The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. III.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.
ADDITIONAL NAMES GIVEN BY DUCHESNE.
Prepared by Michael A. Linton
-------*--------
Return to Index
Gaunt : Few among the Conqueror's companions of arms were so splendidly rewarded as Gilbert de Gand, who held one hundred and seventy-two English manors.; yet there is much doubt—or at least much difference of opinion—as to who he really was. Dugdale, and after him Sir Henry Ellis and others, have called him a younger son of Baldwin, Earl of Flanders, and consequently the nephew of Queen Matilda; but this opinion appears to be now altogether exploded. Mr. Freeman discards it as "an amazing piece of genealogy," and promptly dubs him "a Flemish adventurer," without stooping to explain how or why it was that a mere soldier of fortune received so vast a grant of territory. On the other hand, the author of The Norman People furnishes him with a lineage more consonant with his fortunes, tracing his direct descent from Witikind, the renowned opponent of Charlemagne in the eighth century. "When, after many years of resistance, Witikind was compelled to submit, c. 780, he was invested with the Dukedom of Angria (L'Art de Verifier les Dates, xvi. 145). Ludolphus, one of his descendants, was Duke of Saxony, and died in 864, leaving by his wife (a daughter of Eberhard, Duke of Friuli), Bruno Duke of Saxony. He married a daughter of the Emperor Arnold, and declined the Imperial throne. Bruno had two sons, 1, Henry the Fowler, Emperor in 919, father of the Emperor Otho, who succeeded 936; 2, Wickman. Wickman was created Count of Gand 940, by the Emperor Otho, his nephew, and had two sons: 1, Theodoric, Count of Gand, ancestor of the Counts of Gand and Guisnes; 2, Adalbert, father of Ralph, father of Baldwin de Gand, Count of Gand or Alost, ancestor of the Counts of Alost, whose younger brother, Gilbert de Gand, became Baron of Folkingham in England." Gilbert was, if not the nephew, the cousin of Queen Matilda; and could claim our great King Alfred as one of his ancestors. "He was sixth in male descent from Wickman, 'Count of the Castle of Gand,' who had married Leutgarde, granddaughter of Elfthryth, Countess of Flanders, the daughter of Alfred."—A. S. Ellis.
Gilbert, among his other possessions, received the broad lands of Ulf the Constable, lying chiefly in the counties of Nottingham and Lincoln, and chose his predecessor's capital manor, Folkingham, near Grantham, as the head of his barony.
The first mention of him is in 1068, when the Conqueror, after the surrender of the city of York, placed it under the joint command of William Malet, Robert FitzRichard, and Gilbert de Gand; and he and Malet were still in charge when, in the following year, the Danes landed in England, besieged and captured the city, and put the garrison to the sword. Only Malet, with his wife and two children, Gilbert and a few others, were spared for ransom or exchange. He died during the reign of Rufus, and was buried in Bardney Abbey, which he had refounded and re-endowed about 1086-89. It had lain in ruins for more than three centuries, having been destroyed by the Danes under Inguar and Hubba.
"He had by Alice his wife, daughter of Hugh de Montfort, Lord of Montfort-sur-Risle, and eventually heiress of her brother, 1, Gilbert de Gand, who died without issue in his lifetime; 2, Hugh, who. inheriting the extensive fief of his mother's family in Normandy, took the name of Montfort, and was ancestor of the lords of that place and Coquainvilliers. He married Adeline, sister of Waleran, Count of Mellent, and being soon after drawn with him into the revolt in Normandy in favour of William Clito in 1123, was taken prisoner, and Ordericus, writing apparently in 1135, says "he has now groaned in fetters for thirteen years"; 3, Walter de Gand, ancestor of the Earls of Lincoln; 4, Robert de Gand, most probably another son, Provost of Beverley under the celebrated Thomas a Beckett, Dean of York, and Chancellor to King Stephen; 5, Ralph de Gand, perhaps another son, besieged in the castle of Montfort-sur-Risle by Henry I. in 1123; and three daughters at least: 1, Emma, married to Alan de Percy; 2, (Agnes?) wife of William Fitz Nigel, Constable of Chester to Earl Hugh; and 3, * * * * married to Ivo de Grentemesnil (Ord. Vit. VIII. xvi)."—A. S. Ellis.
Walter de Gand succeeded to all his father's English possessions, and founded Bridlington Priory, in Yorkshire, besides granting fresh endowments to Bardney. "A person," says Dugdale, "of great Humanity and Piety, who, when he was an aged Man, and near his death, Commanded a brave Regiment of Flemings and Normans in that famous Battle against the Scots, commonly called Bellum Standardi," where "his eloquent speech and prudent conduct" are highly commended. His wife was Maud, daughter of Stephen, Earl of Brittany and Richmond, who brought him all Swaledale as her marriage-portion; and at his death in 1138 he left three sons: Gilbert, Robert, and Geoffrey.
