On 9/05/2017 5:22 PM, Peter Stewart wrote: <snip> > > If Robert had a niece then he would have usurped her rights to her > father's inheritance in Calabria. As the son of a disgraced man, who > had gone from Normandy to Italy long before, he would hardly have > presented himself in England much less with a niece in tow who was > supposed to be his dead brother's heiress despite his own earlier > conduct. > > And as I mentioned before, there is no evidence whatsoever that his > brother William ever married. As a grandson of Robert Guiscard, we > would certainly expect to find some record of it if he survived long > enough to have offspring. We would also expect to find some trace of > Pernel's very grand relatives in Italy. If Pernel had been a daughter of the Calabrian William, she must have been somewhat older than the known chronology indicates. She first occurs as wife of Robert son of the earl of Leicester in a charter dated by Round to ca 1155/59, and the lives of her children suggest that she had probably not been married long before this. But William was evidently dead by June 1127, when his younger brother Robert was described as one of the counts in Calabria at the siege of Omignano: it is highly unlikely that Pernel was not married to Robert until she was around 30 years old. It is equally unlikely that Robert would have encumbered himself with an inconvenient niece when he left Italy afterwards. Peter Stewart