Crusade

Empress Matilda (also known as Matilda of England, or Maude) was the daughter and heir of Henry I. Matilda and her younger brother, William Adelin, were the only legitimate children of King Henry to survive to adulthood. William’s early death in the White Ship disaster in 1120 made Matilda the last heir from the paternal line of her grandfather William the Conqueror. As a child, Matilda was betrothed to and later married Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, acquiring the title Empress. The couple had no children. After being widowed for a few years, she was married to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, with whom she had three sons. Matilda was the first female ruler of England. However, the length of her effective rule was brief, lasting a few months in 1141. She was never crowned and failed to consolidate her rule. For this reason, she is normally excluded from lists of English monarchs, and her rival (and cousin) Stephen of Blois is listed as monarch for the period 1135-54. Their rivalry for the throne led to years of unrest and civil war in England that have been called ‘The Anarchy’. She did secure her inheritance of the Duchy of Normandy — through the military feats of her husband, Geoffrey — and campaigned unstintingly for her eldest son’s inheritance, living to see him ascend the throne of England in 1154 as Henry II.

Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the Conqueror, died in 1134 in Cardiff Castle in his early eighties. He was buried in the abbey church of St Peter, in Gloucester. The exact place of his burial is difficult to establish — legend states that he requested to be buried before the high altar. The church has subsequently become Gloucester Cathedral.

There is little mention in the historical records of the whereabouts of Edgar the Atheling after the beginning of the reign of Henry I. All that is said by William of Malmesbury, writing in 1025, was that he ‘had retired to his estates in England’. There is no record of him ever marrying. Intriguingly, there is mention of an ‘Edgar Atheling’ in the Great Pipe Rolls of the Second, Third and Fourth Years of the Reign of Henry II. It is recorded that ‘Edgar Atheling owed money for a donum [Latin: present, gift, offering] taken in Northumberland’ before 1157. If this Edgar is Prince Edgar, he would have been 105 years old. It seems unlikely. However, it also seems odd that a man living in Northumbria at this time would carry a name suggesting he was the heir to the English throne — unless he was a twelfth-century Walter Mitty!

It has been written that Hereward of Bourne returned to his mountain eyrie after the Crusade and lived for many years as the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’. But the true circumstances of his life or death after the Siege of Ely remain a mystery. Even though he is now known as Hereward ‘the Wake’, Hereward of Bourne was not given the suffix ‘Wake’ until many years after his death. The term is thought to come from the Old French ‘wac’ dog, as in wake-dog, the name for dogs used to warn of intruders.

The present-day Wakes of Courteenhall are directly descended from a Geoffrey Wac, who died in 1150. His son, Hugh Wac, who died 1172, married Emma, the daughter of Baldwin Fitzgilbert and his unnamed wife. That wife, it is supposed, was the granddaughter of either Gunnhild or Estrith in the female line from Hereward and Torfida. It is suggested that her mother had married Richard de Rulos and her grandmother had married Hugh de Evermur, a Norman knight in the service of King William. It is a tenuous link, but a remote possibility.

There are also other claimants, including the Harvard family (the founders of Harvard University) and the Howard family (the Dukes of Norfolk and Earls Marshal of England).

he underside of the collar beam 63 feet 6 inches, so an additional height in the centre of 23 feet 6 inches has been gained by the use of hammer beams.