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Hugh 'le Gros' d'Avranches, 1st Earl of Chester (1)
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Leo
Feb 1, 2013, 7:05:46 PM2/1/13
to GEN-MED...@rootsweb.com
In his days Hugh d'Avranches was an important man, after all he was a nephew of William the Conqueror. In genealogy he seems to be unimportant, after all his son, according to the Complete Peerage, died without legitimate issue. However no information is given about any illegitimate ones.
Thanks to John Ravilious this should change.
Hugh 'le Gros' d'Avranches was the son of Richard Le Goz, vicomte d'Avranches, and Emma de Conteville half-sister of William the Conqueror. He is genearlly supposed to have fought at the Battle of Hastings, when, at the utmost, he would have been but 19 years old. In 1071 his uncle William the Conquieror made him count palatine of Chester 'to hold as freely by the Sword as the king himself held the kingdom of England by the Crown.'
He succeeded his father, who was living as late as 1082, as vicomte d'Avranches in Normandy. In 1096 in the rebellion against William II Rufus, he stood loyally by his sovereign. However his career was chiefly notorious for gluttony, prodigality and profligacy.
Hugh, also nicknamed 'Hugh the Wolf', married Ermentrude de Clermont, daughter of Hugues de Clermont dit de Mouchy and Marguerite de Montdidier. Their son and heir Richard died without legitimate issue. Hugh also fathered three illegitimate children Othuer, Robert and Geva, of whom Othuer and Geva had progeny.
Having founded the Abbeys of St. Sever in Normandy and St. Werburg at Chester, besides largely endowing that of Whitby, he became a monk on 23 July 1101 and died 27 July 1101 at St. Werburg's.
Can anyone add to these biographical details?
With many thanks
Leo van de Pas
Canberra, Australia
Thanks to John Ravilious this should change.
Hugh 'le Gros' d'Avranches was the son of Richard Le Goz, vicomte d'Avranches, and Emma de Conteville half-sister of William the Conqueror. He is genearlly supposed to have fought at the Battle of Hastings, when, at the utmost, he would have been but 19 years old. In 1071 his uncle William the Conquieror made him count palatine of Chester 'to hold as freely by the Sword as the king himself held the kingdom of England by the Crown.'
He succeeded his father, who was living as late as 1082, as vicomte d'Avranches in Normandy. In 1096 in the rebellion against William II Rufus, he stood loyally by his sovereign. However his career was chiefly notorious for gluttony, prodigality and profligacy.
Hugh, also nicknamed 'Hugh the Wolf', married Ermentrude de Clermont, daughter of Hugues de Clermont dit de Mouchy and Marguerite de Montdidier. Their son and heir Richard died without legitimate issue. Hugh also fathered three illegitimate children Othuer, Robert and Geva, of whom Othuer and Geva had progeny.
Having founded the Abbeys of St. Sever in Normandy and St. Werburg at Chester, besides largely endowing that of Whitby, he became a monk on 23 July 1101 and died 27 July 1101 at St. Werburg's.
Can anyone add to these biographical details?
With many thanks
Leo van de Pas
Canberra, Australia
Robert Bank
Feb 2, 2013, 5:56:18 AM2/2/13
to Leo, MEDIEVAL ENQUIRIES
>From Oxford Dictionary of National Biography : (the references at the end
may be particularly useful)
Avranches, Hugh d', first earl of Chester (d. 1101), magnate and founder of
Chester Abbey, was the son of Richard Goz, vicomte d'Avranches and seigneur
de St Sever, and an unknown mother formerly identified on the basis of
unsatisfactory evidence as Emma, supposedly a half-sister of William the
Conqueror. Hugh's paternal family were aristocratic landowners of viking
descent in the Cotentin. In 1066 Hugh was still a young man and his father
vicomte d'Avranches: he was not the ‘Viscount Hugh’ of the Ship List and is
unlikely to have fought at Hastings. Soon afterwards, however, he crossed to
England in the service of King William. His first military command was
Tutbury Castle in still unpacified Mercia; but probably in 1070 the king
instead gave him the much more important castle in the regional capital of
Chester and made him an earl. It was a significant promotion, shared, among
the Conqueror's other regional commanders in Mercia, only by Roger de
Montgomery, an older man close to the king.
