Who was the mother of Etienne Henri (d. 1102)?

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Apologies if this is an already-chewed-over chestnut. But who was the
mother of Etienne Henri (d. 1102), husband of William I's daughter
Adela? Or, to put it another way, who was the paternal grandmother of
King Stephen of Blois?

Etienne Henri's father was Thibaut III (d. 1089), count of Blois, who
was married three times:

(1) To Gersinda of Maine, daughter of Herbert "Eveille-Chien", count of
Maine. Divorced 1048. She (is said to have?) subsequently married
Alberto Azzo II, Marchese d'Este.

(2) To Gundrada, also called Gondrée, parentage evidently unknown.

(3) To Alix de Crepi.

Richardson (ROYAL ANCESTRY) says Etienne Henri was a son of Gundrada /
Gondrée. He cites Arbois de Jubainville, HISTOIRE DES DUCS ET DES
COMTES DE CHAMPAGNE (1859), containing a "charter of Count Etienne and
his wife, Ala, dated 1089; names his father, Count Thibaut, and his
mother, Gundrea."

Boyer (MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ANCESTORS OF CERTAIN AMERICANS) also says he
was a son of Gundrada / Gondrée. Boyer includes de Jubainville in his
prefatory list of sources for the Blois line, but doesn't specifically
mention that 1089 charter.

Genealogics, apparently citing EUROPAISCHE STAMMTAFELN, says he was a
son of Gersinda of Maine.

Peter Stewart, posting to SGM on 6 Feb 2005, also says he was a son of Gersinda
("Gersent, daughter of Count Heribert Wake-dog of Maine").

ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE by Theodore Evergates (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) also says he was a son of Gersinda
("Gersent de la Mans"--thank you, Amazon's Look Inside This Book
feature).

Ancestral Roots (8th ed.) appears to say he was a son of Alix de Crepi
(line 137, items 22 and 23).

Thanks in advance for any thoughts...

--
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
http://nielsenhayden.com
http://nielsenhayden.com/genealogy-tng/

[joe...@gmail.com]

This is a great question! You are basically asking if it is more likely that Thibaut had a wife Gundreae who appears only in one place in recorded history (this charter of 1089 transcribed here):

https://books.google.com/books?id=c3GlCZm834oC&pg=PA504&lpg=PA504&dq=%22et+matris+me%C3%A6+Gundre%C3%A6%22&source=bl&ots=0wcK6inGOe&sig=ACfU3U2pC56YemhWdsEYpoNKq7l8ue93kw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAj7Dc5_7mAhUIvVkKHcJ5B1UQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22et%20matris%20me%C3%A6%20Gundre%C3%A6%22&f=false

who died soon after this birth...
or if someone perhaps misread "Gersendae" as "Gundreae" when transcribing the charter.

The latter seems a lot more likely to me; but doubt it can be resolved beyond that?

[Peter Stewart]

I agree with this, as implicitly did Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville whose
book (vol. 1, linked by Joe above) is cited for "Gundrea". In his own
work (same vol., p. 392 note 5) he stated that Stephen Henry was the son
of his father's first wife Gersende of Maine, but on p. 504 he printed
the charter dated 1089 representing that Stephen Henry named his mother
as "Gundrea". However, Arbois de Jubainville took this charter directly
from the text as printed in a history of Blois published in 1682, where
the same name is clearly given as "Gandrea" - and as suggested by Joe,
this is fairly likely to be a copyist's error for Garsenda.

From memory there was an article in *The Genealogist* purporting to
correct the long-held consensus of historians that Gersende of Maine was
Stephen Henry's mother entirely on the basis of the 1089 charter as
reprinted by Arbois de Jubainville.

Peter Stewart

[Peter Stewart]

Apologies, the article I was thinking of was not in *The Genealogist*
but in *Notes and Queries* vol. 162 (January-June 1932), by Geoffrey
White, 'The parentage of Herbert the Chamberlain'.

White took up the question of whether Stephen-Henry's mother may have
been an Italian lady named Gandrea from Kate Norgate in *England under
the Angevin Kings* vol. 1 (1887) pp. 255-256, here:
https://archive.org/details/englandunderang00kategoog/page/n283.

The point made by Norgate that "Gersendis cannot possibly have
been a daughter of Hugh II" is due to a mistake of Orderic Vitalis, who
stated this - she was Hugh II's sister, and no doubt old enough to have
produced offspring before her divorce from Thibaud III of Blois by
October 1049.

Peter Stewart

[Peter Stewart]

It's worth mentioning that the question of Stephen-Henry's mother having
been an Italian, based on John of Salisbury calling the grandmother of
King Stephen "Lumbarda", was discussed most recently by Patrick Corbet
in 'A propos du schisme de 1159: la parenté bléso-champenoise
de l'antipape Victor IV', *Francia* 45 (2018) 329-337.

Corbet pointed out that Gersende of Maine's son by her second marriage,
Hugo of Este (who eventually sold the county of Maine to Hélie of La
Flèche), was known as "the Lombard" (Langobardus): most probably
Gersende herself was referred to as "Lumbarda" after her Italian
remarriage, so John of Salisbury's use of this term need not signify
that King Stephen's paternal grandmother was Italian by birth.

Peter Stewart

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Thanks to you (and Peter Stewart) for the broader perspective on this.
As you both say, it seems more likely that "Gundreae" is simply a
mistranscribed Gersenda. I now see that my first question should
actually have been "Is there any evidence _aside_ from this single
mention that 'Gundreae' existed at all?"

