♂Henry of Eu

Henry of Eu (died 16 March 1183) was Count of Eu^W in Normandy and lord of Hastings in England. He came into his inheritance as a boy, and while he was still a ward he joined the rebellion of the younger Henry against his father, King Henry II, in 1173. He was the twenty-third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Alice of Eu (died 1246).

A boy count

Henry was the son and heir of John, Count of Eu and lord of Hastings, and of Alice d’Aubigny, a daughter of William d’Aubigny, Earl of Arundel^W. His father became a monk at the abbey of Foucarmont near Eu, which his grandfather Henry had founded, and died in 1170, leaving Henry under age. His mother married again, to Alvred de St. Martin, the king’s steward and the founder of Robertsbridge Abbey.

For some years Henry was in the custody of the Earl of Arundel, who answered at the Exchequer for the knights of the Eu fees. It was in those years that the Revolt of 1173–1174^W broke out, and Henry gave himself and his castles to Henry the Young King^W and the Count of Flanders, siding with the king’s eldest surviving son against the king himself. By 1177 he was answering for his own fees.

Count and patron

Henry married Maud de Warenne, the daughter of Hamelin, Earl of Warenne, and of Isabel, the daughter and heir of William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. His seal shows a knight on horseback, his shield charged with an indented or engrailed border. He gave part of his forest to the abbey at Eu, and at his mother’s asking he gave the canons a wood as well.

Henry died on 16 March 1183 and was buried in the choir of the abbey church of Foucarmont, before the altar, where Maud is said to have been laid beside him.

The family

Henry and Maud had two sons and a daughter. The sons, Raoul and Guy, died as young children, Guy in 1185 and Raoul, the elder, in 1186, and Raoul was buried at Foucarmont. Their sister Alice was left the only sister and heir, and the man she married, Raoul d’Exoudun, became Count of Eu by the marriage.

Notes

Sources

Henry’s parentage, wardship, part in the rising of 1173, marriage, seal, gifts, death and burial, and his children, are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, pp. 158–160), which cites the Pipe Rolls for Sussex, the chronicler Robert de Torigni (“Comes Aucensis Henricus subdidit se et castella sua Regi juniori et Comiti Flandrensi”), the chronicle of the counts of Eu written by a monk of Foucarmont in 1390, and the obituaries of Eu and Le Tréport. The Complete Peerage calls the chronicle the principal authority for the family, while warning that it is not accurate on the parentage of the earlier countesses.

The day and year of his death

The obituary of Eu keeps his anniversary on 16 March and that of Le Tréport on 17 March, so the Complete Peerage gives “16 or 17 Mar. 1183”; the chronicle of the counts of Eu gives the year 1183. The Pipe Rolls show a Count Henry of Eu still answering for scutages assessed in the first years of Richard I, and the Complete Peerage remarks that unless the rolls are mistaken he must have lived some time after 1189.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from Henry to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through his daughter Alice and her 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.