Comments on the Archbishop William la Zouche of York

This posting does not pretend to give a comprehensive argument for the details of the life of William la Zouche, either before or after he became archbishop of York. It is merely is meant to give an outline of the tentative conclusions I have so far reached based on on-going research that has lasted, off and on, for eight years, in the hope that should I never be in a position to publish a polished version of my research, others might find a certain amount of stimulation and may be spared some of the long hours of academic struggle that will have gone into these few lines.

All previous studies of the archbishop's life depend heavily on his will as a means for establishing a framework to his life in which to include to mass of other surviving details from the contemporary written record of his time. One point of the published version of the will is quite curious and that is the phrase "parentes, consanguineos meos" which is normally translated as "parents, blood relations". I have come to the conclusion that this should be read as "parentes consanguineos meos" without the comma which almost certainly represents an editorial addition in the printed version and cannot have existed in the original 14th century Latin. As a phrase "parentes consanguineos" was a legal term which exists even today in the Portuguese legal code to indicate someone too closely related for a marriage to be legally binding. If we remember that the archbishop was a university trained specialist in canon law, then, considering the way church law was applied in his lifetime, we might just as easily interpret the passage concerned as meaning "individuals related to me within the degree  of 3rd cousin or less". The passage concerned, thus, cannot be taken as an indication that his parents were still alive, though for six out of the last seven years of my research, just like all of my predecessors, this is a position that I took, too.

On close examination, the archbishop's will shows a far greater partiality to his relatives than is apparent at first sight, as an examination of the executors of his will would show. Lord Neville of Raby, the first person mentioned as an executor, is the husband of an individual my current research indicates to have been a second cousin of the archbishop. In addition, he was a companion in war and can be shown to have been a political ally. Ralph la Zouche is specifically mentioned as being the archbishop's brother. Anketil Mallory is either a brother-in-law (more probably) or a half-brother (less probably). Christopher Mallory is either a first or a second cousin, depending on whether his mother was a much younger sister of the archbishop's father or a first cousin of that man. Robert Constable would have been directly ancestral to the man who was either contracted or already married to the archbishop's neice. This would lead one to expect that the other executors would also have some family connection, either direct or indirect, with the archbishop, too.

Another thing one should be careful about is not to confuse the archbishop or his brother Roger with two sons of the first baron William la Zouche of Harringworth. It is extremely easy to do as it would seem that both Williams became clerics and both Rogers were knights and lords of manors, though it would seem that the Roger who was the son of William la Zouche of Harringworth did not leave descendants. It is on the basis of this overlapping in naming and what I believe to be a mistaken reading of the archbishop's will that many people in the past (including myself) have assumed that the baron was the father of the archbishop, as he was old enough to be the archbishop's father, alive at the archbishop's death, and clearly the father of a William who was a cleric. Other contemporary evidence, however, makes it impossible to believe that this could be the case.

The archbishop and his brother Roger have to be the sons of the first Roger la Zouche of Lubbesthorpe and Juliana (Tresgoz?). Moreover, William would appear to have been a youngest son, being born either shortly before or soon after his father's death, as he is nowhere mentioned in the property settlements made after the first Roger's death, whereas as various other sons are. One can assume, on this basis, that the archbishop was probably born around 1300 or 1301. Ecclesiastical preferment before the mid-1320s probably refers, not to him but to his cousin who was the son of the first baron la Zouche of Harringworth.

The archbishop's career was a brilliant one and he was undoubtedly a man of energy and, being highly educated, of talent. What should not be overlooked is that he was also well-connected in terms of family and that he placed importance on family interest in the management of his affairs, both as archbishop and before. Moreover, this was natural for a man of his times.

Concerning the archbishop's Mallory connections, Anketil Mallory is mentioned by a late 14th century memorandum of a complicated series of land transfers as being the brother of the archbishop which would not be impossible if we assume that this particular Anketil is the son of the archbishop's mother, Juliana, and her second husband Reginald Mallory. However, another document in the same collection refers to a William Mallory as being this Anketil's brother, though he is closely associated with Anketil, at no time does he appear in connection with the archbishop during the archbishop's life. Considering other matters that cannot be gone into here, it would be easier to assume that Anketil was the husband of a sister of the archbishop, thus making him a brother-in-law instead of a blood brother. On the other hand, William would have been a blood brother of Anketil, though not directly connected with the archbishop by blood or marriage.

Christopher Mallory, however, would appear to be a representative of a different branch of the Mallory family (Kirkby Mallory) from Anketil (Walton on the Wold). His connection can best be explained as a cousin (either first or second) but would have been well within the degree of blood relationship for the archbishop to have considered him as being closely related according to the definitions provided by canon law at the time.

I hope eventually to provide a fuller and much more coherent life of the archbishop in the future, but, even if I don't, a better understanding of the points raised above can help a future researcher do the same. I don't see anything brought up in this blog as being a final statement of fact, but rather as an attempt to stimulate research taking place in directions it may not have otherwise gone.

