings,[14] principally of grazing land but also within the city of York.

The family continued to remain in the area,[16] moving on to nearby Normanton,[17][18] where they were lords of the manor of the Newlands estate,[19] and had longstanding ties to the Knights Hospitallers, and to High Melton,[20] where many of the original charters of Roche, as well as the Chartulary of the St. John of Pontefract Abbey, eventually fell into the hands of Thomas Levett, a descendant who turned them over to eminent Yorkshire antiquarian Roger Dodsworth for study and publication.

Most of the other records of Roche were lost when the chest in which they were kept in St Mary's Tower, York, was blasted by the Parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell during the siege of June 1644 in the English Civil War.