The migration of noble Bretons to England cannot be documented before the eleventh century. The story starts, as is well known, with Radulfus Anglicus - Ralph the Englishmen - who was the first known lord of Gaël in the county of Rennes. He is interesting for severaI reasons. He occurs in a Breton document of c. 1031 as Radulfus Anglicus, during the reign of the Danish Cnut's son Hardecanute in England. His cognomen Anglicus means that he was part English by birth. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says as much, and we know from Domesday Book of other members of his family bearing English names such as Godwin and Ailsi. Perhaps his unknown father had gone first to Normandy with Judith of Rennes, who manied Richard II of Normandy, and then a few years later to England with Richard's sister Emma, wife of Aethelred II and then of Cnut. Although before 1042 Ralph the Englishman was still associated with Brittany, thereafter the evidence concerning him shows him to have been an influential figure in the circle of Emma's son King Edward the Confessor, for whom he acted as staller or constable. The land that Ralph held was located in eastern England, in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, as well as Lincolnshire. This was the region contralled in 1066, when Harold son of Godwin became king, by Harold's brother Gyrth. Ralph supported William when he invaded in October of that year, and was rewarded by the grant of the earldom of East Anglia. Within a short time, probably by 1069, he was succeeded by his son Ralph of Gaël. This second Ralph married a Breton and had probably lived in Brittany until 1066. In that year he joined the Norman expedition, in the company of Nigel of the Cotentin, who had been an exile in Brittany for some time between 1047 and 1050. Within a few years of his father's death, in 1075, Ralph of Gael quarrelled with the king and went into revolt. An earlier revolt in the north of England had been savagely repressed by the Conqueror in 1070. So serious had the situation been that it entailed a radical change of policy by the Normans.