♀Alice d'Aubigny

Alice d’Aubigny (died in or before 1188) was the twenty-fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Henry of Eu (died 1183).

Daughter and wife

Alice, also called Adelise, is given in the Complete Peerage as Countess of Eu^W in Normandy, the wife of John, Count of Eu and lord of Hastings, and the daughter of a queen. Her father was William d’Aubigny, Earl of Arundel^W, and her mother was Adelise of Louvain^W, the widow of King Henry I, who had married the earl after Henry I’s death. In her own charter Alice remembered her mother as “Aliz Regine”, Queen Aliz. She had a brother, Godfrey.

John and Alice were married by 1166, when John held eleven knights’ fees in Kent of the Earl of Arundel as her marriage portion. John held the county of Eu and the rape of Hastings^W in Sussex. He became a monk at Foucarmont at the end of his life and died on 26 June 1170, leaving their son Henry under age, in the custody of the Earl of Arundel.

Widow

Alice married again, to Alvred de St. Martin, the king’s steward and the founder of Robertsbridge Abbey^W. To that abbey she gave her land at Snargate, out of the Kentish fee of Bilsington that had come to her on her marriage, to keep up the abbey’s hospitality, for the souls of her father, her mother, her first husband, her brother Godfrey, her daughters Maud and Margaret, her son Count Henry and all her sons, and her second husband. Her nephew William, Earl of Arundel, later confirmed the monks in that land as the gift of his aunt, the Countess of Eu. At her asking, her son Henry gave the canons of Eu a wood.

Alice died on 11 September, in or before 1188, and was buried in the abbey of Foucarmont.

The family

John and Alice had four sons and two daughters. Henry, the eldest, succeeded his father as Count of Eu and lord of Hastings. Robert, a man-at-arms, died at Acre and was buried at Jerusalem. The two younger sons, a second Henry and John, were churchmen: the second Henry was Dean of St. Mary’s at Hastings in 1195, and in April 1202, on a false report that his niece the Countess Alice had died, King John sent the younger John to the knights and burgesses of Eu as their count. The daughters, Maud and Margaret, are named in their mother’s charter; one married the eldest son of the Estouteville family and the other the Seigneur de Saint-Remi-en-Rivière.

Notes

Sources

Alice’s parentage, marriage, marriage portion, second marriage, gifts, death and burial are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, pp. 157–158), which prints her two charters to Robertsbridge from the abbey’s cartulary, her nephew’s confirmation (“ex dono Adelicie Comitisse de Augo amite mee”) from the Monasticon, and the obituary of Eu, which keeps her anniversary on 11 September and records the wood her son gave at her prayers. The children’s careers come from the chronicle of the counts of Eu, written by a monk of Foucarmont in 1390, the Pipe Roll of 1196–1197, the Robertsbridge charters and the chancery rolls of King John.

Her names

The charters call her Aliz, the obituary of Eu Aelidis, and her nephew’s confirmation Adelicia; the Complete Peerage gives “Alice or Adelise”. The surname d’Aubigny is her father’s.

The year of her death

The chronicle of the counts of Eu says that she died before her husband, in 1154, and was buried at Foucarmont on the right side of the high altar. Her second marriage and her charter naming her son Count Henry, who succeeded in 1170, show that she outlived John; the Complete Peerage gives her death as in or before 1188.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from Alice to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through her son Henry and Henry’s descendants to John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547. That the John Washburn of the pedigrees was this man is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is probable.