On 06-Sep-17 11:14 PM, Paulo Canedo wrote: > Em quarta-feira, 6 de setembro de 2017 13:06:19 UTC+1, Peter Stewart escreveu: >> On 06-Sep-17 7:22 PM, Paulo Canedo wrote: >>> Judith's paternity is not controversial. The Life of Walteof affirms it was Lambert. See http://sbaldw.home.mindspring.com/hproject/prov/rober000.htm. >> This is the earliest source stating that Lambert was Judith's father - >> it is a 13th-century work following Orderic and containing errors. >> >> The controversy is real, based on the unreliability of the source and >> its derivatives and the problem that Judith was not Lambert's heiress. >> >> Peter Stewart > There is a very good reason to explain Judith not being Lambert's heiress. When Lambert died Judith was a baby. So babies forfeited hereditary rights? Judith may have been born posthumously for all we know, but if she was Lambert's child she was the only one. The assumption that her father's brother would have the temerity to usurp the inheritance of a niece of William of Normandy is just a speculative scenario, not a 'very good reason' to explain this. Other heirs and heiresses who were displaced as children, and their own subsequent offspring, did not always accept dispossession quietly: it is far from highly credible to me that Judith and then her daughters (both of them married to powerful men) would have done this without so much as a peep over the countship of Lens. Peter Stewart

On 07-Sep-17 8:54 AM, Peter Stewart wrote: > > On 06-Sep-17 11:14 PM, Paulo Canedo wrote: >> Em quarta-feira, 6 de setembro de 2017 13:06:19 UTC+1, Peter Stewart  >> escreveu: >>> On 06-Sep-17 7:22 PM, Paulo Canedo wrote: >>>> Judith's paternity is not controversial. The Life of Walteof >>>> affirms it was Lambert. See >>>> http://sbaldw.home.mindspring.com/hproject/prov/rober000.htm. >>> This is the earliest source stating that Lambert was Judith's father - >>> it is a 13th-century work following Orderic and containing errors. >>> >>> The controversy is real, based on the unreliability of the source and >>> its derivatives and the problem that Judith was not Lambert's heiress. >>> >>> Peter Stewart >> There is a very good reason to explain Judith not being Lambert's >> heiress. When Lambert died Judith was a baby. > > So babies forfeited hereditary rights? Judith may have been born > posthumously for all we know, but if she was Lambert's child she was > the only one. The assumption that her father's brother would have the > temerity to usurp the inheritance of a niece of William of Normandy is > just a speculative scenario, not a 'very good reason' to explain this. > Other heirs and heiresses who were displaced as children, and their > own subsequent offspring, did not always accept dispossession quietly: > it is far from highly credible to me that Judith and then her > daughters (both of them married to powerful men) would have done this > without so much as a peep over the countship of Lens. If Judith was Lambert's child she was almost certainly born posthumously: her mother was first married to Enguerrand of Ponthieu, who was killed on 25 October 1053 fighting against one brother-in-law (William of Normandy) in support of another (William's namesake uncle, count of Arques). Lambert was killed in late July or early August 1054, just nine months or a very little more later. These datings are not in any doubt at all, and the suggestion that Adeliza was divorced from Enguerrand in order to have married Lambert before 1053 is a non-starter - as Enguerrand of Ponthieu's widow she was countess of Aumale, that was inherited by Enguerrand from his mother. This is set out in charters of two of her children, in one of which she is described as having been young when Enguerrand died;  she evidently did not remarry immediately, since at that time she turned for protection of the collegiate church of Saint-Martin d'Auchy that she had founded to the archbishop of Rouen ('Engerranno marito suo mortuo ... et cum esset adhuc in juvenili etate, fecit eam dedicare dumnum Marilium Rotomagensem archiepiscopum qui etiam excommunicavit omnes qui aliquid detraherent vel aliquod dampnum eidem ecclesie inferrent', see http://www.cn-telma.fr/originaux/charte4551/.) Maurilius did not become archbishop until 1055, so if Adeliza was married to Lambert and widowed a second time before she had the church dedicated and defended with his archiepiscopal fulminations it is strange that this was not mentioned. In both of her children's charters her daughter Judith is mentioned as a donor to Saint-Martin d'Auchy, but there is no indication of who her father was. In any case, Adeliza could not have had a child by Lambert before his own death in the summer of 1054 unless she had married him within days of her first husband's death in October 1053. This is extremely unlikely, as then it would be not have been certain whose child it was. And if Judith was not conceived until some months after Enguerrand's death, then it could not have been known at the time of Lambert's death whether his widow was carrying a boy or a girl. I think it highly unlikely that Lambert's brother would have disinherited an unborn child was would be the nephew or niece of William. It is possible that some arrangement was made so that rights to Lens belonged to Eustace of Boulogne rather than to his brother's widow and her unborn child, but given the geographic position of Aumale in relation to Normandy it is hard to see what interest William would have had in alienating control from his close family. Given these circumstances, I think it would need a better source than an otherwise unreliable 13th century hagiography of Judith's husband to conclude that she was definitely Lambert's daughter. By the way, Heather Tanner has made a peculiar mistake in her *Families, Friends and Allies: Boulogne and Politics in Northern France and England, c. 879-1160* (2004) - she thinks there were two Lamberts of Lens, father and son. According to her Eustace I's brother Lambert I died in 1047 and the husband of Adeliza of Normandy was his son Lambert II who died in 1054. This is ill-founded. Tanner relied on her misinterpretation of a charter dated 13 November 1047 in which Lambert is twice named as 'memoratus comes', which she took to mean he was deceased at the time. However, she had not understood the context, as 'memoratus comes' here means only 'the said count': the first of these mentions is when the residents of Harnes (near Lens) are to owe Lambert and his successors 50 solidi at Easter in every third year ('Sed semper post tercium annum homines de ipsa uilla Harnes tam ipsi quam posteri eorum soluent quinquaginta solidos in pascha Domini memorato comiti Lantberto et successoribus suis'); and the second is his own subscription ('S. Lantberti comitis memorati'). Clearly he was not dead at the time. (This charter was once thought a forgery, as a falsified version had been printed from a copy in Ghent, until the original charter was discovered in Paris and published for the first time in 1950.) Peter Stewart

On 09-Sep-17 5:48 PM, Peter Stewart wrote: > > By the way, Heather Tanner has made a peculiar mistake in her > *Families, Friends and Allies: Boulogne and Politics in Northern > France and England, c. 879-1160* (2004) - she thinks there were two > Lamberts of Lens, father and son. According to her Eustace I's brother > Lambert I died in 1047 Apologies again, my brain has shut for the day - I should have written 'Eustace II's brother ...' Peter Stewart