♂John of Eu

John of Eu (died 26 June 1170) was Count of Eu^W in Normandy and lord of Hastings in England for thirty years, from the civil war of King Stephen’s reign, in which he was taken prisoner and lost the castle of Tickhill, into the reign of Henry II. He was the twenty-fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Henry of Eu (died 1183).

Tickhill and Lincoln

John was the son and heir of Henry, Count of Eu, by his third wife, Margaret de Sully, a niece of King Stephen. His father became a monk at Foucarmont and died there on 12 July 1140. Stephen gave John the custody of the castle of Tickhill^W, but in the war with the Empress Maud known as the Anarchy^W John was taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln^W on 2 February 1140/1, the battle in which Stephen himself was captured. The victors seized Tickhill, and when John’s other lands were given back to him, the castle was not.

Lord of Hastings

John was at the Council of Clarendon in January 1163/4, where Henry II set out the Constitutions of Clarendon^W against the claims of the Church. In the accounts of 1165 he owed the king 100 marks as a pledge for Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s great opponent Thomas Becket, and the debt stood against him until it was pardoned in 1176. In 1166 he returned 56 knights’ fees^W of the old enfeoffment in the rape of Hastings^W, besides four that his father had held under Henry I and that the Bishop of Chichester now held. His seal shows a knight on horseback, his shield with an engrailed border.

John married Alice d’Aubigny, the daughter of William d’Aubigny, Earl of Arundel^W, and of Adeliza of Louvain^W, the widow of King Henry I. John and Alice were married by 1166, when John held eleven knights’ fees in Kent of the Earl of Arundel as her marriage portion.

Death

At the end of his life John took the habit of a monk at Foucarmont. He died on 26 June 1170 and was buried beside his father in the chapter house of the abbey, leaving his son Henry under age, in the custody of the Earl of Arundel. Alice married again, to Alvred de St. Martin, the king’s steward and the founder of Robertsbridge Abbey^W.

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

John’s parentage, his custody of Tickhill, his capture at Lincoln, his attendance at Clarendon, his return of knights’ fees in 1166, his debts on the Sussex Pipe Rolls, his seal, marriage, death and burial, and his children, are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, pp. 156–158). It cites the Pipe Rolls, an inquisition of the first year of King John, the obituaries of Eu and Le Tréport, which keep his anniversary on 26 June, Robert de Torigni’s chronicle under the year 1170, and the chronicle of the counts of Eu written by a monk of Foucarmont in 1390, which gives his epitaph with the year 1170. The children’s careers come from that chronicle, the Pipe Roll of 1196–1197, the Robertsbridge charters and the chancery rolls of King John.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from John to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through his 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.