The implications of la Zouche chronology as it intersects with Mallory history: Juliana of Lubbesthorpe

Without accounting for the chronology of the la Zouche families of Ashby la Zouche, Harringworth, and Lubbesthorpe and their sometimes intricate intertwining range of relationships with the Mallorys, it is impossible to fully understand Mallory history from the last half of the 13th century through the first half of the 15th, whether it concerns the Mallory families of Kirkby Mallory, Walton on the Wold, Hutton Conyers, Sudborough, or Papworth St Agnes. In historical terms, however, the various branches of the la Zouche family consistently made more of an impact on England than did any branch of the medieval Mallory family. Nevertheless, there are many aspects of la Zouche chronology, especially before the mid-14th century which are confusing in the extreme and deserve careful attention. It is rather like encountering an immensely difficult example of sudoku, where one must process literally hundreds of possible numerical combinations before coming across hopefully the only one that can fully satisfy the various disparate bits of contemporary data that survive in the full glory of their disarray.

In connection with the book I have been working on now for the last eight years and which could take another eight before it is finished, I have been and will continue to do research on the la Zouche family, something which many others are also doing and from whose efforts I have benefited and continue to benefit. Recently, the online publication of the third edition of Charles Cawley's Medieval Lands by on the fmg.ac website has proven to be an invaluable tool, when combined with the extensive notes I took when I was on a year's sabbatical in London, and I feel I have been able to make a certain progress in dealing with this treacherously confusing historical territory.

In consideration of my age and the uncertainty of human fortune, I have decided to upload to this blog my observations as I come across them. This blog, however, is not meant to substitute for the series of books I eventually intend to publish when I no longer have to deal with PhD student dissertations or the still inadequate research skills of master's students. It is merely meant to point people in the direction of possibly fruitful research should I eventually prove incapable of completing in manuscript form what I have begun.

As for the connections between the la Zouche and the Mallory families, the key individuals to consider are Juliana (the widow of the first Roger la Zouche of Lubbesthorpe and the second wife of Reginald Mallory of Walton on the Wold) and her son the Archbishop of York William la Zouche (certainly a close relative of the first Anketil Mallory of Sudborough and the first Christopher Mallory of Hutton Conyers, both Mallorys appearing in his will).

The connection to Lubbesthorpe by Juliana's husband, Roger, best makes sense, if we assume his birth in the mid to late 1240s. His father William la Zouche would have been born around 1220 and, on these grounds, best fits an identification with the William la Zouche who was the son of a Roger la Zouche and the brother of an Alan la Zouche of Ashby la Zouch. The key problem with this identification would be that King's Nympton, a manor given to William by his father, was inherited by William's daughter Joyce Mortimer of Richard's Castle, a woman whom it would make best sense to think of as having been born between 1250 and 1255. What is generally overlooked is that Joyce's descendants (and not the descendants of the son of Joyce's mother by her first husband) also inherited her mother's manor of Howbridge in Essex and that William was a second husband of Joyce's mother Maude and that Maude died well before her husband did, though under English law he continued to possess her manor until his death in 1270 in his capacity as the father of a child by her.  He may be expected to have had a third wife and to have possibly fathered other children after Maude's death. This hypothetical third wife may have been a woman by the name of Alice, though this name might also refer to a wife of the younger son (also a William) of William's older brother Alan. It will be argued in a future blog that a daughter of William by this third wife would have been a second or third wife of Thomas Mallory of Kirkby Mallory who was active in the last quarter of the 13th century.

If the above reconstruction is correct, one must account for an older son by a first wife being disinherited in favor of the daughter of a second. One must assume that, as was common during this era, one of the conditions imposed by Maude in her marriage contract was that William make legal arrangements preferring her descendants by him over those of any other marriage, past or future. For William, who would have been a younger son with far from extensive land-holdings, marrying Maude would have been an attractive proposition, as she would have been quite a bit richer than him with her own inheritance as an heiress and one third of the properties of her first husband as a widow's dower. Disinheriting his young son would not necessarily have been seen as being disadvantageous to the boy, himself, as access by William to the financial resources Maude would have brought to him for the duration of their marriage would have given him a feeling of being able to promote his son Roger's career in ways that could more than make up for the lack of a landed inheritance.

