♀Maud (surname unknown)

Maud was the mother of Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the royal official who rose to be Justiciar^W of England and Earl of Essex, by her husband Piers de Lutegareshale. She was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Geoffrey: her twenty-fourth great-grandmother by one and her twenty-fifth by the other.

Family

Piers and his wife Maud had at least two sons: Robert, the eldest, and Geoffrey, the second son, who in the end became the heir. Geoffrey also had a sister or half-sister, Julienne. Robert held Cherhill in Wiltshire from 1165 to 1185, and by 1187 the manor had passed to Geoffrey.

Maud and her son Robert gave the canons of Bradenstoke Priory^W a hide of land at Costowe, and Geoffrey later confirmed the gift, calling her “domina Matild’ mater mea”, the lady Matilda, my mother. She is said to have married, secondly, Hugh de Boclande.

In 1210, on the eve of the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, Geoffrey, by then Earl of Essex, gave the monks of St Swithun’s^W at Winchester the rents he held in the city, so that every year they would keep the anniversaries of King Henry II, of Kings Richard and John, of “Petri de Lutegareshale patris mei” (Peter de Lutegareshale, my father) and “Mathildis matris mee” (Matilda, my mother), and of Geoffrey himself, his wives and his children.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard descends from Maud by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Geoffrey Fitz Peter; on the second line Maud stands one generation further back. The two lines meet again in Polly Knapp (1798–1863), whose parents, Joseph Knapp (1763–1839) and Eunice Carver (1763–1845), both descended from Maud.

Notes

Sources

Maud is known from the Complete Peerage (2nd ed., vol. 5, 1926, pp. 122–123, under Essex), which calls Geoffrey “2nd s., but eventually h., of Piers de Lutegareshale, by Maud, his wife”. Its notes print Geoffrey’s confirmation to Bradenstoke from the priory’s cartulary (British Library, Stowe MS 925, f. 81), and his 1210 charter to St Swithun’s from that house’s cartulary (Additional MS 29436, f. 31v). Her second marriage, to Hugh de Boclande, is given there from the Colchester cartulary (ed. S. A. Moore, vol. 1, pp. 202, 205) and the Walden chronicle. Robert’s tenure of Cherhill is from the pipe rolls, and the sister or half-sister Julienne, mother of Morice de Bendenges, from Bracton’s Note Book.

Her name

Maud’s own family and surname are not known. The Latin charters write her name Matildis or Matild’, the Latin form of Maud.

The Bradenstoke charter

“Notum sit … quod ego Gaufridus filius Petri concessi … Deo et ecclesie sancte Marie de Bradenestoke et canonicis ibidem Deo servientibus illam hidam terre in villa de Costowe … quam domina Matild’ mater mea et Robertus frater meus … eis dederunt.”