Hugh "Lupus" d'Avranches

Abt 1047 - 1101  (~ 54 years)

• Name	Hugh "Lupus" d'Avranches  [1, 2]
  Birth	Abt 1047  [3]
  Gender	Male
  Death	27 Jul 1101	Abbey of St. Werburg, Chester, Cheshire, England   [4, 5, 6]
  Siblings	2 siblings
  + 1. Margaret d'Avranches ▻ Ranulph de Briquessart + 2. Judith le Goz d'Avranches ▻ Richer de l'Aigle + 3. Hugh "Lupus" d'Avranches ,   b. Abt 1047   d. 27 Jul 1101, Abbey of St. Werburg, Chester, Cheshire, England  (Age ~ 54 years) ▻ Ermentrude de Clermont ;  (Unknown mistress of Hugh d'Avranches)
  Person ID	I5301	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of AP, Ancestor of DDB, Ancestor of DGH, Ancestor of DK, Ancestor of EK, 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	1 Jan 2020

  
  

  Father	Richard le Goz,   b. Abt 1020   d. 1082 (Age ~ 62 years)
  Family ID	F275	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family 1	Ermentrude de Clermont
  Children	+ 1. Geva of Chester,   b. of Chester, Cheshire, England d. Aft 1120
  Family ID	F1555	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	7 Mar 2016

  
  

  Family 2	(Unknown mistress of Hugh d'Avranches)
  Children	+ 1. Robert Fitz Hugh
  Family ID	F3657	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	14 Apr 2016

  
  

• 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.

  
  

• Sources

  [S1117] County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire by James Croston. London: John Heywood, 1887. [S1016] Medieval English Ancestors of Robert Abell by Carl Boyer III. Santa Clarita, California, 2001. [S160] Wikipedia. [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. [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., year only.