Along with Chester and the earldom came the beginnings of a huge landed
estate in England. The honour of Chester was accumulated gradually over some
twenty years. From the first it was essentially northern, with scattered and
not especially valuable outliers over much of the midlands and south.
Cheshire was the heart of it, not for its value—a third or less of the
total—but for the importance of Chester itself and the fact that the earl
received every manor in the shire except the bishop's. Beyond Cheshire the
honour came to include a large share of Earl Harold's northern manors and a
smaller but still significant portion of those in the south, fragments of
several other aristocratic estates, and the scattered holdings of a small
number of king's thegns. Together they did not amount to a palatine earldom,
a concept unknown in Norman England, but they did make Earl Hugh one of the
most powerful men there. The earl revelled in his wealth and status,
indulging himself to excess in hunting, war, women, mountains of food,
reckless expense, and lavish generosity to the knights and clerks of his
household. He fathered many bastards, grew grotesquely fat, and fought the
Welsh with a ferocity which embedded him in their memory as Hugh the Wolf.
At the same time he was at least conventionally mindful of the perils to his
immortal soul, and steadfastly and conspicuously loyal to successive kings.
Earl Hugh probably spent most of the 1070s in England, though he was with
William I at Bayeux and Caen in 1077 and Rouen in 1080. He was beginning to
find his feet politically, active, for instance, in trying to patch up the
quarrel between the king and Robert Curthose in 1080. Some thought that he
was one of those approached in 1082 to back Bishop Odo's wild scheme to
become pope, but if so, and if there really was any such plot, he kept well
out of it. By 1086, and probably long before, he had arranged his estates in
a clear and distinctive pattern, demonstrating a calculating liberality
towards his men. He gave all the southern manors to his knights and kept
some fifteen large northern and midland manors in demesne, not all in
Cheshire but spaced around the honour, so that it was possible to travel in
stages from Macclesfield to Leek, Repton, and Barrow (in Leicestershire),
and then either north to the Lincolnshire estates or south to Coventry and
Chipping Campden. All were market towns and the centres of large and
productive manors.
Because Earl Hugh did not control the family's Norman honour until his
father died, there was no existing baronage awaiting rewards in England.
Instead he attracted a following of knights from various parts of Normandy,
probably mostly young men of his own generation, and led by his older cousin
Robert de Tilleul. A dozen or so of them became the core of his honorial
baronage, each with a stake—often a compact fief—in Cheshire, backed up by
other manors, usually more valuable, elsewhere in the country. Five men were
prominent: Robert de Tilleul of Rhuddlan, Robert fitz Hugh of Malpas,
William Malbanc of Nantwich, William fitz Nigel of Halton, and Hugh fitz
Norman of Mold. A good two dozen lesser knightly tenants were endowed either
in or beyond Cheshire, but not both. In many ways Earl Hugh's dispositions
created a structure for the earldom of Chester which survived until it fell
into royal hands in the thirteenth century.
Chester was also the base for the conquest of north Wales, in which Earl
Hugh was initially an equal partner with Robert of Rhuddlan. In terms of
territorial possession Robert took the greater part. The earl's stake in
their new castle and borough at Rhuddlan was smaller and by 1086 he had
taken into his own hands only Bistre and Iâl along the English border; but
Robert's nascent principality in Gwynedd was founded on the successes of
Earl Hugh's armies. Co-operating closely with the Normans of Shropshire, the
earl had raided the distant Llŷn peninsula perhaps as early as the
mid-1070s, and in 1081 he first laid a successful trap for one of the north
Welsh princes, Gruffudd ap Cynan, and then invaded Gwynedd in force.
>From the mid-1080s the earl's responsibilities elsewhere were also growing.
He succeeded his father some time after 1082, and may then have married. His
only legitimate son, Richard, was probably born in the earlier 1090s,
whereas one of the bastards from an earlier liaison, Robert, was sent to the
monastery of St Evroult as a child oblate in or before 1081 and was old
enough (just) in 1100 to be made abbot of Bury St Edmunds. Hugh took his
wife from the Beauvaisis, perhaps to further Norman ambitions beyond the
eastern frontier; she was Ermentrude, daughter of Hugh de Clermont.
