Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/73

Rh In 'D.N.B.' (vol. xxxi. p. 377) it is stated that Hugh de Laci married "Emeline (sometimes called Lesceline), daughter of Walter de Redelesford," and it adds: "She was alive in Nov., 1267, but dead before 1278" (Sweetman, ii. 834; 'Calendarium Genealogicum,' i. 256).

From the 'Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland,' however, we learn that this Hugh de Laci married Lesceline de Verdon (so named, as was the custom in those days after her grandmother, Lesceline, wife of Norman de Verdon, and daughter of Geoffrey de Clinton, Chamberlain and Treasurer to Henry I.).

Lesceline de Verdon was the only daughter of Bertram de Verdon by his second wife. Rohese, "a lady 'of Saxon origin (Banks's 'Dormant and Extinct Baronage,' vol. i. p. 191; 'B.E.P.,' p. 534).

The statement that Hugh de Laci married Lesceline de Verdon is also to be found in 'The Abbey of St. Mary, Croxden, Staffordshire,' by Charles Lynam, F.S.A., under 'Sketches of the Earlier Verduns,' and, I understand, in the latest edition of 'Burke's Extinct Peerage.'

The references in the 'Calendar of Documents' above mentioned are as follows:—

This last reference, which is a lengthy one, goes on to say that Hugh had two sons Walter and Roger who were alive in 1226 (Sweetman, i. 1372); but as from other sources ('D.N.B.,' vol. xxxi. p. 377) we learn that "the Earldom of Ulster of this creation came to an end at Hugh's death, for he left no male heir," we may naturally assume that his male issue, at all events, was not by his wife Lesceline. The 'Dunstable Annals' allege that "in 1225 Hugh had abandoned his wife, and was living with an adulteress" ('Ann. Mon.,' iii. 91).

As Lesceline was born in or before 1192—I have never heard she was a posthumous child—it would seem, from the fact that she had one child by her second husband (Stephen de Longespee), that she must have obtained a divorce from her first husband, Hugh de Laci ('B.E.P.,' p. 175, does not describe her as Hugh's widow), shortly after his desertion of her, circa 1225; for had she waited to remarry until his death in 1242 the birth of such a child would have been improbable. I have entirely failed to discover the date of her marriage to Stephen de Longespee, or the dates of his birth and decease.

I find no record that Hugh de Laci ever married a second time—he could not have done so unless he had been divorced by his first wife, because she survived him; and if he did not, it seems clear (as the records in the Irish State Papers are, without doubt, more reliable evidence than the works of modern peerage compilers) that Hugh de Laci's wife was Lesceline de Verdon.

How, then, came Lesceline to be described as Emeline, daughter and heir of Walter de Reddesford?

It is quite possible that the original writers of the De Laci and D'Evereux pedigrees may, in reading the old difficult writing from which they copied, have partly deciphered, and partly guessed, the name of Lesceline as Emeline, and that, instead of verifying the statement, one "authority" after another merely copied what others had Written, and so perpetuated the error.

Bertram de Verdon died in 1192. In 1198 Rohese his widow, whom he had married circa 1140—possibly in her teens—and who died 1215, gave 20l. to the King for liberty to marry again (Nichols's 'History of the bounty of Leicester,' vol. iii. part ii. p. 637), and the question in my mind is, Did she marry, secondly, Walter de Reddesford, Baron of Bray?

If so, it may be assumed that Lesceline, her only and, in 1198, very possibly unmarried daughter, went to reside with her mother and stepfather, and the peerage writers, having already decided for themselves, as I have shown above they may lave done, that Lesceline's name was Emeine, jumped to the conclusion from her so residing that she was the daughter, instead of the stepdaughter, of Walter de Reddesford, who most likely, having no issue by his wife Rohese, made his stepdaughter his heir.

This theory is one which, so far as my investigations have gone, I have found myself unable to prove or disprove, and is one which can only be made a certainty by knowing whom Walter de Reddesford married, and when, and whether or no he had any issue by his wife.