♀Gundred (surname unknown)

Gundred (died 27 May 1085) was a Norman noblewoman, married to William de Warenne, the first Earl of Surrey, and the mother of the second earl. Her parentage has been disputed at length by historians. She was the twenty-sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) through her son William de Warenne, and her twenty-seventh great-grandmother by a second line through the same son, so by two separate lines of descent.

Marriage and death

Gundred married William de Warenne before 1078, and perhaps before 1070. In 1078 the two are said to have been joint founders of the priory of Lewes^W. She died in childbed at Castle Acre in Norfolk on 27 May 1085 and was buried at Lewes. Of the children she bore him, his heir was William, and a second son was named Reynold.

Her parentage

The Complete Peerage says that her parentage has caused, “probably, greater controversy than that of any other person”. Her monument called her “stirps ducum”, of ducal stock. Until about 1846 the usual view made her a daughter of William the Conqueror and Queen Matilda^W. Another reading took her to be the sister of Gherbod, Earl of Chester^W, as the chronicler Orderic Vitalis^W calls him her brother, and a third made her Matilda’s daughter by an earlier husband.

The Peerage rejects the royal descent. When a marriage was proposed between her son William and an illegitimate daughter of Henry I, Anselm^W objected that the pair were related in the fourth and sixth generations, a degree that, by the argument the Peerage adopts, cannot fit Gundred being Queen Matilda’s daughter. It does not name her father.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son William de Warenne, the second earl. They part with the second earl’s children. One runs through his daughter Ada de Warenne, her daughter Margaret of Scotland and Margaret’s son Henry de Bohun (1176–1220) to Henry’s son Humphrey de Bohun. The other runs through the second earl’s son William de Warenne and his daughter Isabel de Warenne, then Isabel’s daughter Maud de Warenne, and Maud’s granddaughter Maud of Eu (died 1241). Humphrey de Bohun married Maud of Eu, and the two lines meet again in their daughter Alice de Bohun. From her the pedigrees carry the descent down to John Washburn (died 1547), and so probably to Nancy Jane Blanchard.

Notes

Sources

Gundred’s marriage before 1078, her death in childbed at Castle Acre on 27 May 1085, her burial in the priory of Lewes, and her sons William and Reynold are given in the first edition of the Complete Peerage (vol. 7, 1896, under Surrey, pp. 324-325); the joint foundation of Lewes priory in 1078 is stated in a note on p. 324. These are compiled peerage accounts, not records of the time.

Parentage

The Complete Peerage (1st ed., vol. 7, pp. 324-325) sets out the competing theories: that she was a daughter of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, the view prevalent until about 1846; that she was the sister of Gherbod, Earl of Chester, on the authority of Orderic and the Book of Hyde Abbey, which Sir George Duckett took to mean foster-sister; and Thomas Stapleton’s theory of about 1845 that she and Gherbod were children of Matilda by an earlier husband. The Peerage reports that Freeman, who had accepted Stapleton’s view, later withdrew it, that the charters at Cluny make no mention of any kinship between Gundred and Matilda, and that the disproof of Matilda as her mother rests on Chester Waters’s argument from Anselm’s objection to the proposed marriage of her son. The Peerage also notes that a Lewes charter in which William grants for the soul of his deceased wife Gundred and of Queen Matilda, whom it calls his wife’s mother, was the evidence on which Stapleton relied, and that the foundation charter of the priory, which makes her Matilda’s daughter, was attacked by Waters as unreliable. Burke’s Peerage (1869) names Gundred as a daughter of William I; that statement is not followed here.

The descent through John Washburn

That the John whom the pedigrees give as a son of Joyce Botetourt’s great-granddaughter Joan Mitton was John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547, is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is given here as probable.