By 1087 Earl Hugh was poised to become a major player in Anglo-Norman
politics. Among many other connections his sisters had married Richer de
l'Aigle and William, count of Eu, and his tenants in England included Roger
(I) Bigod, William de Percy, and sheriffs Robert (I) d'Oilly and Edward of
Salisbury. His position, however, was complicated by one of William II's
earliest acts, which was to place the earl's honour in the Cotentin under
the authority of his younger brother, the future Henry I. Earl Hugh was
often in Henry's company but maintained an overriding loyalty to the king,
acting as a brake on both when their disagreements threatened to become
overheated. In 1091, for example, he detached himself from Henry when open
war between the brothers looked likely, and thus helped to prevent its
happening; and later he was instrumental in Henry's return to favour. The
earl was also frequently at William II's side, at his courts, campaigning
with him against the Scots in 1091 and on the Norman frontier in 1097–8,
unblinkingly loyal in the major baronial rebellions of 1088 and 1095.
Characteristically he used the latter occasion to settle a score, insisting
that William, count of Eu, who had ill-used his wife, Hugh's sister, receive
the full punishment for treason: blinding and castration.
The 1090s saw Earl Hugh's focus of activities shift back to the honour of
Chester. Robert of Rhuddlan's death at Welsh hands in 1093 left him with
prime responsibility for north Wales at the moment when a serious rebellion
was breaking out. He did not regain the initiative until 1098, when he and
Hugh de Montgomery, earl of Shrewsbury, led a determined assault on
Anglesey. Despite Hugh of Shrewsbury's death, Hugh of Chester came away with
booty and prisoners, and in the following year was able to install Gruffudd
ap Cynan as client ruler of the island.
The mid-1090s also saw the culmination of Earl Hugh's solemn and magnificent
gesture of a monastic foundation in England. He had been a patron in a small
way of St Evroult and St Sever, but seems also to have begun laying plans
for his own house at an early date, perhaps after 1075 when his minster
church of St Werburgh was challenged in Chester by the relocation into the
city's other major church, St John's, of the cathedral seat of the bishop of
Lichfield. A crucial stage in the refoundation of St Werburgh's as a
Benedictine monastery came in 1092, when Earl Hugh enticed to Chester no
less a person than Abbot Anselm of Bec, who brought with him the monks who
were to form the basis of the new monastic chapter. A lavish building
programme may already have been under way, and the earl shortly endowed
Chester Abbey with extensive possessions and encouraged a great many of his
barons to give something too. For all his enduring interests in the
Cotentin, Earl Hugh owed his significance to the earldom and honour of
Chester, and with the new abbey he struck a deep root in the city. Hugh fell
ill, probably in the autumn of 1100 or the following winter; in his last
days he took monastic vows at Chester and died in the abbey on 27 July 1101.
He was buried in the abbey churchyard, but his body was later moved by his
nephew Earl Ranulph I to the chapter-house. Earl Hugh was succeeded by his
son Richard, who died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120.
C. P. Lewis
Sources
C. P. Lewis, ‘The formation of the honor of Chester, 1066–1100’, Journal of
the Chester Archaeological Society, 71 (1991), 37–68 [G. Barraclough issue,
The earldom of Chester and its charters, ed. A. T. Thacker] • C. P. Lewis,
‘Gruffudd ap Cynan and the Normans’, Gruffudd ap Cynan: a collaborative
biography, ed. K. L. Maund (1996), 61–77 • Ordericus Vitalis, Eccl. hist. •
A. Farley, ed., Domesday Book, 2 vols. (1783) • D. Bates, William the
Conqueror (1989) • F. Barlow, William Rufus (1983) • L. Musset, ‘Les
origines et le patrimoine de l'abbaye de Saint-Sever’, La Normandie
bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le conquérant, ed. J. Daoust (1969),
357–67 • C. P. Lewis, ‘The early earls of Norman England’, Anglo-Norman
Studies, 13 (1990), 207–23 • G. Barraclough, ed., The charters of the
Anglo-Norman earls of Chester, c.1071–1237, Lancashire and Cheshire RS, 126
(1988), 23 [no. 13]
may be particularly useful)
Avranches, Hugh d', first earl of Chester (d. 1101), magnate and founder of
Chester Abbey, was the son of Richard Goz, vicomte d'Avranches and seigneur
de St Sever, and an unknown mother formerly identified on the basis of
unsatisfactory evidence as Emma, supposedly a half-sister of William the
Conqueror. Hugh's paternal family were aristocratic landowners of viking
descent in the Cotentin. In 1066 Hugh was still a young man and his father
vicomte d'Avranches: he was not the ‘Viscount Hugh’ of the Ship List and is
unlikely to have fought at Hastings. Soon afterwards, however, he crossed to
England in the service of King William. His first military command was
Tutbury Castle in still unpacified Mercia; but probably in 1070 the king
instead gave him the much more important castle in the regional capital of
Chester and made him an earl. It was a significant promotion, shared, among
the Conqueror's other regional commanders in Mercia, only by Roger de
Montgomery, an older man close to the king.
