♂Piers de Lutegareshale

Piers de Lutegareshale (died before May 1198) was the father of Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the royal official who rose to be Justiciar^W of England and Earl of Essex. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Geoffrey: her twenty-fourth great-grandfather by one and her twenty-fifth by the other.

Family and death

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.

Piers is said to have died a monk at Winchester, and he was first buried in the monks’ cemetery there. On 8 May 1198, two months before he was made Justiciar, Geoffrey had his father’s body taken up from the cemetery and moved into the church itself.

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. One of the monks was to say mass every day at the altar of St Katherine in the great church of St Swithun, before which, the charter says, Piers lay buried.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard descends from Piers by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Geoffrey Fitz Peter; on the second line Piers 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 Piers.

Notes

Sources

Everything known of Piers comes 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 the 1210 charter from the cartulary of St Swithun’s (British Library, Additional MS 29436, f. 31v); give the moving of his body on 8 May 1198, and his death as a monk at Winchester, from the Winchester annals (Annales de Wintonia, p. 67); place Robert at Cherhill from the pipe rolls; and name the sister or half-sister Julienne, mother of Morice de Bendenges, from Bracton’s Note Book. The year of Piers’s death is not known; he was dead by May 1198.

The charter of 1210

”… ad faciendum inde singulis annis in perpetuum anniversarium domini Regis Henrici patris dominorum Regis Ricardi et Regis Johannis et anniversarium ipsius Regis Ricardi et Regis Johannis ipsius et anniversarium Petri de Lutegareshale patris mei et anniversarium Mathildis matris mee et anniversarium meum et anniversarium sponsarum mearum Beatricis et Aveline et liberorum meorum Et ut qualibet die faciant unum de monachis suis missam pro fidelibus in altari sancte Katerine in magna ecclesia sancti Swithuni coram quo predictus Petrus pater meus sepultus est …” The gift was offered on the high altar on the eve of the Nativity of St John the Baptist (23 June) 1210.

His name

The Latin records call him Petrus, Peter; Piers is the French form of the name. His son was accordingly known as Galfridus filius Petri, Geoffrey Fitz Peter or Geoffrey fitz Piers.