De Braose continued.

Philip de Braose ;Lord of Briouze and Bramber, born about 1076, of Bramber, Sussex, England, and Briouze, Normandy, d 1134-1135, Holy Land, Palestine. He married Aenor de Totnes about 1104. She was the daughter of Juhel de Totnes and Daughter de Picquigny.

Father: William de Braose, 1st Lord of Bramber
Mother: Eve de Boissey
Philip is recorded as consenting to his father's gifts to his canons at St Nicholas church at Bramber in 1073 and confirmed those gifts to the abbey of St Florent in 1096. He was the first Braose Lord of Builth and Radnor, their initial holding in the Welsh Marches. Philip seems to have gone on the First Crusade and returned in 1103. Old Shoreham was part of his demesne lands where St Nicolas church (right) had stood since Saxon times. Philip expanded trade in the area by founding the port of New Shoreham. His lands were confiscated by Henry I in 1110, due to his traitrous support of William, son of Robert Curthose, but they were returned in 1112.

There are charters where Robert de Harcourt's sons, Philip and Richard, refer to Philip de Braose as "patruus" - paternal uncle. This lends weight to the theory that Robert de Harcourt and Philip de Braose were both sons of Eve de Boissey. In another record dated 1103 (Pipe Roll Soc. Vol 71 no 544) it is stated that Philip de Braose was represented by "his brother Robert, the son of Anketill".
Philips son William de Braose,Lord of Abergavenny, was born about 1106. He married Bertha of Hereford, daughter of Sir Miles Fitz Walter, Earl of Hereford, and Sibyl de Neufmarche.

Eventually the land came into the hands of the Braose family. William was a great favourite of King John and was also Lord of his Main seat at Bramber (1144-9th August 1211) Lord of Gower, Abergavenny, Brecknock, Builth, Radnor, Kington, Limerick, Glamorgan,Skenfrith, Briouze in Normandy, Grosmont, and White Castle Gwyn, and so owned all three Norman Castles in the area.William was very powerful.

He married Bertha de Pitres, the daughter of Miles Fitzwalter Earl of Hereford, then Maud de St Valery.

In spite of his later misdeeds, Williams early life was spent making a name for himself. Being a third son he had to make his way in the world. 1192, he was made Sheriff of Hereford, a post he held until 1199 and 1196 was made Justice Itinerant for Staffordshire.



King Richard the Lionheart of England

William accompanied Richard to Chalus in 1199 and the King was mortally wounded there.
He then supported King John's claim to the throne of England, supported the new king in making various royal grants and was in attendance with John in Normandy at the time of Arthur of Brittany's death in 1203. Arthur was John's nephew and was seen by many as the rightful heir to the English throne. He was the son of Geoffrey,his uncle who was the son of Henry II. Richard, believing John would be an unwise and incompetent king, had designated Arthur as his successor. In 1203, for some reason, Arthur was put in charge of William. William had personally captured Arthur in 1202 at the Battle of Mirabeau. Arthur was caused to disappear and to die and so the obstacle to John’s Coronation was removed, although no concrete evidence ever came to light. There is somewhat better evidence that he at least knew the truth of the matter, which made it important for John to reward him well.
William was ruthless. He became fed up with the constant onslaughts of the Welsh under Seisyll am Dyfnwal-(s-eye-slith am Duvun-wath-approx ) The Chronicle of the Princes records the deed. Pretending to want to make peace, William invited Seisyll and his men to the castle and prepared a sumptuous meal before the parley. At the height of the meal, a signal was given during scene of joy and merrymaking; the Normans fell upon the Welsh and killed every one. There was no escape. This burned in the Welsh people as the worst betrayal ever. Worse was that the French made for Seisyll’s court and seized his wife Gwladys and slew his son, too young to fight. The Welsh chronicle continues ‘from that time forward, after that treachery, none dared place trust in the French.’
Gerald of Wales describes the aftermath, while travelling through Abergavenny trying to raise men to take the Cross in 1188 with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

dow Burning with revenge, they concealed themselves in the overgrown ditches of Abergavenny Castle, which they had occupied while the Castellan was away. The previous day, a man called Seisyll the son of Eudas, had said to the constable as if warning him, but apparently more for a joke and a laugh than seriously:’this is where we shall climb tonight’. As he spoke, he pointed to the corners of the wall, where it seemed to be lower than elsewhere.
The Constable and his household stayed on guard all night, refusing to take off their amour and remaining on the alert until first light. In the end, tired out by their vigil and feeling safe now that day had dawned, they all retired to bed. Thereupon their enemies dragged the scaling ladders, which they had prepared to the precise corner of the walls which Sessile had pointed out. The Constable and his wife were captured and so were most of the men. A few escaped, finding refuge in the Keep. The Welsh occupied the castle and burnt the whole place down.(Welsh Chronicle of the Princes)
The possibility was that even then in 1182, the keep was a stone building with a thick oak door
Finally de Braose’s ambition and violence made him a problem for King John. Perhaps William, swollen with power and ambition tried to blackmail King John for more lands and money, and John considered that he was a threat. But soon after this William de Braose fell out of favour with King John of England. King John publicly cited overdue monies that de Braose owed the Crown from his estates. But the King's actions went far beyond what would be necessary to recover the debt. He distained de Braose's English estates in Sussex and Devon and sent a force to invade Wales to seize the de Braose domains there. Beyond that, he sought de Braose's wife Maud who, the story goes, had made no secret of her belief that King John had murdered Arthur of Brittany. Gerald of Wales describes Maud de St. Valery, as a 'prudent and chaste woman' who bore her husband three sons William, Giles and Reginald de Braose.