Gilbert II., according to the Baronage, was promoted to an Earldom by an inconceivable stroke of fortune. "In his youth, being with King Stephen in that fatal Battle of Lincoln, he was with him taken Prisoner, and thereupon compelled by Ranulfe, Earle of Chester, to marry his Niece, viz. Rohais (or as some call her Hawise), daughter and Heir of William de Romare,[1] Earle of Lincolne; Whereby he had the title of Earle of Lincoln, in her Right." This statement is in flagrant contradiction with the acknowledged custom of the time. The hand of a great heiress—always at the sole disposal of the Sovereign, was, under the most favourable circumstances, only granted on payment of a large sum of money; and the tax thus levied on each fortunate bridegroom formed a considerable portion of the Royal revenue. That a Countess in her own right, the niece of one of the greatest potentates in the realm, should have been freely proffered—nay, more, forced upon the unwilling acceptance of a prisoner taken in arms for a hostile cause, exceeds all bounds of credibility. The following is at least a probable account. "There appears to be some reason to suspect that William de Romare was deprived of his Earldom by Stephen when he regained his ascendancy, and that Gilbert de Gant, who was a steady adherent of the King, was rewarded with it. The Priory of Rufford was founded by the latter in 1146 or 1148: in his foundation charter he styles himself Earl of Lincoln."—Bowles' History of Lacock Abbey. The title, however obtained, died with him in 1156, when he left two daughters—Alice, the wife of Simon de St. Liz, Earl of Huntingdon, and Gunnora, who was childless. Like his antecessors, he had been a great benefactor of the Church; for, in addition to this new foundation at Rufford in Nottinghamshire, he transferred the monks of Biham from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire, where they built Vaudy (Vallis Dei) Abbey on an estate he had given them at the Pope's desire.
Contrary to the received practice, his great inheritance did not devolve upon his daughters, but passed to his brother Robert, then the father of two sons; a third Gilbert, surnamed the Good, and Stephen. Both were probably very young when they were left orphans in 1162; but I was rather taken aback by the dates given by Dugdale, according to which Gilbert was still a minor, in ward of Robert de Stuteville, as late as 1197—exactly thirty-five years after his father's death! In the latter years of King John's reign, he joined the insurgent barons that invited Louis of France to reign over England, and received in recompense his uncle's Earldom of Lincoln. "So far, however, was he from having succeeded his uncle, as stated by some works on the peerage, that it was after an interval of sixty years; and he held his title for a period still shorter than the former. If the first was introduced by the sovereign will of Stephen, overruling the ordinary laws of inheritance, the second was obtruded by a still less competent authority—the invader Louis of France. This was in the last year of the reign of John; and the next year, 1216, he was taken prisoner at the battle then fought at Lincoln, and his brief career as an Earl thereupon closed; the dignity being transferred to Ranulph Earl of Chester, the great grandson of the first Ranulph and the Countess Lucia, who was evidently then considered its heiress."—Ibid. He had served Louis well, for he and Robert de Ropesby had overrun and subjugated the whole district of Holland, captured the city of Lincoln, and besieged its castle. Then followed the disastrous rout in which he was taken prisoner; but he appears to have been soon restored to liberty, and to his great barony (he had answered for sixty-eight knight's fees in 1211); and to have dropped the title of Earl of Lincoln—"a fleeting honour" that no man recognized, of his own accord. But as Gilbert the Good, the beloved friend and comforter of the poor, his memory has not been blotted out by the changeful course of six hundred years. In the town of Hunmanby, part of his East Yorkshire barony, it remains unforgotten to the present day, for a doggerel rhyme in his honour is still familiar in men's mouths, and was formerly chanted round the market cross every year on Shrove Tuesday:—
"Gilbert of Gant
Left Hunmanby Moor
To Hunmanby poor,
That they might never want."[2]
Heckington Church, in Lincolnshire, long retained in one of its windows these grateful words: "The Lord love De Gant."
He died in 1241, and was followed by Gilbert IV., twice summoned to parliament as a baron, once by Henry III. in 1260, and again in 1264 by Simon de Montfort and the confederate barons with whom he had cast in his lot. He was taken prisoner the same year at Kenilworth, and mulcted of 3000 marks fine. His heir was his second son, Gilbert V.—Robert, the eldest, having died s. p. in his lifetime—who fought in Edward I.'s foreign wars, and followed him successively to Wales, Flanders, and Gascony. He, too, was a baron by writ in 1295, but left no successor, and with him the great Flemish house was brought to a close. His wife, Lora de Baliol, had remained childless, and he constituted the King heir to Folkingham, Barton-upon-Humber, and the greater part of his barony, reserving only Swaledale and a portion of Skendelby. On his death in 1297, this remnant of his former possessions was divided between his three sisters, viz. Margaret, the wife of Sir William de Kerdeston; Nichola, the wife of Peter de Mauley; and Julian, who remained unmarried, and bestowed her share on the nuns of Nun-Cotum.
Another branch of this house had ended somewhat earlier. Robert, the fourth son of the first Gilbert de Gant, was, as has been said, King Stephen's Chancellor, and married Alice, the widow of Richard de Courcy, who brought him the great fief of her father, William Paynell. They had two daughters, Juliana, and Alice, or Adeline, the wife of Robert FitzHardinge, and the mother of Maurice, named after his grandfather De Gant, and of Emma, his eventual heiress. Maurice held land in eight different counties, and "in 15 John covenanted to serve the King, at his own charge, with twenty Knights, himself accounted one; in consideration that he might marry the Daughter of Henry de Oilli." Within the next two years, he was in arms against the Crown, and all—or nearly all—his estates seized and given to Philip de Albini; whereupon he, very sensibly, "addressed himself to the King to make his peace." He died s. p. in 1229, and the son of his sister Emma, Robert de Gournay, was his heir.
No others of the name are mentioned by Dugdale; yet it is hard to believe that some of the numerous younger sons of the baronial line should not have left descendants. "An existing family of Gaunt, in Staffordshire claims, though only by ancient and uniform tradition, descent from Gilbert de Gant and the Earls of Lincoln, and bears their arms, Barry of six, Or and Azure, a bend Gules."—A. S. Ellis. Their first recorded ancestor was John Gaunt, a clergyman, living in 1530.