As it was, Eudon la Zouche would seem to have played a decisive role in Roger's advancement. Eudon is commonly referred to as Eon, Ivo, and occasionally as John, though every time he appears in records produced by the government of Henry III he is referred to as Eudon, exclusively, so this would seem to be the best name to call him by. Eudon would seem to have been the youngest surviving brother of Alan and William la Zouche mentioned above and to have been too young to have received property from his father Roger before that individual's death. A comparison with the dates of various life events of his supposed siblings would suggest that Eudon was born between 1230 and 1235. By 1268 when Eudon's assumed nephew Roger was first assigned Lubbesthorpe to manage by Millicent de Monte Alto, Eudon would seem to have already been married to the lady, a daughter of the baron of Abergavenny William de Cantelo and the former wife of John de Monte Alto. Millicent would have been born around 1247 and have been the child bride of her first husband who seems to have died before her marriage was consummated. At this point, Millicent would not yet have been the great landed heiress she became on the death of her brother several years later, but would have been in possession of lands (including Lubbesthorpe) granted to her and her husband by her father on the occasion of her first marriage. Millicent's marriage to Eudon, thus, has the makings of a love match of sorts between two individuals without any future prospects of greatness. As it was, the death of Millicent's brother without any children changed both their lives profoundly and for most of the last decade of his life, Eudon became a man of consequence in the affairs of England.

My best estimate is that Eudon would have been in his mid to late forties when he passed away in 1279 and his older brother William about 50 at his decease at the beginning of the decade. After Eudon's death, his presumed nephew Roger continued to managed Millicent's interests in Lubbesthorpe until, probably in connection with his marriage to Juliana sometime around 1290, she made him lord of the manor with her as his immediate overlord. Juliana must have clearly been a much younger relative of Millicent's, but cannot have been a daughter, as has sometimes been maintained and which I, myself, thought of as a likely possibility for quite a few years.

Juliana, herself, is unlikely to have been born before 1270 and probably not later than 1275. She could conceivably be a last child of Millicent's sister Joan, but this individual's children, daughters included, seem to be already otherwise accounted for, nor is there any compelling onomastic reason for assigning Joan such a daughter. Nevertheless, Juliana is a name appearing in Millicent's family, it being the name of Millicent's father's sister who married a Tresgoz. Juliana's husband was a son of Sybilla d'Ewias, an important heiress who was the closest living relative in her time to the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Edward the Confessor, being a direct descendant of Edward's full sister rather than his half-brother, the ancestor of the future kings of Scotland and England. Sybilla's children by her first husband, though, were actually raised from their early childhood by her second husband, Roger Clifford. Millicent's aunt, Juliana de Cantelo, had two sons of whom only the name of the first is known, though the fact that a second son married and had at least one son who had come into possession of a modest amount of family property is something for which there is charter evidence.

If we take into account the onomastic traditions which were common at the time and evident among the families with which we are dealing (Cantelo, Tresgoz, Clifford, la Zouche, Mallory), then we see that a son was not generally named after his father, nor a daughter after her mother, but the oldest son or daughter was, in each case, very often named after a grandfather or a grandmother (normally through the father but also through the mother, especially if the mother were an heiress or the particular grandparent a person of importance). Thus, the naming of Roger la Zouche and Juliana's oldest son, Roger, might normally be expected to mean that he was being named in honor of Juliana's father and not of Roger, himself, or Roger's father, whom we known, from government created documentation in the time of Edward III, to have been a William.

There is, of course, no place in the written record where we can find her family name. However, onomastically and chronologically, assuming that Juliana was the daughter of a Roger Tresgoz who was a second son of a Juliana who was the sister of Millicent's father would fit perfectly, especially as the first Juliana can be shown to have lived at least until the mid-1280s and might very well have been instrumental in arranging the marriage of a granddaughter with limited marital prospects to a much older, securely well off, presumed nephew of Millicent's second husband, Eudon la Zouche.

After the second Roger la Zouche of Lubbesthorpe's birth, Juliana and her husband went on to have at least four other sons during the last decade of the 13th century and presumably a certain number of unrecorded daughters. Presumably the youngest of these children, perhaps even posthumously born, was William la Zouche who later became Archbishop of York. It would seem rather than having been named for Roger's father, he was more likely to have been named for Roger's cousin, William la Zouche of Harringworth, the son of Eudon and Millicent and also Roger's immediate overlord. This William would, in turn, have been named for Millicent's father, as, when he was born, Millicent had already come into possession of half of her father and mother's lands as the co-heiress of her brother. A presumably older sister of William was already named for Millicent's mother.

On the death of the first Roger la Zouche, Juliana took immediate action to gain the guardianship of her son and his lands and then very shortly after married Reginald Mallory as his second wife. Significantly, Reginald would have been much closer in age to Juliana than her first husband and, although he eventually came to inherit Walton on the Wold, Tachebrook Mallory, and Botley, he would seem to have still been at the time of his marriage a favored younger son rather than the natural heir to his father's properties. As was the case with Millicent's second marriage, this also has the markings of a love match, at least on the part of Juliana, herself.

Whether Juliana had any children by Reginald is not clear. His heir, John, was Reginald's son by his first wife Joan. Nevertheless, the marriage can be shown to impact Mallory history for over 100 years, as will be discussed in other postings to this blog when I have time to write them..