Ruloff de Kype

Born Abt in Alencon, Bretagne, France. 1562: Fled from France to the Netherlands with his 3 sons after their house was burned down by Protestants. He died March 13, 1569, on the banks of La Charente near Jarnac, France.

Death at Jarnac

Ruloff de Kype was born around 1510–1520 near Alençon, in Brittany, France, a Catholic squire loyal to the House of Guise during the opening years of the French Wars of Religion. In 1562, after Protestant forces under the Prince of Condé took and burned his château — part of the wave of violence that followed the Huguenot massacre at Vassy — Ruloff fled with his three sons to the Netherlands, living for a time under an assumed name. He returned to France in 1569 to fight in the army of the Duke of Anjou and was killed in battle on the banks of the Charente River near Jarnac on March 13, 1569. His son, a priest named Jean Baptiste, oversaw his burial; his tomb, destroyed during the French Revolution, identified him as an ecuyer (squire) and bore a coat of arms — two silver griffins and a chevron on an azure field, with the motto Vestigia nulla retrorsum, “never step back” — strikingly similar to the arms later used by the American Kip family.