Lucy of Bolingbroke

- Abt 1138

• Name	Lucy of Bolingbroke  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  Birth	of Spalding, Lincolnshire, England   [6]
  Gender	Female
  Death	Abt 1138  [7]
  Person ID	I317	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, Ancestor of TNH, Ancestor of TSW, Ancestor of TWK, Ancestor of UKL, Ancestor of WPF
  Last Modified	6 Jan 2018

  
  

  Family	Ranulf le Meschin   d. Abt 1129
  Marriage	Abt 1098  [2, 7, 8]
  Children	+ 1. Alice of Chester   d. Aft 1148 + 2. Ranulph de Gernons,   b. Bef 1100, Guernon Castle, Normandy, France d. 16 Dec 1153 (Age > 53 years)
  Family ID	F2555	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	16 Jun 2018

  
  

• Notes

  "Lucy of Bolingbroke (died circa 1138) was an Anglo-Norman heiress in central England and, later in life, countess of Chester. Probably related to the old English earls of Mercia, she came to possess extensive lands in Lincolnshire which she passed on to her husbands and sons. She was a notable religious patron, founding or co-founding two small religious houses and endowing several with lands and churches. [...] Lucy, as widowed countess, founded the convent of Stixwould in 1135, becoming, in the words of one historian, 'one of the few aristocratic women of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to achieve the role of independent lay founder.'" [Wikipedia] Much controversy has ensued over her parentage. Appendix J to volume 7 of the Complete Peerage sums up the state of play in 1929: "The parentage of the Countess Lucy is one of the unsolved puzzles of genealogy. The only direct statements about it are in the Peterborough Chronicle and the pseudo-Ingulf’s Chronicle of Crowland, which agree in saying that she was daughter of Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia, and niece or grandniece of Thorold, sometime Sheriff of co. Lincoln. All that is certainly known is that she was niece of Robert Malet of Eye and of Alan of Lincoln, and that Thorold the Sheriff was a kinsman." The essay goes on to state that a good but not conclusive case can be made for her parents being Thorold the sheriff and an unnamed daughter of Robert Malet. The ODNB calls Lucy merely "heir of the honour of Bolingbroke". In 1995 Katharine Keats-Rohan made a case for the Thorold hypothesis, but Rosie Bevan argued on SGM that "the main sticking point [...] is that although Lucy is mentioned a few times as Thorold's heir she is not named as his daughter." Bevan went on to propose that the incomplete evidence could as easily be used to argue that Lucy's parents were William Malet (son of Robert) and a daughter of earl Alfgar III. The one point on which everyone appears to agree is that one of Lucy's parents has to have been a Malet, because in 1153 the future Henry II promised the honour of Eye to Ranulph, earl of Chester, to be held as "Robert Malet the uncle of his mother [i.e., Lucy] held it."

  
  

• Sources

  [S152] Domesday Descendants: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066-1166 by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2002. [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. [S977] The Blackmans of Knight's Creek: Ancestors and Descendants of George and Maria (Smith) Blackman by Henry James Young. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: 1980. [S1326] Katherine S. B. Keats-Rohan, "Antecessor Noster: The Parentage of Countess Lucy Made Plain." Prosopon Newsletter 2, May 1995. [S1016] Medieval English Ancestors of Robert Abell by Carl Boyer III. Santa Clarita, California, 2001. [S160] Wikipedia. [S76] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004-ongoing. [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.