♀Maud de Warenne

Maud de Warenne (died in or after 1212) was Countess of Eu by her marriage to Henry, Count of Eu and lord of Hastings, and the mother of Alice, the heiress of Eu. Widowed in 1183, she married again into the Norman house of Estouteville, lords of Valmont. She was the twenty-third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Alice of Eu (died 1246).

Countess of Eu

Maud, also called Mahaut or Matilda, was the daughter of Hamelin, Earl of Warenne^W, and of Isabel^W, the daughter and heir of William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. She married Henry of Eu, who had come into the county of Eu in Normandy and the lordship of Hastings as a boy. Henry died on 16 March 1183 and was buried in the choir of the abbey church of Foucarmont, leaving Maud with two small sons and a daughter.

A chronicle of the counts of Eu, written by a monk of Foucarmont in 1390, records that in her widowhood she lived for a long time at the abbey of Foucarmont and kept her household at its entrance. Within three years of Henry’s death both her sons had died, and her daughter Alice was left the heir to Eu.

Second marriage

Maud then married Henry d’Estouteville, Seigneur de Valmont and Rames in Normandy, who also held Eckington in Derbyshire, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Barton and Bradmere in Nottinghamshire, and Dedham in Essex. By him she had a daughter, Isabel, who married Pierre de Préaux. In 1212 Maud made a gift to the abbey of Valmont^W, and she died in or after that year. She is said to have been buried at Foucarmont, beside her first husband, though perhaps it was at Valmont.

On St. Lucy’s day in 1227, at his castle of Valmont, Henry d’Estouteville gave the monks of Valmont the tithes of his Valmont fair for the soul of “Matildis Comitisse de Augo uxoris mee”, Matilda, Countess of Eu, his wife, to keep the church lit on the day of her death.

The family

Henry and Maud had two sons and a daughter. The sons, Raoul and Guy, died as young children, Guy in 1185 and Raoul, the elder, in 1186, and Raoul was buried at Foucarmont. Their sister Alice was left the only sister and heir, and the man she married, Raoul d’Exoudun, became Count of Eu by the marriage.

Notes

Sources

Maud’s parentage, both marriages, her widowhood, her gift to Valmont, her daughter Isabel and her burial are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, pp. 159–160), which cites the chronicle of the counts of Eu, the cartularies of Foucarmont and Valmont as printed by La Roque in his history of the house of Harcourt, and Anselme. The chronicle’s words are that she “demoura moult long temps en labbaye de Foucarmont en sa vefvete et tenoit son estat a la porte”. Isabel is placed as Maud’s daughter because she was the daughter of Henry d’Estouteville and half-sister of the Countess Alice.

The year of her death

The chronicle of the counts of Eu puts her death in 1207, but her gift to Valmont in 1212 shows her still living then, and the Complete Peerage gives her death as in or after 1212. The first edition of the Complete Peerage, in its corrections, gave 30 March 1207.

Not the wife of Osbert de Préaux

Thomas Stapleton, in his work on the Norman Exchequer rolls, took this Maud to be the Maud who was the wife of Osbert de Préaux, and the first edition of the Complete Peerage followed him in calling her Osbert’s widow. The second edition sets this aside: Osbert belonged to an older generation, and Stapleton had run together two men named Pierre de Préaux, Osbert’s son, who died without children, and the younger Pierre who married Isabel d’Estouteville.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from Maud to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through her daughter Alice and her 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.