For at the battle of Poictiers, the great-great grand-father of Pierre Bayard, the good knight without fear and without reproach, fell by the side of the French King John. At the battle of Agincourt, was slain his great-grand-father; his grandfather was left on the field of Montlerey with six mortal wounds, not to speak of lesser ones ; and at the battle of Guignegaste, his father was so severely wounded, that he was never afterwards able to leave his house, where he died at the age of eighty."

Pierre duTerrail Signeur de Bayard was born in 1476, at the Chateau de Bourg in the valley of Graisivudun, a few leagues from Grenable, the principal city of Dauphiny. For more than thirty years he served in the armies of France. For valor and skill as a leader he was unsurpassed, in an age when chivalry was still honored. He was killed by a gun-shot at Biagrassa on the 13th of April, 1524, at the age of forty-eight years and died unmarried, and without issue.

During the religious troubles which distracted the kingdom of France in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, some of the family descendants from a branch of the Chevalier Bayard's house, emigrated to Holland ; among these was Balthazar Bayard, a Huguenot clergyman and professor of languages in Paris, who early in the seventeenth century left France to escape persecution on account of his religion. There is a tradition in the family that he was shipped from Rochelle in a hogahead. He soon rallied around him a congregation of Huguenot refugees, whose pastor he continued until his death. He mirried, in Holland, Anna Stuyvesant, sister of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Governor of New York. Madame Anna Bayard, her husband being then dead, accompanied her brother, Peter Stuv-^-estant, to New York v/ith her three children, all sons-- Balshazar, Peter and Nicholas-- where they landed on the fourteenth of May, 1647.