Mabel de Bellême

- 1077

• Name	Mabel de Bellême  [1]
  Gender	Female
  Death	Dec 1077	Bures-sur-Dives, Normandy, France   [2]
  Alternate death	2 Dec 1079  [3, 4]
  Burial	Troarn, Calvados, Normandy, France   [5]
  Person ID	I6486	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of AP, Ancestor of AW, Ancestor of DDB, Ancestor of DGH, Ancestor of DK, Ancestor of EK, Ancestor of GFS, Ancestor of JMF, Ancestor of JTS, Ancestor of LD, Ancestor of LDN, Ancestor of LMW
  Last Modified	11 Jan 2020

  
  

  Father	William I Talvas   d. Between 1060 and 1062
  Mother	Hildeburg
  Family ID	F6496	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Roger de Montgomery,   b. of St. Germain de Montgommeri, Calvados, Normandy, France d. 27 Jul 1094, Shrewsbury Abbey, Shropshire, England
  Marriage	Abt 1050  [2]
  Children	+ 1. Maud de Montgomery   d. Between 1082 and 1084 + 2. Sibyl de Montgomery   d. Aft 1107 + 3. Roger "the Poitevin" de Montgomery   d. 1123 + 4. Robert II de Bellême,   b. 1057, Sées, Orne, Normandy, France d. Aft 1129 (Age > 73 years)
  Family ID	F1554	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	16 Jun 2018

  
  

• Notes

  Also called Mabel Talvas; Dame de Alencon, de Seez, and Belleme; Countess of Shrewsbury and Lady of Arundel. From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Earl Roger's first wife, Mabel de Bellême, has been depicted unforgettably for posterity by Orderic Vitalis, though that historian never saw her. He describes her as 'a forceful and worldly woman, cunning, garrulous, and extremely cruel', 'a perfidious woman', and 'a cruel woman, who had shed the blood of many and had forcibly disinherited many lords'; and he recounts several stories to her discredit related to him by colleagues at St Evroult. Whatever allowances can be made for Mabel there must have been something particularly aggressive and brutal about her for four of her vassals to ride at night into her castle at Bures [-sur-Dives] and cut off her head as she lay in bed after a bath. Her murderer Hugh Bunel was among those whom she had disinherited and was never caught. The date of the murder must be December 1077, not 1082 as long accepted from a marginal note in the editio princeps of Orderic. There is evidence that Mabel, like a very few other baronial wives, was a tenant-in-chief in England, but no evidence that she ever visited that land or the Montgomery estates there.

  
  

• Sources

  [S874] Todd A. Farmerie, "Robert de Torigny and the family of Gunnor, Duchess of Normandy.". [S76] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004-ongoing. [S3215] Medieval Welsh Ancestors of Certain Americans by Carl Boyer III. Santa Clarita, California, 2004. [S145] Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700 by Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. 8th edition, William R. Beall & Kaleen E. Beall, eds. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2004, 2006, 2008., year only. [S128] The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant ed. Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, Duncan Warrand, Howard de Walden, Geoffrey H. White and R. S. Lea. 2nd edition. 14 volumes (1-13, but volume 12 spanned two books), London, The St. Catherine Press, 1910-1959. Volume 14, "Addenda & Corrigenda," ed. Peter W. Hammond, Gloucestershire, Sutton Publishing, 1998.