♂Roger le Bigod

Roger le Bigod (died 1221) was an English nobleman, Earl of Norfolk and steward of the royal household, whose career ran through four reigns, from Henry II to Henry III. He was the twenty-fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Hugh le Bigod (died 1225).

A disputed inheritance

Roger was the son and heir of Hugh le Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, by his first wife, Juliane de Vere, and is said to have been born before 1140. In the rising of the early 1170s he took the side of King Henry II^W against his own father: at the Battle of Fornham^W he bore the standard of St Edmund, under which the royal forces fought.

When his father died in 1176, Roger’s stepmother, Gundred, disputed the inheritance with him, pressing the claims of her own son, and the king took the Bigod lands into his own hands. For the rest of that reign Roger seems to have had little power, though he acted as steward at the court held at Guildford in 1186.

Earl of Norfolk

The accession of Richard I in 1189 restored him. By a charter of 27 November 1189 the new king confirmed him in the earldom of Norfolk and in the stewardship of the royal household, and sent him as one of the ambassadors to King Philip of France to arrange the coming crusade. He was put in charge of Hereford Castle in 1191, was summoned in 1193 to go into Germany with the chancellor while Richard’s release from captivity was negotiated, and helped carry the canopy at Richard’s second coronation on 17 April 1194. He sat as a royal justice under Richard and went on as a judge under King John, and in 1200 he was one of the envoys sent to summon William the Lion, King of Scotland, to do homage at Lincoln.

Roger married Ida, probably before 1190, and the couple had five sons, Hugh, William, Roger, John and Ralph, and three daughters, Mary, Margaret and Ida. Between 1189 and 1193 Roger gave Reading Abbey^W three marks of rent in Walton, Norfolk, for the health of his own soul and that of his wife. Before the marriage Ida had been a mistress of Henry II, and her son by the king, William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury^W, was Roger’s stepson.

Magna Carta

Roger was imprisoned in 1213, for reasons that are not recorded, and in 1214 went with King John to Poitou. The next year he joined the barons’ league against the king, and when John granted Magna Carta on 15 June 1215, father and son were both among the twenty-five barons chosen to guarantee that he kept it. Pope Innocent III^W excommunicated them with the other barons on 16 December 1215, and in the First Barons’ War^W the king forfeited Roger’s lands and ravaged them.

After the young Henry III came to the throne, Roger returned to his allegiance. His lands were ordered restored in September 1217, and his rights were recognized at the Council of Oxford on 12 May 1221. He died that year, before 2 August, when Hugh did homage for the earldom.

The family

Their son Ralph Bigod was among the prisoners taken at the Battle of Bouvines^W in 1214. A French record of the captives names him “Radulphus Bigot, frater Comitis Saresburiensis”, the brother of the Earl of Salisbury: William Longespée, his half-brother through Ida.

Notes

Sources

Roger’s parentage, career, marriage, children and death, and Ida’s son by Henry II, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), BIGOD 1, p. 84, a printed genealogy of the medieval nobility. The royal charter of 27 November 1189, the court at Guildford in 1186 and the Council of Oxford in 1221 are from the Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VI (1895), p. 39, which also names Roger and his eldest son among the twenty-five guardians of Magna Carta. Hugh’s homage on 2 August 1221 is from Richardson, BIGOD 2, p. 85.

His birth and the battle

Richardson gives Roger’s birth as before 1140; the Complete Peerage gives before 1150. Richardson places the Battle of Fornham in 1172; it is generally dated 1173.

The marriage date

The Complete Peerage dates the marriage before 1190 because Roger calls himself Earl of Norfolk in the charter that names his wife Ida. It adds that he is said to have married Isabella, a daughter of Hamelin, Earl of Warenne, perhaps the same woman as Ida.

His numbering

Richardson counts Roger the 4th Earl of Norfolk; the usual modern numbering makes him the 2nd. The Complete Peerage gives his death as between May and August 1221.