Zoe’s Comments (group member since Jul 07, 2013)

Zoe’s comments from the Ask Carol McGrath group.

The Revolt of the Earls was in early 1075. Alan received many of Ralph de Gael's best properties in East Anglia, so it seems likely Alan was in the army with Geoffrey de Montbray, Robert Malet and William of Warenne (who was a subordinate of Alan's at Sainte-Suzanne in 1083 and with him at Pevensey in 1088) which defeated Ralph - though Alan's name, as usual, was not mentioned in accounts.

Ralph left his wife Emma de Breteuil in Norwich Castle to negotiate while he sailed to Denmark.

On 18 December 1075, Ealdgyth Godwinson, Edward the Confessor's Queen, died at Winchester. William gave her a state funeral and buried her in Westminster Abbey.

Ralph succeeded in persuading Cnut the Holy and Hakon to provide a fleet of some 200 ships with which he returned to (vainly) threaten England the next year (1076).

This having failed, Ralph went immediately to Brittany where he joined up with his wife on their extensive estates at Gael and Montfort.

Ralph promptly joined Eozen's continuing rebellion against Hoel of Kernev, Regent of Brittany and Alan's maternal uncle, leading to the siege of Dol.

On 31 May 1076, Waltheof, having been denounced by his wife Judith, was executed at Winchester for his peripheral role in the previous year's Revolt.

King William invaded Brittany in September to support Hoel in the siege, but in early November Ralph and Hoel patriotically patched up their differences and drove William away.

(Invading Brittany almost never works, as even the Americans discovered to great cost. The only exceptions occurred when the Bretons were bitterly divided down the middle: the Viking conquest of 917-936, Henry II's overlordship, the first phase of the Hundred Years's War, and the French conquest in 1488, are all instances of that.)

Amidst the events of 1075 and 1076, William and Alan still made time to sign writs and charters in London.

Carol wrote: "It is possible that she was a sister. She certainly could make a good story. I shall send Swan-Daughter at the weekend. Just remember it is fiction!"

Thank you very much! Yes, I shall happily make allowance for the imaginative plot and narrative elements.

What I'm keeping my eye out for are details of medieval life from your researches: what fabrics and clothes people wore, what they ate, how buildings looked, how they spoke to each other and deported themselves, how things were made, and so on.

These would nicely round out my notes on Alan's life story, in case I should ever write it up as a novel (as someone on Quora recently suggested). Musing idly, I have formed some notions of chapter headings.

My wish is to put Alan's story in context, as his background and milieu not only explain much about his actions but also enhance his distinctive character.

Ideally, Alan's biography would be one a series of books on the Bretons (especially the sovereign house), from their origins (as diverse families across the Old World who converged on Brittany) to modern times.

Rather than rehash old legends and fairy-tales, I'd like to tell the true stories of the fascinating events that inspired them, showing how they weave together in the personal histories of this family.

There'd be accounts of the Romans, Persians, Jews, Gauls, Britons and Irish, among others. Julius Caesar, Livia Augusta, Gratian, Magnus Maximus, Theodosius, Conan Meriadoc, Riothamus, Cerdic, and the founders of the House of Anjou would all have roles. So would the Aurelian emperors, Honorius, Attila the Hun, Aetius, Arvandus, Anthemius, Syagrius, Clovis, the Moors, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, the Queens of Mercia, Edward the Confessor, Harold and Gyrth Godwinson, Eadgifu the Fair and Gunhild of course, the main actors (well-known or neglected) of the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses, and many many other persons.

The problem is not in finding something to say, but rather in deciding what not to include lest each novel take forever to complete. That's a weakness of mine, you see.

Zoe wrote: "A cluster of genealogies assert that Alan Rufus had a wife born c. 1042 whom they name as "Melisinde de Richmond", which is suspiciously similar to the name of his great-grandmother, Mélisende of Maine..."

It just occurred to me that this "Melisinde de Richmond" was of the right age and had an appropriate name to be a sister of Alan Rufus. Given his known generosity to his brothers and sisters (legitimate and illegitimate), cousins, in-laws and servants, Alan might well have brought more than one sister and her husband to England.

Alternatively, "Melisinde" may have been the name of Alan's (half-)sister who married Enisant Musard, in which case the modern genealogists got confused between the different Musards.

Ok, here's a list of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish tenants of Count Alan's, plus a few tenants whose names I'm very uncertain about.

