♂Saher de Quincy

Saher de Quincy (died 3 November 1219) was an English baron of Long Buckby in Northamptonshire and of Leuchars in Scotland, made Earl of Winchester in 1207 on the strength of his wife’s inheritance, one of the twenty-five barons who stood surety for Magna Carta in 1215, and a crusader who died at Damietta in Egypt. He was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by six separate lines of descent: by two of them, through his daughter Orabella Quincy (1202–1258), he was her twenty-third great-grandfather; by the other four, through his son Robert de Quincy (died 1217), he was her twenty-fifth great-grandfather by three and her twenty-sixth by the fourth.

A knight of the Angevin kings

Saher was the son and heir of Robert de Quincy of Long Buckby and of Orabel, the heiress of Ness of Leuchars in Fife. He was already a young knight in 1173, when he joined Henry the Young King^W in his rebellion against his father, Henry II. Before 1173 he married Margaret de Beaumont, a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester^W. From 1180 to 1184 he was castellan of Nonancourt in Normandy, and in November 1200 he was one of the escort of William the Lion, King of Scots, at Lincoln, and saw him do homage there to King John.

In 1203 Saher and Robert Fitzwalter^W held the castle of Vaudreuil together against the French. They gave it up before any assault was made, and the King of France held them prisoner at Compiègne until they were ransomed for £5,000.

The earldom

The turn in Saher’s fortunes came through his wife. In 1204 her brother Robert, Earl of Leicester^W, died without children, and Margaret became co-heiress with her sister’s son, Simon de Montfort^W, to the great Beaumont and Grandmesnil estates. Saher held the stewardship of the Leicester lands from 1205, and in March 1207 the king confirmed his half of them and granted him £10 a year from the county of Southampton as earl. He was known from then on as Earl of Winchester.

He rose high in King John’s service. He went with the king to Ireland in 1210, sat as a justiciar from 1211 to 1214, and in 1212 went as an ambassador to the Emperor Otto IV^W. On 15 May 1213 he was one of the witnesses when John surrendered his crown to the Pope.

Magna Carta and the war

On 4 March 1215 Saher took the cross with the king, yet by Easter he had joined the barons’ confederacy at Stamford. In June he was one of the twenty-five barons elected to guarantee the provisions of Magna Carta, and for it he and his son Roger were excommunicated by Pope Innocent III^W on 16 December 1215. In the First Barons’ War^W that followed, he and Robert Fitzwalter crossed to France to offer the English crown to Prince Louis^W, and on 9 January 1216 they came back with forty-two ships full of French knights.

Saher kept faith with Louis even after the young Henry III came to the throne. In the spring of 1217 the royal army besieged the castle of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, which was in his keeping, and he marched to relieve it with the Count of Perche and Robert Fitzwalter, but on 20 May 1217 he was defeated and taken prisoner at the Battle of Lincoln^W. He made his peace, and on 4 October his lands were restored to him.

Crusade and death

With the war over, Saher set out to fulfill the vow he had taken in 1215. In 1219 he sailed for the Holy Land with Robert Fitzwalter and others to join the Fifth Crusade^W, then besieging Damietta in Egypt. He fell ill shortly after he arrived, and died there on 3 November 1219. He was buried at Acre. The chronicler Matthew Paris^W remembered him as miles strenuus et elegans, “a vigorous and elegant knight.”

The family

Saher and Margaret had five sons, Robert, Roger, a second Robert, John and Reynold, and three daughters, Lorette, Hawise and Orabella. The eldest son, Robert de Quincy, married Hawise of Chester^W, later Countess of Lincoln, and died in London in 1217, two years before his father, leaving a daughter, Margaret de Quincy; he was buried in the church of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell. The earldom passed to the second son, Roger, who had been excommunicated with his father. Orabella Quincy married Richard de Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire.

Lines of descent

Two of the six lines run through Orabella Quincy and her son William Harcourt; the other four run through Robert de Quincy and his daughter Margaret de Quincy. They meet again in Alice Harcourt (died 1526), whose parents Richard Harcourt (died 1486) and Edith Saint Clair (born about 1423) both descend from Saher and Margaret; in Maurice Berkeley (about 1435–1506), whose parents James Berkeley (about 1394–1463) and Isabel Mowbray (died 1452) both do; 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

Saher’s parentage, marriage, career, death and burial, and the names of his children, are from Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), QUINCY 1, pp. 683–684, which cites the chancery rolls, the chronicle of Matthew Paris and the Complete Peerage. The rebellion of 1173, Nonancourt, the stewardship, the charter of March 1207 and the battle of 1217 are also in G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VIII (1898), WINCHESTER, pp. 168–169, which gives the charter’s date as 13 March 1207; the 2nd ed., vol. VII (1929), LEICESTER, dates the confirmation of his share of the Leicester lands 10 March 1206/7, saving to Earl Simon the third penny of the county. Matthew Paris’s words are quoted in the Complete Peerage, 1st ed., vol. VIII, p. 169, note c. Orabella’s marriage to Richard de Harcourt is from Richardson’s HARCOURT descent, p. 48.

His birth

No birth date is known. Richardson puts it at “say 1150”; the Complete Peerage gives about 1156, and its corrigenda (vol. VIII, p. 457) about 1154. The Complete Peerage dates the marriage between 1168 and 1173.

Orabella’s birth

The year 1202 given for Orabella Quincy comes from a WikiTree profile, not from Richardson or the Complete Peerage. It is late for a daughter of a marriage made before 1173, and may be too late.