♂Hugh le Bigod

Hugh le Bigod (died February 1225) was an English nobleman, Earl of Norfolk, the son and heir of Roger le Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and the husband of Maud Marshal. He was the twenty-fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Isabel le Bigod.

Magna Carta

Hugh was the son and heir of Roger le Bigod, Earl of Norfolk^W, and his wife Ida. Hugh le Bigod married Maud Marshal, the eldest daughter of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke^W, probably before Lent 1207.

In 1215 Hugh and his father joined the barons who rose against King John. When the king granted Magna Carta on 15 June 1215, father and son were both among the twenty-five barons chosen to guarantee that he kept it. For that they were among the barons whom Pope Innocent III^W excommunicated on 16 December 1215, as the quarrel turned into the First Barons’ War^W.

Earl of Norfolk

His father died in 1221, and on 2 August 1221 Hugh did homage for the earldom of Norfolk. He was also Lord High Steward^W of England. He held the earldom for less than four years, and died between 11 and 18 February 1225, when his eldest son, Roger, was eleven or twelve. Before 13 October 1225 Maud married William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey.

The couple had four sons, Roger, Hugh, Ralph and possibly William, and one daughter, Isabel.

The family

Their eldest son, Roger, born in 1212 or 1213, succeeded as Earl of Norfolk and married Isabel of Scotland, a daughter of William the Lion^W, at Alnwick in May 1225. In 1245 he led the English delegation to the First Council of Lyon^W, and the same year he put his wife away, nominally because they were too closely related, until a church court compelled him to take her back in 1253. He held the marshalcy under his mother’s commission, confirmed by the king in 1246, and died in July 1270; he was buried at Thetford.

Notes

Sources

Hugh’s parentage, marriage, children, his part in Magna Carta and the excommunication, his homage for the earldom, his office of steward and his death, with Maud’s second marriage, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), BIGOD 2, pp. 85–86, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility that cites the Complete Peerage, the chronicle of Matthew Paris and the letters of Pope Innocent III. Roger’s marriage and career are from the same pages.

The marriage date

“Probably before Lent 1207” is Richardson’s own estimate; no date for the wedding is given.

His numbering and dates

Richardson counts Hugh the 5th Earl of Norfolk; the usual modern numbering makes him the 3rd. Richardson gives his death as between 11 and 18 February 1224/5, the year written in the old style, when the year began on 25 March; by the modern reckoning he died in February 1225. No date of birth is given.