Numerous unnamed "English men" and "English women" and "sokemen",
Ælfric the priest,
Adestan,
Almær of Bourn,
Almær's son,
Beornwulf,
Donewald,
Ealdræd,
Ermengot (correction - Keats-Rohan says Ermengot's name is Breton, but Asgot held the same plot of land pre-Harold, so there is continuity),
Ernegis,
Eskil,
Fredegis,
Fulcwig (previous owner Godwig),
Gamal's sons (who inherited from their father Gamal, which I guess is an English name, not the Hebrew/Arabic name meaning camel - but you cannot exclude any possibility among Bretons),
Goding,
Godric (a steward, with many manors),
Gollan,
Gospatric (discussed in message 94 above),
Grim,
Gyrth (the count's man),
Hademar (is German, as it's currently used in West Germany, but is it Anglo-Saxon?),
Kolgrimr,
Kolsveinn,
Landric (apparently German, but is it English?),
Modgifu (a free woman),
Nardred,
Northmann,
Ordmaer,
Orm,
Thor,
Thorkil,
Toli (? Google finds this as a "Spanish" name!),
Turstin,
Uhtred,
Wigwin (English or Breton?),
Wimund (the count's man),
Wulfbert,
Wulfgeat,
Wulfmaer.

Alan was probably very fond of Cumbrians, because they were British and Alan's own male line came to Brittany from Cymru - either Gwynedd, or, as now seems more likely, Gwent.

There are hints that Alan's female line was from the (apparently hereditary) Queens of Mercia; if so, he probably had a soft spot for Mercians also, though he had little land there.

That Alan was buried at the shrine of the royal martyr King Edmund of East Anglia suggests that his family were staking some sort of a claim there, too.

Many of Alan's manors had either no (recorded) tenant (presumably he held them in demesne) or the tenant was English - often the same person who held it in 1066, or their son. Certifiable Normans seem rather scarce on the ground where Alan was.

In fact, the only tenants of Alan's whom we don't know to have been either English or Breton were Aubrey de Vere (whom Keats-Rohan thinks was Breton), Geoffrey de Tournai (in Belgium), someone called Gerard (who could have been Breton), a Humphrey (either German, Norman or their way of writing the Old English Hunfrið), an Odo (a Frankish name, but also used by Bretons), Osbern (but he could have been Anglo-Danish), Picot (the count's man, and I'm guessing not the notorious sheriff), Robert (the count's man, but Alan also had a full brother named Robert), Roger Bigod (I guess foisted on Alan by King William), Thomas the Archbishop of York (whose brother Samson was named after a Breton saint), William Peverel (thought by some historians to have been a favoured bastard son of King William's), the famous William de St Calais (who was a canon at Bayeux with Thomas and Samson), another William, and many unnamed knights.

That's all. It may seem like a lot of foreigners, but you should see the list of Englishmen and women.

Kathleen, indeed he did. For more details, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospatr....

Gospatric's son Waltheof, Lord of Allerdale, is the ancestor of the two Alans I mentioned above, in message 89.

Furthermore, there was another Gospatric, a distant cousin, who remained in Yorkshire where he became a tenant-in-chief of 44 manors and a tenant of Alan Rufus in another 19. So he had 63 manors in total by the time of the Survey, comparable to a middle-rank Norman baron. Not too bad for a Cumbric Englishman in the war-ravaged North.

This Gospatric did better than Alan's Norman chum Walter d'Aincourt, who held Derby under Edward the Confessor in 1065, in 1088 was entrusted by William II with a royal writ, and Trevor Foulds suggested (and I believe) was a son-in-law of King William I, and was TIC of 32 manors and a tenant (of the Archbishop of York) in 3 others.

Still, Gospatric's 63 manors were a let-down from the 94 he had held in 1066, but what really stands out is that although he was replaced *entirely* by every other TIC including King William, where Alan held sway Gospatric retained all but a few of his former properties, and those Alan gave to other, elsewhere dispossessed, Englishmen.

Moreover, within the "Land of Count Alan in Yorkshire" Gospatric was over-compensated by gaining more additional manors there than he had lost.

During the Harrying of the winter of 1069-70, Alan's recently obtained property of Gilling, Earl Edwin's wealthy northern caput, seems to have been devastated - if the Domesday valuations are any guide.

The English fled inland, to the Yorkshire Dales, where Alan had other manors.

It's scarcely recalled that Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who participated big-time in that Harrying, but for some reason obtained no land there for his exertions, conducted a second, and even more severe Harrying in 1080.

Alan would have been well-established in the North by then, so this wouldn't have helped his property values.

