♂Simon de Dammartin

Simon de Dammartin, also called Simon de Boulogne, was a French nobleman who held the counties of Ponthieu^W and Montreuil in northern France in right of his wife, Marie of Ponthieu. He was the twenty-fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Jeanne de Dammartin (died 1279).

Count of Ponthieu

Simon was a brother of Renaud de Dammartin^W, Count of Boulogne. He married Marie, the daughter and heiress of Guillaume II Talvas, Count of Ponthieu and Montreuil, who died on 4 October 1221, and Simon held the two counties as count in her right. A roll of arms from the reign of Henry III of England records his shield: silver, with three blue bars inside a red border.

Their daughter Jeanne

Simon and Marie’s eldest daughter, Jeanne de Dammartin, was married by proxy to King Henry III of England in 1235, but the marriage was annulled the next year. She married King Fernando III of Castile^W at Burgos before 31 October 1237, and in a letter of that year Fernando called Simon his father-in-law. Marie died in 1251, and Jeanne succeeded her as Countess of Ponthieu.

Notes

Sources

Simon’s titles, his marriage, his daughter Jeanne and her two marriages are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, CASTILE 5, pp. 495–496, and ENGLAND 4, p. 42, a printed genealogy of the medieval royal families; Guillaume II Talvas’s death is from p. 20. Fernando’s letter of 1237, in which he styles the count of Ponthieu his “socero” (father-in-law), and Simon’s arms, “Argent, three bars azure in a border gules”, are among the works Richardson cites on p. 496. That Simon was Renaud’s brother is from the Complete Peerage (2nd ed.), vol. I, p. 354.

Aumale

Richardson’s ENGLAND 5 entry (p. 49) and the Complete Peerage (vol. VI) also style Simon Count of Aumale. His CASTILE 5 entry gives him only Ponthieu and Montreuil, and it was Jeanne who gained Aumale, in 1259, as one of the heirs of her cousin Mahaut de Dammartin.