Ok, an update on my searches.
Through a bit of detective work I've been able to latch on to some gentry in England and now have a family line back to 1189! A certain A. de Barnardiston, who lived around that time, is my Greatx22 Grandfather, and is one of the, mathematically, 16,777,216 Greatx22 grandparents I have!
All very interesting.... but now the clouds have gone I can get back to looking further back in time by a couple of orders of magnitude!!
Cheers,
Mario