♀Maud de Lacy

Maud de Lacy (died before 10 March 1288/9) was an English noblewoman, Countess of Gloucester and Hertford by her marriage to Richard de Clare, who in her long widowhood turned a Devon house of canons into an abbey of nuns. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by four separate lines of descent: by three of them she was her twenty-second great-grandmother, two through her son Thomas Clare (1245–1287) and one through her son Gilbert de Clare (1243–1295), and by the fourth, also through Thomas, her twenty-third.

Marriage

Maud’s marriage was a royal bargain. In October 1237 King Henry III, who held the young Richard de Clare as his ward, proposed to marry him to a daughter of the Count of La Marche, the king’s own half-sister, or else to let the Earl of Lincoln have the marriage for 3,000 marks. Richard de Clare married Maud de Lacy, a daughter of John de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln^W, and Margaret de Quincy, on or about 25 January 1237/8.

Countess

Maud’s first child, Isabel, was born in May 1240, and her heir, Gilbert, at Christchurch in Hampshire on 2 September 1243; the last, Eglantine, was born in 1257. In 1258 Richard sat on the barons’ council of twelve that set out to reform the king’s government. He died in Kent on 15 July 1262, rumored to have been poisoned, and was buried in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey^W at his father’s right hand. Maud raised a splendid tomb for him there.

Widowhood

Maud outlived her husband by some twenty-five years. Her dower included the manor of Clare and the manor and castle of Usk, and about 1271–72 she sued in the church courts of Canterbury for a third of his movable goods, which were valued at £12,000. She was a benefactress of the Austin friars at Clare, and she had wished to found a convent of nuns at Sandleford, near Newbury, though that plan seems not to have gone ahead. Instead, in 1284, she turned the house of canons at Canonsleigh, in Burlescombe in Devon, into an abbey for forty Augustinian nuns, at the church of St John the Evangelist and St Etheldreda. She was living in 1287 and died before 10 March 1288/9.

The family

Richard and Maud had three sons, Gilbert, Thomas and Bogo, and four daughters, Isabel, Margaret, Rose and Eglantine. Isabel, born in May 1240, was married at Lyons in June 1257 to the Marquess of Montferrat, and Margaret, born in 1249, married Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, in 1272. Bogo, born on 21 July 1248, became a clerk at Oxford, held church livings from 1259 on, rose to be Treasurer of York, and died suddenly in October 1294. Eglantine died in 1257 at fifteen weeks old and was buried at Tewkesbury.

Lines of descent

Three of the lines run through Thomas Clare and his daughter Margaret de Clare, and one through Gilbert de Clare and his daughter Eleanor de Clare (1292–1337). They meet again in Maurice Berkeley (about 1435–1506), whose parents James Berkeley (about 1394–1463) and Isabel Mowbray (died 1452) both descend from Richard and Maud; in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825) both do; and in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884) both do.

Notes

Sources

Maud’s parentage, her marriage, her children, her husband’s death and burial, her tomb for him, her dower, her gifts to the church and her death are from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., vol. V (1926), GLOUCESTER, pp. 700–702, and Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 3, p. 196, with her father and mother at LACY 1, pp. 479–480. Both are printed accounts of the medieval nobility, citing the patent and close rolls, the papal letters and the monastic annals. The suit for a third of her husband’s goods is from Richardson, citing the printed cases of the church courts of Canterbury; Richardson also cites her charters in the cartulary of Canonsleigh Abbey. The plan for Sandleford and her gifts to the friars at Clare are from the Complete Peerage, p. 702, which also notes a letter from her to the king’s chancellor in 1268.

Canonsleigh

The Complete Peerage describes the change as turning “a house of canons regular at Legh or Canonleigh in Burlescombe, Devon, into an abbey of nuns or canonesses in 1284”; Richardson calls it an Augustinian nunnery for forty nuns that she founded at Legh. The abbey is known today as Canonsleigh Abbey^W.

Her birth

Neither Richardson nor the Complete Peerage gives her birth date.