Mabel Fitz Hugh

Family/Spouse: William le Belward. William (son of John le Belward) died after 4 Aug 1112 in Malpas, Cheshire, England. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. William le Belward was born in of Malpas, Cheshire, England; died after 1154.

Notes:

"Within the limits of the parish of Malpas, and comprehended in the original barony, is the township of Egerton. When the Saxon counties had been formed, this part of Chesire, as we learned from the Domesday Book, belonged to Edwin, Earl of Mercia, a grandson of Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva. After the battle of Hastings, the Saxon rights were transferred by the victorious Norman to his sister's son, Hugh d'Avranches, surnamed Lupus, the pious profligate whom he had created Palatine Earl of Chester. Malpas was selected by him as the site of one of the numerous fortresses with which, at regular intervals, he strenghthened his Welsh border, and was given by him, with other estates from the forfeited lands of Earl Edwin, to his natural son Robert Fitz-Hugh, whom he created Baron of Malpas, and who was one of the eight barons of his Parliament." [County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire, citation details below.]

Notes:

Earl of Chester. Called "Lupus" for his savagery toward the Welsh. Also called "le Gros"; a footnote to CP's account of him, following the statement that he stood with the king during the rebellion of 1096, notes that "his career was chiefly notorious for gluttony, prodigality and profligacy."

He founded Chester Abbey, where became a monk three days before his death. He was buried in the cemetery of St. Werburg, but his body was afterwards removed to the Chapter House by Earl Ranulph le Meschin.

From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Hugh's paternal family were aristocratic landowners of viking descent in the Cotentin. In 1066 Hugh was still a young man and his father vicomte d'Avranches: he was not the 'Viscount Hugh' of the Ship List and is unlikely to have fought at Hastings. Soon afterwards, however, he crossed to England in the service of King William. His first military command was Tutbury Castle in still unpacified Mercia; but probably in 1070 the king instead gave him the much more important castle in the regional capital of Chester and made him an earl. It was a significant promotion, shared, among the Conqueror's other regional commanders in Mercia, only by Roger de Montgomery, an older man close to the king.

Along with Chester and the earldom came the beginnings of a huge landed estate in England. The honour of Chester was accumulated gradually over some twenty years. From the first it was essentially northern, with scattered and not especially valuable outliers over much of the midlands and south. Cheshire was the heart of it, not for its value--a third or less of the total--but for the importance of Chester itself and the fact that the earl received every manor in the shire except the bishop's. Beyond Cheshire the honour came to include a large share of Earl Harold's northern manors and a smaller but still significant portion of those in the south, fragments of several other aristocratic estates, and the scattered holdings of a small number of king's thegns. Together they did not amount to a palatine earldom, a concept unknown in Norman England, but they did make Earl Hugh one of the most powerful men there. The earl revelled in his wealth and status, indulging himself to excess in hunting, war, women, mountains of food, reckless expense, and lavish generosity to the knights and clerks of his household. He fathered many bastards, grew grotesquely fat, and fought the Welsh with a ferocity which embedded him in their memory as Hugh the Wolf. At the same time he was at least conventionally mindful of the perils to his immortal soul, and steadfastly and conspicuously loyal to successive kings.

Hugh married (Unknown mistress of Hugh d'Avranches). [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: Abt 1082
• Alternate death: Aft 1082
• Alternate death: Aft 1084

Notes:

Viscount of the Avranchin. Probably Scandinavian in origin. Shown in some sources (including CP) as a son of a "Thurstan le Goz", son of Ansfrid, a Dane.

Another persistent genealogical tradition is the identification of his wife as "Emma de Conteville," an alleged daughter of the Conqueror's mother Herleve by her husband Herluin. His wife is in fact unknown.