By 1082, when Odo was imprisoned and Alan's star was still rising, it was pretty clear that Alan and Odo were not friends.

Before King William left England for the last time on 2 August 1086, Alan had persuaded the Conqueror to refound St Olaf's Church in Earlsborough outside the walls of York and to apologise to the people of York for the numerous devastations that the Normans had caused. Imagine that!

Alan then conceived of a great work of compensation to the English church on the land he owned around St Olaf's: St Mary's Abbey.

In 1087, Bishop Odo was released from prison on the reluctant orders of the dying Conqueror, and looked forward to resuming his rightful place as the principal counsellor of the King.

Alas for Odo, William de St-Calais, Bishop of Durham, had usurped this role. Although St-Calais had done such sterling work during the Domesday survey and the compilation of its results, Odo didn't appreciate this, because the survey had revealed many hitherto concealed illegal property acquisitions committed by Odo and his clique.

In January or February of 1088, Alan invited the new king William II and the royal court up to join him in officially founding St Mary's Abbey.

Perhaps this was Alan's way of rubbing Odo's nose in it, because Odo swiftly conspired with the majority of Norman magnates to rebel.

At first the King was outmatched and in dire trouble, but Alan and his allies combined with the English fyrd to stamp on the rebels all over the land, and prevented reinforcements arriving from Normandy by destroying the first Norman fleet that dared enter the Channel.

For the moment, the English had their revenge.

Just read the Goodreads summary of Paula's book "Sons of the Wolf". Is Wulfhere an historic personage?

All the thegns known to us by name probably had very interesting lives.

Almaer, Lord of Bourn, was a tenant of Edeva the Fair at some seven of her manors. The historian Katherine Keats-Rohan thinks he was a royal thane serving both Gyrth and Leofwine. If so, he must have been in the thick of the fiercest fighting when Duke William's horse was cut down and Gyrth charged down the hill to slay him only to be slain instead.

Amazingly, Almaer survived the battle and found favour with William's finest general, Count Alan, who made Almaer lord of eleven manors.

Alan's father Eozen was a first cousin of King Edward the Confessor, which is perhaps why Alan owned Wyken Farm in Suffolk on 5 January 1066. It seems plausible that Alan might have known his near neighbour Edeva and perhaps met Almaer.

According to the Domesday Survey, King William obtained 28 of Earl Gyrth's manors, but so did Alan. Alan was known often to be at William's side, so was it Alan who slew Gyrth?

Did Alan somehow, despite the exigencies of the moment, capture Almaer on the battlefield to spare his life?

The thanes of the north such as Uchtred and his family have amazing stories, but others elsewhere have told them better than I can. Long story short, Uchtred's descendant Gospatric of Cumbria lost his post as Earl of Northumbria rather abruptly and perhaps unexpectedly in 1072 and fled north to King Malcolm III's kingdom.

There must have been a lot of pressure to remove Englishmen from the North after the rebellion of 1069 and the Harrying of 1069-70, but Alan was his own man: Domesday shows that he parcelled out his 200-plus Yorkshire manors among his own family and the surviving English, including Gospatric's cousins - and barred Normans from owning anything there.

Interestingly, within a generation, Gospatric's family began naming their heirs "Alan". The famous Alan fitz Roland of Galloway, who advised King John to sign the Magna Carta, was the son of Roland/Lochlann, son of Gunhild, daughter of Waltheof of Allerdale, son of Gospatric. Gunhild's brother was Alan of Allerdale, heir of this Waltheof.

The name "Gunhild" had already occurred in this family for generations, so no link to Harold, but "Alan" was a novelty.

Alan didn't commission anyone to sing his praises, but much about him is discoverable in local stories and personal testimonials. Here are three examples.

The tale of Mainard and Orwen tells how Alan expressed his gratitude to Orwen, his wet-nurse, by giving her Sibton Manor, how Mainard became Alan's chamberlain, and how the elderly couple fell in love and received Alan's blessing to marry.

Stephen of Whitby wrote of the tribulations of his little band of monks and how Alan twice intervened to rescue them, culminating in the foundation of St Mary's Abbey, York.

William de St Calais' supporters recorded how Alan took extraordinary steps to protect the Bishop from King William II's wrath.

To recap, Alan was important enough in 1082/1083 to command the royal household knights, before August 1086 to persuade William I to apologise to the City of York, in 1088 to bring the royal court to attend the foundation of St Mary's Abbey (despite whatever reluctance Bishop Odo and his majority party may have felt), and afterwards to witness royal charters immediately after the future Henry I.

