The confident assertion that Guy I of Ponthieu had a first wife named
Ada or Adela who died (on 5 March) before 1066 was all over the internet
before it was polluted by Medieval Lands.
This error comes from Ernest Prarond in *Les Comtes de Ponthieu: Gui
Ier, 1053-1100* (1900), p. 35, where he thought that Guy had been a
widower in 1066 when he restored the estate of Robecourt, which had been
expropriated by countess Adela, to the church of Saint-Martin at
Picquigny for the remission of her sins.
Prarond was paraphrasing from a history of the counts of Ponthieu
written in the 17th century by Du Cange, where there is no statement
about whether Adela was living or dead at the time of Guy's 1066
charter. Du Cange had seen this in the Chambre des comptes in Paris, but
it has been lost since (no extant 11th century documents remain in the
archives from there).
Saint-Martin church had been the chapel of Picquigny castle until it was
established as a collegiate church in 1066. One of the properties
donated at this time was a quarter of Robecourt ("quartam partem villae
Roberti curtis"). Du Cange's account suggests that Guy gave back the
whole rather than a part of the estate. If Robecourt had been taken from
the chapel of Saint-Martin some time before Guy restored it to the new
collegiate church in 1066, and he had held it in the interval by right
of his wife, he would presumably have included himself in the expiation
along with her, assuming she was the culprit countess whose wrongdoing
was to be redressed. In any case, since Saint-Martin was endowed by its
founders with a quarter of Robecourt in 1066, the Adela in question may
have been his living wife who had objected to sharing her own part of
the estate with the canons and so briefly caused the donated quarter to
be withheld until Guy intervened to give it back, apparently along with
the remainder. If the other three quarters had been part of his wife's
dowry, this perhaps indicates that she belonged to the seigneurial
family of Picquigny. But that is just speculation.
According to the (also now lost) obituary of Saint-Pierre priory at
Abbeville, where Guy I who died on 13 October 1100 was buried, his wife
Adela died before him on a 5 March and was buried at Saint-Josse. There
is no implication in the independent reporting of this in the 17th
century by Du Cange and Jacques Sanson (Père Ignace-Joseph de
Jésus-Maria) that it refers to a namesake first wife who had died long
before rather than to Ada aka Adela, evidently his only wife, the mother
of his three recorded children, whom we know from Guy's charters was
dead by 1100.
Peter Stewart