On 09-Sep-17 5:48 PM, Peter Stewart wrote: > 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. Kathleen Thompson has added a few red herrings to this in her article 'Being the ducal sister: the role of Adelaide of Aumale', *Normandy and its Neighbours, 900-1250: Essays for David Bates* (2011), where she wrote (p 69): 'The chronology seems scarcely credible: widowhood on 25 October 1053, followed by a second marriage to a husband who died at the latest ten months later and the birth of what can only have been a posthumous daughter, Judith. Our evidence is a thirteenth-century life of Waltheof, which tells us that Lambert of Lens was the father of Waltheof's wife, and some modern commentators have found it hard to accept; Morton and Munz [sic, recte Muntz] cannot countenance it. They firmly attribute Adelaide's second daughter to Enguerrand of Ponthieu, despite the fact that the child's name quite clearly links her to the Flandro-Boulonnais dynasty to which Lambert belonged, while a charter by Adelaide's other daughter, a younger Adelaide, specifically indicates that Judith was the daughter of the younger Adelaide's mother, but not her father.' The last two points are specious. First: the name Judith famously belonged to a countess of Flanders in the 9th century, daughter of Charles the Bald, but as far as we know it was not given to any female in that family except for a daughter of Balduin IV by his second wife, a Norman princess whose mother was named Judith. This name was not used in the comital family of Boulogne either, unless earl Waltheof's wife belonged to it as a daughter of Lambert of Lens. However, even so it should be noted that Adeliza of Aumale had an aunt named Adeliza who (in a charter of her husband) was also called Judith, a daughter of Balduin IV's mother-in-law. Consequently there is no clear link from onomastics to the 'Flandro-Boulonnais dynasty', but rather to the ducal family of Normandy. Secondly, the charter of Adeliza's namesake daughter does not specifically indicate that she and Judith were only half-sisters. I gave a link to this charter (above), where it can be seen that the younger Adeliza is described both as 'Addelidis comitissa supradicti Engerranni et supradicte Addelidis filia' and as 'cometissa Addelidis filia supradicte cometisse', while Judith is described as 'Julita cometissa domine supradicte filia'. If naming her only as her mother's daughter specifically precludes her having been a full-sister, then the younger Adeliza must have been conflicted about her own parentage in order to describe herself in the same way. The corresponding charter of their maternal half-brother Stephen (http://www.cn-telma.fr/originaux/charte4557/) also describes Judith as 'Julita cometissa filia domine supradicte', but does not mention the younger Adeliza at all. Presumably these charters were issued at the request of the chapter of Saint-Martin d'Auchy in order to have a bet each way with their foundation confirmed both by Enguerrand's daughter Adeliza and by her half-brother Stephen who did not share her hereditary claim. Judith was incidental to this as a middle child, whether her father was Enguerrand or Lambert. It is notable that in the list of donations to the church there is no mention of any by Lambert, who if he had been Adeliza's second husband would have been count of Aumale by her right: his resulting patronage of Saint-Martin d'Auchy, however brief, would most likely have been signalled in this document. Thompson went on to state that 'The whole problem begins to recede, however, when we take into account the proceedings of the Council of Reims in 1049'. This is very dubious in my view: Enguerrand of Ponthieu and Eustace II of Boulogne were both excommunicated by Pope Leo IX for consanguineous marriages ('Excommunicavit etiam comites Angilra[mm]i, et Eustachium propter incestum'). At the same time William of Normandy was forbidden to marry Matilda of Flanders. We know what came of that - their marriage went ahead. We do not know if either Enguerrand or Eustace repudiated their illicit unions, or for that matter whether Adeliza of Normandy was already married to Enguerrand at the time in order to be the irregular wife in question. Thompson reported (p 71) that Eustace's fist wife, the English princess Goda, 'bore her new husband no surviving male heir, and by the late 1040s she must have been nearing forty years of age. It was now perhaps convenient to dissolve the marriage. The existence of a common ancestor in King Alfred of England allowed Eustace and Goda to part, and the researches of Dr Christopher Lewis suggest that from 1051 Countess Goda lived in her brother’s kingdom, probably at Lambeth, close to his chosen residence of Westminster'. The reference given for this (ibid note 42) is not very illuminating: 'C. P. Lewis, personal communication, based on Goda's holdings in Domesday Book, in particular at Lambeth, DB, I, fol. 34. Using material from Rochester Cathedral priory's fourteenth century Registrum Temporalium, Dr Lewis has deduced that Goda's property at Lambeth was subsequently given to Rochester. Rochester later asserted that it had the treasures of the Countess Goda in its possession, and it also had an interest in what it referred to as 'Countess Goda's former soke' in London, probably a survival of the nineteen burgesses recorded under Lambeth in Domesday.' It is not clear from this what basis Dr Lewis has for identifying the Goda in Domesday book and the 'Countess Goda' in the much later Rochester record with the countess of Boulogne. If she was nearing 40 in the late 1040s she must have been nearing 80 at the time of the Domesday survey, and you might expect that we would hear something besides this about a daughter of Ætheldred II who lived for at least 20 years under the reign of William the Conqueror. By the way, Timothy Bolton in 'Was the family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof a lost line of the ancestors of the Danish royal family?', *Nottingham Medieval Studies* 51 (2007) thought that the extant text of 'Vita Waldevi comitis' naming Lambert as Judith's father is a 13th-century revision of a work perhaps written in the 12th century (p.49): 'The vita is closely based, in part, on accounts written in the 1120s (those of Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester), and so must post-date these accounts. An imprecise terminus ad quem can only be established by the observation that in 1219 this vita was old enough to warrant revisions in prose and verse by William of Ramsey.' There is of course no way to know when the detail about Lambert was included. Peter Stewart