Geoffrey de Mandeville: A study of the Anarchy - John Horace Round

It should be observed that this pedigree is not intended to show all the children. It gives those only which are required for our special purpose. On some points there is still need of more original information. No doubt Beatrice, wife of William de Say, was sister, and not daughter, to Geoffrey de Mandeville. I know of nothing to the contrary. Still the fact would seem to rest on the authority of the Walden Chronicle. The re-marriage of the Countess of Essex to Payn de Beauchamp, and her parentage, by him, of Simon, are both well established, but the date of her death is taken from the Chronicle, and seems suspiciously late. So also does that which is assigned to her brother, the Earl of Oxford, namely, 1194, fifty-two years after the charter of the Empress. Still, the fact that his mother survived her husband for twenty-two years implies that her children may have been comparatively young at his death. Both Aubrey and Rohese may therefore have been several years junior to Geoffrey de Mandeville.

But the main point has been, in any case, established, namely, the true relationship of these baronial houses. That which is given by Dugdale contains the further error of representing Alice de Vere as wife, not of Robert de Essex, but of Henry. Mr. W. S. Ellis, in his Antiquities of Heraldry (p. 210), observes with truth that, as to this relationship, the existing "accounts ... are conflicting, and that of Dugdale contradictory." But I cannot admit that his own version is "correct, or approximately so;" for while, with Dugdale, he errs in assigning to Alice de Vere Henry de Essex for husband, he transforms Roger fitz Richard, whom Dugdale had, rightly, given as her second husband, into her son-in-law.[1141]

My reason for alluding to this passage is that, after I had worked out the heraldic corollaries of this descent in their bearing on the adoption of coat-armour, I found that I had been anticipated in this investigation by the author of that scholarly work, The Antiquities of Heraldry. As the conclusions, however, at which I had arrived differ slightly from those of Mr. Ellis, it may be worth while to set them forth.

Mr. Ellis writes thus of "the simple QUARTERLY shield":—

"There can be little doubt that the source of this honoured armorial ensign is to be found in the distinguished family of De Vere, as all the families in the table who bear it are descended from the head of that house who lived at the commencement of the twelfth century."[1142]

I should differ with no slight hesitation from so ably argued and erudite a work, were it not that, in this case, its conclusions are based on a false premiss. Thus we read, further on:—

"Which was the original bearer of the quarterly coat of De Vere? Was it Say, or Mandeville, or Lacy, or Beauchamp, or was it De Vere, from whom all, or their wives were descended?"[1143]