Alan escaped much notice precisely because he was so often right beside the King, who naturally received the lion's share of glory, and because he wasn't noted for causing trouble, as so many major barons were.

Were it not for the PASE Domesday database, I wouldn't have known that William I and Alan Rufus divided Earl Gyrth Godwinson's properties equally between them (28 each), an indicator that Alan may have been right beside William when Gyrth attempted to kill the King and that whatever Alan did then earned William's gratitude. (Another possibility is that Ralph the Staller aided William and was rewarded with those properties, and that they passed to Alan after Ralph junior rebelled in 1075.)

It's really interesting that Ralph de Gael's 1075 rebellion against King William and subsequent attempt to invade England with the Danes, did nothing to dampen his friendship with Alan's father Eozen in 1076. Complicated politics!

Many notable people died prematurely in 1093: aside from Alan and his brother Count Geoffrey "Boterel", the deceased include King Malcolm, Rhys ap Tewdwr and Count Robert I of Flanders.

The Aquitainian Viscount Aimery IV of Thouars (who served beside the Bretons at Flanders and whose family would later marry into Alan's) also died in 1093, as did his daughter Eleanor or Aenora; she had married Boson II Viscount of Chatellerault who had died the previous year.

And of course King William II nearly died during Lent in 1093, which is what prompted him to appoint an Archbishop of Canterbury, namely Anselm.

Not a good year for nobles, townsfolk or peasants.

A little more information on the London fire of 1093. According to “A New and Compleat History and Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster : the borough of Southwark, and parts adjacent; from the earliest accounts; to the beginning of the year 1770 ... By a society of gentlemen; revised, corrected, and improved, by Henry Chamberlain”, pp. 23-37, “A great part of this city was again destroyed by fire in the year 1093, and this calamity was succeeded by a great scarcity of corn, and almost all kinds of the necessaries of life.”

Although I live in the southern hemisphere, I should have realised that August is late summer in England, and that the grain harvest is when? July-September? Lammas is 1 August, and the Harvest festival (which incidentally corresponds to the Chinese Lantern or Moon Festival) is usually in September.

A hot, dry summer would leave London susceptible to fire and cause a lean harvest.

Alas, I think Alan Rufus died in a fire, as his epitaph uses "cineratur" to describe his death, Alan was in London in the 1090s and London suffered a conflagration in 1093, the year of Alan's demise.

If the burning house on the Bayeux Tapestry really does depict Eadgifu and one of her children, then given Alan's close association with Eadgifu's properties and the love he shared with her daughter, one can hardly imagine how distressed Gunhild would have been. The epitaph states "Anglia turbatur": that England was in distress because of it.

Based on the 11th century "Norman French" (i.e. Gallo) version of the Song of Roland, which names him, Count Eozen's Gallo name is Eudon.

Just stumbled on a poem by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) that employs similar language to the thoughts on mortality in Alan Rufus's epitaph.

"Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same."

The Botanic Garden (1791), Part i.

The Wikipedia article on King Edward the Confessor states:

"On 23 January 1045 Edward married Godwin's daughter Edith. Soon afterwards, her brother Harold and her Danish cousin Beorn Estrithson, were also given earldoms in southern England. Godwin and his family now ruled subordinately all of Southern England."

Harold married Edith Swannesha about the same time as he became Earl of East Anglia, i.e. 1044 x 1045.

Since she had inherited extensive property in East Anglia, these two weddings do look suspiciously like a political alliance - similar to that enacted by Duke Geoffrey I of Brittany and Duke Richard II of Normandy, who married each other's sisters.

By the way, is Gytha a familiar form of Ealdgyth? For, I find the statement made by some writers that Edward's Queen changed her name from Gytha to Ealdgyth rather odd.

Did Harald Hardrada have two wives simultaneously, then?

It's plausible, as it seems to have been a frequent political strategy in those times.

Like Harold Godwinson, Cnut the Great had two wives: his first, handfasted wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton, was Queen in Northern England, while his second, church-sanctioned wife, Emma of Normandy, was Queen in the South.

Harald III Sigurdsson (Hardrada/Harthrada) was (Saint) Olaf II's younger half-brother. Olaf II was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad; Harald was also present, aged fifteen.

The Wikipedia article on Elisiv of Kiev says this:

"Elisaveta Yaroslavna of Kiev (Norwegian: Ellisif or Elisabeth), (1025 – ca. 1067)"

There's some latitude as to whether Elizaveta was still alive when Gytha arrived.

