♀Margaret of Gloucester

Margaret of Gloucester^W (died 6 April 1187) was an Anglo-Norman heiress, the eldest daughter of Miles of Gloucester, Earl of Hereford, and the wife of Humphrey de Bohun, steward to King Henry I of England. She was the twenty-fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Humphrey de Bohun.

The heiress

Margaret was the eldest daughter of Miles of Gloucester^W, Earl of Hereford and Constable of England, and of Sibyl de Neufmarche. Her father was hereditary sheriff of Gloucester, and the Empress Matilda^W created him Earl of Hereford on 25 July 1141. She married Humphrey de Bohun, the king’s steward, and their son, Humphrey de Bohun, was recognized as hereditary Constable of England.

Miles’s five sons all died without children, and when the last of them, Mahel, died, the inheritance was divided among his three daughters and their husbands. Margaret is said to have brought the county of Hereford and the constableship of England as her share, although the title of earl came to the Bohuns only with her grandson Henry de Bohun in 1200. In 1166 Margaret herself certified to the crown the knights who had been given land on her father’s fee in Gloucester in the time of King Henry.

The line to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) passes from Humphrey through Humphrey’s descendant John Washburn (died 1547), a step that is probably right but rests on a family historian’s identification rather than on a record.

Death and burial

Margaret died on 6 April 1187 and was buried at Llanthony Secunda Priory^W, outside Gloucester, where her father and mother also lay. An account of the graves in the chapter house places “the worshipful Matron of Llanthony, Lady Margaret” at the foot of her mother, Sibyl, near Miles and three of her brothers.

Notes

Sources

Margaret’s parentage, her marriage, the division of her father’s inheritance, the certification of 1166, her death and her burial are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 6, 1926, pp. 454–458 and notes, under Hereford), which cites Giraldus Cambrensis for Miles’s sons, Dugdale’s Monasticon (vol. 6, p. 134) for the division and her death, and the Red Book of the Exchequer (pp. 292–293) for the certification. Miles’s creation as earl is from the same work, vol. 1 (1910), p. 20. The account of the chapter-house graves is from Aske’s Collections, printed in Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica (vol. 1, pp. 168–169), as quoted in the Complete Peerage; it credits Humphrey with “the earldom of Hereford”, which the Complete Peerage marks as a mistake. The Llanthony chronicle calls her Margery.

Earl or constable

The Complete Peerage remarks that the chronicle’s “county of Hereford” for Margaret “appears to be anticipating events, so far as concerns a titular earldom”: the earldom came to the family only when her grandson Henry was created Earl of Hereford on 28 April 1200.

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.