Some corrections and additions to the Complete Peerage: Volume 10: The Early Veres (PROPOSED CORRECTIONS)

THE EARLY VERES

Volume 10, Appendix J, page 115:
The daughters [of Aubrey II and Alice] were: (i) Alice, to whom her father gave as marriage portion land at Ugley (Essex). She m., 1stly, as his 2nd wife, Robert de Essex, lord of Raleigh, for whose soul and the souls of her father and her brother Robert de Vere she gave land in Ugley to the Order of the Hospital;(i)
Note i (continued on page 116):
Round, Essex Arch. Soc. Trans., N.S., vol. viii, pp. 329-30. By his 1st wife, Gunnor Bigod (see NORFOLK), Robert was father of Henry de Essex, whose da. Agnes m., as his 3rd wife, the 1st Earl of Oxford. As the Lord of Rayleigh had already been married, Round assumed that Alice was his 2nd wife; but subsequently he abandoned this conclusion, in the belief that Robert's undoubted wife, Gunnor Bigod, survived her husband, and suggested that Alice's husband was an otherwise unknown son of that Robert and brother of Henry de Essex (Geoffrey de Mandeville, p. 391). However, eventually he reverted to his original theory (Rot. de Dominabus, p. 77). Probably he had come to the conclusion that Gunnor de Essex, who occurs in connexion with Binham (Dugdale, Mon., vol. iii, p. 348), was not Robert's wife, but an otherwise unknown daughter, as suggested (for chronological reasons) by Miss Fry (Essex Arch. Soc. Trans., Orig. S., vol. v, p. 107). Dr. Farrer makes Alice the wife of Robert de Essex in one passage, of Henry de Essex in another (op. cit. [Honors and Knights' Fees], vol. ii, pp. 201-02; vol. iii, p. 407).

Views have differed as to whether Alice's husband, Robert de Essex, was the same man as the Robert de Essex who married Gunnor Bigod and was father of Henry de Essex. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan [Domesday Descendants, pp. 450, 451] states that Gunnor survived her husband Robert, and remarried to Haimo de St Clair, by whom she had a son Hubert, his father's successor. She therefore revives Round's suggestion, referred to in the note, that the Robert de Essex who married Aubrey's sister, Alice, must have been a son of the Robert de Essex who married Gunnor, possibly by an earlier marriage.

Rosie Bevan, in April 2003, suggested that the Gunnor de Essex connected with Binham was not a daughter of Robert de Essex and Gunnor Bigod, but a daughter of their son Henry de Essex by his wife Cecily, arguing that Cecily may have been a daughter of Roger de Valognes by his wife Agnes, who calls Gunnor de Essex her neptis.

[Item last updated: 22 June 2003.]