Along with Chester and the earldom came the beginnings of a huge landed
estate in England. The honour of Chester was accumulated gradually over some
twenty years. From the first it was essentially northern, with scattered and
not especially valuable outliers over much of the midlands and south.
Cheshire was the heart of it, not for its value—a third or less of the
total—but for the importance of Chester itself and the fact that the earl
received every manor in the shire except the bishop's. Beyond Cheshire the
honour came to include a large share of Earl Harold's northern manors and a
smaller but still significant portion of those in the south, fragments of
several other aristocratic estates, and the scattered holdings of a small
number of king's thegns. Together they did not amount to a palatine earldom,
a concept unknown in Norman England, but they did make Earl Hugh one of the
most powerful men there. The earl revelled in his wealth and status,
indulging himself to excess in hunting, war, women, mountains of food,
reckless expense, and lavish generosity to the knights and clerks of his
household. He fathered many bastards, grew grotesquely fat, and fought the
Welsh with a ferocity which embedded him in their memory as Hugh the Wolf.
At the same time he was at least conventionally mindful of the perils to his
immortal soul, and steadfastly and conspicuously loyal to successive kings.
Earl Hugh probably spent most of the 1070s in England, though he was with
William I at Bayeux and Caen in 1077 and Rouen in 1080. He was beginning to
find his feet politically, active, for instance, in trying to patch up the
quarrel between the king and Robert Curthose in 1080. Some thought that he
was one of those approached in 1082 to back Bishop Odo's wild scheme to
become pope, but if so, and if there really was any such plot, he kept well
out of it. By 1086, and probably long before, he had arranged his estates in
a clear and distinctive pattern, demonstrating a calculating liberality
towards his men. He gave all the southern manors to his knights and kept
some fifteen large northern and midland manors in demesne, not all in
Cheshire but spaced around the honour, so that it was possible to travel in
stages from Macclesfield to Leek, Repton, and Barrow (in Leicestershire),
and then either north to the Lincolnshire estates or south to Coventry and
Chipping Campden. All were market towns and the centres of large and
productive manors.
Because Earl Hugh did not control the family's Norman honour until his
father died, there was no existing baronage awaiting rewards in England.
Instead he attracted a following of knights from various parts of Normandy,
probably mostly young men of his own generation, and led by his older cousin
Robert de Tilleul. A dozen or so of them became the core of his honorial
baronage, each with a stake—often a compact fief—in Cheshire, backed up by
other manors, usually more valuable, elsewhere in the country. Five men were
prominent: Robert de Tilleul of Rhuddlan, Robert fitz Hugh of Malpas,
William Malbanc of Nantwich, William fitz Nigel of Halton, and Hugh fitz
Norman of Mold. A good two dozen lesser knightly tenants were endowed either
in or beyond Cheshire, but not both. In many ways Earl Hugh's dispositions
created a structure for the earldom of Chester which survived until it fell
into royal hands in the thirteenth century.
