As against the evidence afforded us by the charter of Henry III, we have the statements and documents relating to Barbery Abbey, a daughter of Savigny. It is alleged that the house was first founded in 1140[25] by that Robert Marmion who was slain at Coventry in 1143.[26] Stapleton accepted this without question. Yet, so far as documents are concerned, we have only the charter of Robert Marmion (1181), in which he speaks of his father Robert as beginning the foundation.[27] If that father were indeed the Robert who was slain in 1143, Stapleton's pedigree is duly proved as against that which I derive from Henry the Third's charter. But for this identification we have only, it would seem, the obiter dictum of the 'Gallia Christiana' editors, while the fact that the first Abbot was appointed about 1177,[28] combined with the fact that Robert Marmion, in 1181, was avowedly completing that foundation which his father's death had arrested, certainly seems to point to his father's benefaction being then recent, and little previous to the said appointment of the first Abbot. In that case his father would be not the Robert who died in 1143, but a Robert who, as I suggest, came between the two.[29]
Leaving now this question of pedigree, there is a theory as to the name of Marmion which one cannot pass over in silence, because it has received the sanction even of Stapleton. Writing on the date of the Lindsey Survey, that eminent authority observes:
Robert Le Despenser [Dispensator] was brother of Urso de Abbetot, whose other surname, Marmion, is equivalent in Norman French to the Latin word Dispensator; and as Robert Marmion died in 1107, it was probably in the following year that this catalogue was written.[30]
His meaning, though clumsily expressed, as was sometimes the case, is that the Latin 'Dispensator' represented the name 'Marmion'. This theory would seem to be derived from the word 'Marmiton' (not 'Marmion') which means not a 'Dispensator', but a scullion, the most despised of the menials employed in the kitchen. There was indeed in old French a rare word 'Marmion', but according to Godefroy, it was equivalent to 'Marmot', the name of the Marmoset. In any case, therefore, this illustrious surname, immortalized by Scott
They hailed him Lord of Fontenaye,
Of Lutterworth and Scrivelbaye,
Of Tamworth tower and town
had nothing to do with 'Dispensator', but meant either a scullion or a monkey, and was one of those nicknames that the Normans loved to inexorably bestow on one another.
What was the actual relation of the Marmions to Robert 'Dispensator' is a problem as yet unsolved. Mr Waters wrote: