♀Ida (surname unknown)

Ida was an English noblewoman of the twelfth century who married Roger le Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and became Countess of Norfolk. She was the twenty-fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Hugh le Bigod (died 1225).

The king’s son

Before her marriage Ida was a mistress of King Henry II^W, and she was the mother of the king’s son William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury^W. In his own charters William named his mother as Countess Ida. Her own family is not known for certain.

Countess of Norfolk

Roger married Ida, probably before 1190, and the couple had five sons, Hugh, William, Roger, John and Ralph, and three daughters, Mary, Margaret and Ida. Between 1189 and 1193 Roger gave Reading Abbey^W three marks of rent in Walton, Norfolk, for the health of his own soul and that of his wife.

The family

Their son Ralph Bigod was among the prisoners taken at the Battle of Bouvines^W in 1214. A French record of the captives names him “Radulphus Bigot, frater Comitis Saresburiensis”, the brother of the Earl of Salisbury: William Longespée, his half-brother through Ida.

Notes

Sources

Ida’s marriage, her children by Roger and by Henry II, the gift to Reading Abbey and the record of Bouvines are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), BIGOD 1, p. 84, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility. For William Longespée’s charters naming his mother, Richardson cites the London cartulary of Bradenstoke Priory (Wiltshire Record Society, vol. 35, 1979, pp. 143 and 188). The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VI (1895), p. 39, dates the marriage before 1190, because Roger calls himself Earl of Norfolk in the charter that names his wife Ida, and adds that he is said to have married Isabella, a daughter of Hamelin, Earl of Warenne, perhaps the same woman as Ida.

Her family

Her maiden name is not known. Richardson argues that she was a Tony, perhaps a daughter of Ralph de Tony (died 1162), of Flamstead, Hertfordshire, and his wife, Margaret de Beaumont: two of her children were named Ralph and Margaret, she may have been named for Ralph de Tony’s mother, Ida of Hainault, and William Longespée’s family had long ties to a younger brother of Ralph de Tony. An American writer in 1856 called her “Ida de Thouy”. Richardson himself concludes: “Conclusive evidence of Ida’s parentage is still lacking.”