[Peter Stewart]

There's no other evidence, just a 19th-century historian's arbitrary
emendation of a 17th-century historian's reading of a name in a single
charter (from Gandrea to Gundrea, though arguably an educated guess).

Apart from this unhelpful interference by Arbois de Jubainville with the
spelling of the name, the question raises an interesting issue about the
handling of anomalous sources. Since this must be a case-by-case
problem, it is not often discussed in general.

An interesting example occurs with dating the marriage of Stephen
Henry's son Thibaud IV to Mathilde of Sponheim. Historians usually opt
for 1126, despite a charter dated 1123 in which Mathilde is named by
Thibaud as his wife. The dating to 1126 comes from a contemporary Vita
of St Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian order, who is said to
have travelled from a meeting with Thibaud (presumably in Troyes) to
Regensburg, where his companions negotiated the marriage, then continued
on to Rome, where we know he had arrived by February 1126. Subsequently
Norbert is said to have been present when the bride did not show up for
the wedding, and he was asked by Thibaud to find out what was causing
the delay. However, the chronology in the Vita is plainly confused,
since according to its account Norbert went from Rome back to Germany
and reached Würzburg by Easter (11 April) 1126 after learning on the way
that he was to be made archbishop of Magdeburg. His election was
formalised in Speyer at the end of June. So in order to believe that he
joined Thibaud for the planned wedding between 11 April and late June
1126, we have to believe that he absented himself from imperial and
Church business for over a month and dashed 600 kms across to France for
a wedding, and moreover that as a prospective German archbishop he was
asked to undertake an errand for a French count as "Father" Norbert. Not
very plausible, but for many historians enough to set aside the evidence
of an otherwise unobjectionably dated charter.

Peter Stewart

[Hans Vogels]

Can something be said on the subject of the name combination Stephen Henry?
He himself was the grandfather of King Stephen of Blois so there you see a clear grandfather-grandson naming pattern. In the case of Stephen Henry himself, it strikes me as odd that he shows a double name. His father was count Thibout of Blois son of count Otto. He had an elder uncle named Stephen so that could account for the Stephen-part in Stephen Henry's name. His grandfather on his mothers'side of the family bore the name Herbert (of Maine). So were does the Henry-part come from?

Hans Vogels

[Peter Stewart]

On 21-Jan-20 5:29 PM, Hans Vogels wrote:
> Can something be said on the subject of the name combination Stephen Henry?
> He himself was the grandfather of King Stephen of Blois so there you see a clear grandfather-grandson naming pattern. In the case of Stephen Henry himself, it strikes me as odd that he shows a double name. His father was count Thibout of Blois son of count Otto. He had an elder uncle named Stephen so that could account for the Stephen-part in Stephen Henry's name. His grandfather on his mothers'side of the family bore the name Herbert (of Maine). So were does the Henry-part come from?

Double names were not especially uncommon - in this case, Henri I was
king of Franks when he was born and may have been his godfather. He
occurs in some charters under each of the names without reference to the
other, in some under either name with the other given as his "cognomen",
and in some under both names as "Stephanus Henricus".

Peter Stewart

[taf]

On Monday, January 20, 2020 at 10:29:12 PM UTC-8, Hans Vogels wrote:
> Can something be said on the subject of the name combination Stephen Henry?
> He himself was the grandfather of King Stephen of Blois so there you see a clear grandfather-grandson naming pattern. In the case of Stephen Henry himself, it strikes me as odd that he shows a double name. His father was count Thibout of Blois son of count Otto. He had an elder uncle named Stephen so that could account for the Stephen-part in Stephen Henry's name. His grandfather on his mothers'side of the family bore the name Herbert (of Maine). So were does the Henry-part come from?
>

Theobald, Stephen Henry's father, was a descendant of Henry the Fowler, but given that I don't find any usage of the name in the intervening generations of the descent, this may have been coincidental. The true inspiration may instead have been his feudal ties to Henry I of France and Henry III of Germany. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive: the name could have been intentionally chosen to reinforce the boy's distant genealogical ties to these royal Henrys through the descent of all three from the Fowler.

taf

[Peter Stewart]

According to Michel Bur in _La formation du comté de Champagne_ (1977),
his father Thibaud had managed temporarily to reconstitute the great
territorial dominion of his own father Eudes II, and named him Henri to
mark his agreement with King Henri I over this (p. 200: "S'il ne fait
que garder le patrimoine de son neveu, il n'en est pas moins parvenu à
reconstituer provisoirement l'unité de la grande principauté d'Eudes II.
En témoignage de sa bonne entente avec le roi, il a prénommé son fils
premier-né Henri.").

Bur goes on to note that it was not until much later, and as a signal of
his hereditary claim to Troyes, that this son called himself Etienne.
When he first appeared in charters, around 1059-65, his name was Henri,
Henricus, filius comitis Teobaldi ... When in 1074 he bore the comital
title comtal for the first time, his name changed: S. Stephani comitis
(ibid. note 27: "Ce n'est que beaucoup plus tard, et en signe de
prétention à l'héritage troyen, que ce fils se fera appeler Etienne.
Quand il apparaît pour la première fois dans les chartes, vers 1059-65,
il se prénomme Henri, Henricus, filius comitis Teobaldi ... Quand en
1074 il porte pour la première fois le titre comtal, son nom a changé:
S. Stephani comitis.")

As far as I know he occurs as Etienne first in a charter with his
parents for Saint-Faron de Meaux issued ca 1070, when he was titled
count as his father's associate ("comes ipse Theobaldus et comitissa
Adelais, necnon filius comitis Stephanus ... Signum comitis Teobaldi,
signum filii eius comitis Stephani").

Peter Stewart