Chester was also the base for the conquest of north Wales, in which Earl
Hugh was initially an equal partner with Robert of Rhuddlan. In terms of
territorial possession Robert took the greater part. The earl's stake in
their new castle and borough at Rhuddlan was smaller and by 1086 he had
taken into his own hands only Bistre and Iâl along the English border; but
Robert's nascent principality in Gwynedd was founded on the successes of
Earl Hugh's armies. Co-operating closely with the Normans of Shropshire, the
earl had raided the distant Llŷn peninsula perhaps as early as the
mid-1070s, and in 1081 he first laid a successful trap for one of the north
Welsh princes, Gruffudd ap Cynan, and then invaded Gwynedd in force.
>From the mid-1080s the earl's responsibilities elsewhere were also growing.
He succeeded his father some time after 1082, and may then have married. His
only legitimate son, Richard, was probably born in the earlier 1090s,
whereas one of the bastards from an earlier liaison, Robert, was sent to the
monastery of St Evroult as a child oblate in or before 1081 and was old
enough (just) in 1100 to be made abbot of Bury St Edmunds. Hugh took his
wife from the Beauvaisis, perhaps to further Norman ambitions beyond the
eastern frontier; she was Ermentrude, daughter of Hugh de Clermont.
By 1087 Earl Hugh was poised to become a major player in Anglo-Norman
politics. Among many other connections his sisters had married Richer de
l'Aigle and William, count of Eu, and his tenants in England included Roger
(I) Bigod, William de Percy, and sheriffs Robert (I) d'Oilly and Edward of
Salisbury. His position, however, was complicated by one of William II's
earliest acts, which was to place the earl's honour in the Cotentin under
the authority of his younger brother, the future Henry I. Earl Hugh was
often in Henry's company but maintained an overriding loyalty to the king,
acting as a brake on both when their disagreements threatened to become
overheated. In 1091, for example, he detached himself from Henry when open
war between the brothers looked likely, and thus helped to prevent its
happening; and later he was instrumental in Henry's return to favour. The
earl was also frequently at William II's side, at his courts, campaigning
with him against the Scots in 1091 and on the Norman frontier in 1097–8,
unblinkingly loyal in the major baronial rebellions of 1088 and 1095.
Characteristically he used the latter occasion to settle a score, insisting
that William, count of Eu, who had ill-used his wife, Hugh's sister, receive
the full punishment for treason: blinding and castration.
The 1090s saw Earl Hugh's focus of activities shift back to the honour of
Chester. Robert of Rhuddlan's death at Welsh hands in 1093 left him with
prime responsibility for north Wales at the moment when a serious rebellion
was breaking out. He did not regain the initiative until 1098, when he and
Hugh de Montgomery, earl of Shrewsbury, led a determined assault on
Anglesey. Despite Hugh of Shrewsbury's death, Hugh of Chester came away with
booty and prisoners, and in the following year was able to install Gruffudd
ap Cynan as client ruler of the island.
The mid-1090s also saw the culmination of Earl Hugh's solemn and magnificent
gesture of a monastic foundation in England. He had been a patron in a small
way of St Evroult and St Sever, but seems also to have begun laying plans
for his own house at an early date, perhaps after 1075 when his minster
church of St Werburgh was challenged in Chester by the relocation into the
city's other major church, St John's, of the cathedral seat of the bishop of
Lichfield. A crucial stage in the refoundation of St Werburgh's as a
Benedictine monastery came in 1092, when Earl Hugh enticed to Chester no
less a person than Abbot Anselm of Bec, who brought with him the monks who
were to form the basis of the new monastic chapter. A lavish building
programme may already have been under way, and the earl shortly endowed
Chester Abbey with extensive possessions and encouraged a great many of his
barons to give something too. For all his enduring interests in the
Cotentin, Earl Hugh owed his significance to the earldom and honour of
Chester, and with the new abbey he struck a deep root in the city. Hugh fell
ill, probably in the autumn of 1100 or the following winter; in his last
days he took monastic vows at Chester and died in the abbey on 27 July 1101.
He was buried in the abbey churchyard, but his body was later moved by his
nephew Earl Ranulph I to the chapter-house. Earl Hugh was succeeded by his
son Richard, who died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120.
