On Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 6:34:54 PM UTC-8, Peter Stewart via wrote:
> On 27/01/2015 6:57 AM, The Hoorn via wrote:
>
> > A couple of sources, namely Charles Cawley's Medieval Lands website
> > and Douglas Richardson's Royal Ancestry (2:185), state that Isabel
> > Marshall, daughter of William Marshall and Isabel de Clare, was born
> > on 9 October 1200. She later married, on 9 October 1217, to Gilbert
> > de Clare.
> >
> > I looked at the source footnotes for each author but I could not
> > find where the information came from.
> >
> > Can anyone tell me which primary source was used to establish Isabel's
> > birth date?
>
> Perhaps Douglas Richardson is too busy to respond to this query immediately -
> but it's too soon to say that a professional historian is 'stumped' for an answer.
> This will be interesting when he gets round to it, as knowing the precise
> birthdate for a female ca 1200 is highly unusual. As far as I am aware there is
> no primary source for Isabel's birthdate, but I stand to be corrected on this.
>
As Mr. Richardson's starting material was Faris' Plantagenet Ancestry,
which gives the same date, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for him
to report to us a primary source. Richardson, in MCA, does place her
birth in Pembroke Castle, which I do not see in available snippets
from Faris, so perhaps he has a primary source for this addition.
Both Faris and Cawley probably got the birthdate from Paget (or ES),
and it seems pretty likely that it somehow derived from her marriage
date, either by the suggested extrapolation from an age, or simply by
a clerical error that directly transferred the date from one life
event to another. Either way, as has been pointed out by others in
this thread, both the coincidence with her marriage date and the
extreme dearth of records that would enable such a date to be
identified would seem to render it unlikely to be authentic.
That is not the case, however. Her Wikipedia entry does give this
date for her birth, and containing as it does all the knowledge of the
world, Wikipedia is never wrong. (It got the date from The
Peerage.com, a typical internet genealogical magpie collection,
although at least it cites sources, in this case Alison Weir,
Britain's Royal Family:The Complete Genealogy. Weir does give the
date, but doesn't cite her sources, so it can't be traced further -
again, Paget seems likely.)
taf