"Elisaveta was born to Prince Yaroslav I of Kiev and Princess Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden. She was the sister of Anne of Kiev, queen and regent of France, and Anastasia of Kiev, queen of Hungary. During the winter of 1043–44, Elisaveta was married to Prince Harald Sigurdsson [Harald Hardrada] of Norway."

Eminent connections, indeed!

"In 1066, Harald invaded England, where he died. Tradition says that Elisiv and her daughters followed Harald to England, where Maria died, as it was said, at the news of her father's death, after which Elisiv and her second daughter Ingegerd returned to Norway with the Norwegian fleet. Elisiv was to have stayed at the Orkney islands during this trip ... however, the oldest of the sagas claim that it was Tora [Torbergsdatter, his second wife, who married King Harald Hardrada in 1048] and not Elisiv who accompanied Harald on the trip, which is also considered more likely, as she was the cousin of the Orkney jarl's."

"According to Adam of Bremen [probably born before 1050 and died on 12 October of an unknown year - possibly 1081, latest 1085], the mother of King Olav Kyrre [Olaf III, son of Harald Hardrada] remarried either King Sweyn II of Denmark or an unnamed Swedish king as a widow, but this is unconfirmed, and it is also unknown whether this refers to the actual mother of Olav Kyrre, which would mean Tora Torbergsdatter, or his stepmother, which would mean Elisiv."

Gytha's husband, Vladimir Monomakh of Kiev, was a grandson of Yaroslav the Wise and Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden whose father was Olof Skötkonung, King of Sweden.

Olof Skötkonung was the son of Eric the Victorious (Erik Segersäll) and, according to Icelandic sources, Sigrid the Haughty.

Sigrid's second husband was Sweyn Forkbeard; their children were Cnut the Great, Gytha Svendsdatter, Gunnhild Svendsdatter, Santslaue, Thyra Svendsdatter and Estrid Svendsdatter.

Meanwhile, Norway was ruled by King Olaf II (995 – 29 July 1030). In Old Norse he was known as Ólafr Haraldsson. He's the "Saint Olave" commemorated in Saint Olave's church in York which passed into Count Alan's ownership.

Olaf II was the son of Harald Grenske, a great-great-grandchild of Harold Fairhair, the first King of Norway.

Olaf II's mother was Åsta Gudbrandsdatter, who was widowed while pregnant with Olaf.

Åsta later married Sigurd Syr: one of their children was Harald Hardrada, who before becoming King of Norway had spent around fifteen years in exile as a mercenary and military commander in Kievan Rus and in the Byzantine Empire.

Olaf's wife was Astrid Olofsdotter and their daughter was Wulfhild of Norway, Duchess of Saxony.

Olaf also had an illegitimate son, Magnus "the Good", King of Norway and Denmark, who died in 1047.

Magnus's reign (1035 – 25 October 1047) bridged those of Cnut the Great and Harold Hardrada. At one point, Magnus threatened to conquer the England of Edward the Confessor, and, strange to relate, received support from Edward's mother, Emma of Normandy, whose property was consequently confiscated in 1043.

A favourite hobby of mine is investigating "who knew whom and how?" (a key question in prosopography).

For example, in the foundation charter of 1083 by Geoffrey Boterel I, Alan's eldest brother, for the priory of Saint-Martin de Lamballe in Brittany, the signatories include: "Gauffredus ipse comes, Rotbertus frater eius…Haimo vicecomes…" - that is, Count Geoffrey himself, his brother Robert, and Viscount Haimo.

According to Wikipedia, Eozen's son Robert was a priest in Yorkshire, but who was Viscount Haimo?

There are several men named "Haimo" in the Domesday Book, including “Haimo Viscount” in the entry for Canterbury in Kent, and “Haimo the Sheriff”. Sometimes Domesday renders "sheriff" as "viscount". However, none of these has any evident connection with the Breton sovereign house.

William of Poitiers stated that "Haimo, Vicomte de Thouars" fought for William the Conqueror at Hastings. This refers to Aimery IV the Viscount of Thouars (lived c. 1024 – c. 1094) who led the forces from Poitou on the western wing beside the troops from Anjou, Maine and Brittany.

Aimery had fought in Spain for the Duke of Aquitaine and helped capture Barbastro in 1056, from whence he brought a rich booty to Thouars.

Aimery and his family were patrons of the abbeys of Saint-Florent de Saumur and of Saint-Martin de Tours, as were many generations of the Breton sovereign house.

Moreover, Aimery was a first cousin of Bertha of Blois, the wife of Duke Alan III, Eozen's elder brother.