C. P. Lewis
Sources
C. P. Lewis, ‘The formation of the honor of Chester, 1066–1100’, Journal of
the Chester Archaeological Society, 71 (1991), 37–68 [G. Barraclough issue,
The earldom of Chester and its charters, ed. A. T. Thacker] • C. P. Lewis,
‘Gruffudd ap Cynan and the Normans’, Gruffudd ap Cynan: a collaborative
biography, ed. K. L. Maund (1996), 61–77 • Ordericus Vitalis, Eccl. hist. •
A. Farley, ed., Domesday Book, 2 vols. (1783) • D. Bates, William the
Conqueror (1989) • F. Barlow, William Rufus (1983) • L. Musset, ‘Les
origines et le patrimoine de l'abbaye de Saint-Sever’, La Normandie
bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le conquérant, ed. J. Daoust (1969),
357–67 • C. P. Lewis, ‘The early earls of Norman England’, Anglo-Norman
Studies, 13 (1990), 207–23 • G. Barraclough, ed., The charters of the
Anglo-Norman earls of Chester, c.1071–1237, Lancashire and Cheshire RS, 126
(1988), 23 [no. 13]
Renia
Feb 2, 2013, 7:13:39 AM2/2/13
to
HUGO COMES DE CESTRIE
Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester from 1081r, d.1101
By his wife Ermengarde, daugther of Hugh count of Clermont,
he left issue his son Richard.
Father of several known bastards including
Robert abbot of Bury and
Otuer (sic) fitz Count
Geva, wife of Geoffrey Ridel, was probably another of them.
From Keats-Rohan, Domesday Descendants:
RICARDUS COMES DE CESTRIE
Son of Earl hugh of Chester and Ermentrude de Clermont.
Succeeded as a minor in 1101.
In 1115 married Matilda sister of Count Theobald of Blois
Childless by 1120
Died in White Ship disaster 25 November 1120
OTUEL FILIUS COMITIS
Natural son of Earl Hugh of Chester,
c. 1116 he married Margaret daughter of Eudo Dapifer, widow of William
de Mandeville.
Died in White Ship disaster of 25 Nov 1120
Left a son William.
WILLELM FILIUS OTUEL
Son of Otuel (sic) and Margaret widow of William I de Mandeville. Still
alive in 1157.
GEVA RIDEL
Q Daughter of Hugh d'Avranches, earl of Chester, through whonm she
acquired the lands of Robert de Bucy, possibly a relative of her mother,
who is unlikely to have been Hugh's countess, Ermengarde. Wife of
Geoffrey I Ridel, who died in the White Ship disaster of 25 November
1120. About 1145 she founded the priory of Canwell. UNQ Suggestion her
mother was English.
Matt A
Feb 2, 2013, 2:13:04 PM2/2/13
to Leo, MEDIEVAL ENQUIRIES
[John P. Ravilious] "Hugh is called a 'nepos' of "William the Great by [his]
sister" ['Gulielmi magni ex sorore'] in an extract from John Leland's
De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea (III:6), which is taken up in the
account for St. Wereburgh's in Monasticon Anglicanum (II:384, Num.
I]... [from Domesday People] 'The likelihood that she was nonetheless a half-sister of William I and sister of Robert of Mortain, is increased by the terms of a letter of Bishop Helimand of Le Mans, referring to a consanguineous marriage projected for the daughter of William of Mortain, discussed in Keats-Rohan, Medieval Prosopography 14.1 (1992), 38-40; for Hugh, ibid., 23-30.' [DP 258]"
To which Peter Stewart replied "The likelihood of this seems vanishingly slight to me.
If true there would have been a consanguineous marriage accomplished,
not just projected - Hugh's son Richard and his wife Mathilde (who
drowned with him in the White Ship disaster) would have been second
cousins. She was a granddaughter of William the Conqueror through her
mother - cf Orderic ("Ricardus ... Mathildem filiam Stephani
Blesensium comitis ex Hadala sorore Henrici regis uxorem duxit") and
Robert de Torigni ("Filia autem Adele, filie Willelmi regis
Anglorum ... nupsit Ricardo comiti Cestrensi, filio Hugonis comitis")."
Perhaps there is an alternate way to explain the consanguinous marriage of the daughter of William of Mortain?
-Matt Ahlgren
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