De Braose fled to Ireland, then returned to Wales as King John had him hunted in Ireland. In Wales, William then allied himself to the Welsh Prince Llywelyn the Great and helped him in rebellion against King John!
Death and Disgrace for a Murderer-and the Murder of Maud and William
In 1210, William de Braose fled Wales in disguise as a beggar, to France. His wife and eldest son were captured, and he died the following year in August 1211 at Corbeil, France. He is buried in the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris by a fellow exile and vociferous opponent of John of England, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. His hopes to return alive to Wales and a burial in Brecon were to be unfulfilled. William's wife, Maud, and eldest son, William, once captured were murdered by King John, possibly starved to death incarcerated in Windsor Castle and Corfe Castle in 1210.


Thank you Lynda Denyer
http://freespace.virgin.net/doug.thompson/BraoseWeb/family/home.html

de Braose

William De Braose of Briouze, Normandy.
( William De Braose is the 25th Great Grandfather of Frances (Braden) Hooks nee Hensel)


William de Braose, First Lord of Bramber born 1049 in Briouze, nobleman who participated in the victory at the Battle of Hastings in support of William the Conqueror as he and his followers invaded and controlled Saxon. His name at this early stage would have been Guillaume de Briouze.

De Braose was given lands in Sussex at Bramber in 1073, where he was lord of the Rape of Bramber and where he built Bramber Castle.  De Braose was also awarded lands in the Welsh Marches and became one of the most powerful of the new Lords of the early Norman era. He held other lands including Guibray at Falaise, where one of the greatest trading fairs of Normandy took place. Sussex was divided into "rapes" for administrative and defensive purposes. The King created a lordship for each rape and the lord strengthened his position by developing a major castle and a port. Trade with Normandy soon flourished, free from interference by English rebels or invaders such as the French or the Danes.

He continued to bear arms alongside King William in campaigns in England and Maine in France. King William distributed manors across the country to his companions but he chose his best warriors to defend the coast of Sussex.

William de Braose was a pious man and made considerable grants to the Abbey of St, Florent, Samur and to endow the formation of a Priory at Sele, West Sussex near Bramber and a Priory at Briouze. William's mother Gunnor became a nun at the Abbey of Holy Trinity in Caen, known as the Abbaye aux Dames . Like Queen Matilda who founded the abbey, Gunnor was probably buried there. The River Adur was wider and deeper than it is today and it had a thriving port at Steyning, just north of Bramber Castle. The port belonged to an important Saxon church, Saint Cuthman's. King Æthelwulf was originally buried there in 858. In 1043 Edward the Confessor granted Saint Cuthman's Church to the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp in Normandy. The monks of Fécamp had given Edward refuge during his long period of exile in Normandy. Later, as King of England, Edward rewarded their hospitality. The port was significantly placed on a navigable river and seemed to represent an "open door" for a Norman successor to King Edward, who was childless.

De Braose had built a bridge at Bramber and demanded tolls from ships travelling further along the river to the busy port at Steyning. The monks also challenged Bramber's right to bury people in the churchyard of William de Braose's new church of Saint Nicholas, and demanded the burial fees for themselves, despite it being built to serve the castle not the town. The monks then produced forged documents to defend their position and were unhappy with the failure of their claim on Hastings which were very similar. The monks claimed the same freedoms and land tenure in Hastings as King Edward had given them at Steyning. Though on a technicality William was bound to uphold all aspects of the status quo before Edward's death, the monks had already been expelled 10 years before that death. King William wanted to hold Hastings for himself for strategic reasons and ignored the problem until 1085, when he confirmed their Steyning claims but swapped the Hastings claim for land in the manor of Bury (near Pulborough in Sussex). In 1086 the King William called his sons, Barons and Bishops to court (the last time an English king presided personally, with his full court, to decide a matter of law) to settle this. It took a full day, and the Abbey won over the baron, forcing William de Braose to curtail his bridge tolls, give up various encroachments onto the Abbey's lands, including a farmed rabbit warren, a park, eighteen burgage plots, a causeway, and a channel to fill his moat, and organise a mass exhumation and transfer of all Bramber's dead to the churchyard of Saint Cuthman's Church in Steyning.

William de Braose was succeeded as Lord of Bramber by his son, Philip William de Braose was present for the consecration of a church in his hometown of Briouze near Falaise  in Normandy France whence the name de Braose originates, in 1093, so we know he was still alive in that year. However, his son Philip was issuing charters as Lord of Bramber in 1096, indicating that William de Braose died sometime between those dates probably at Bramber.

The latest evidence for William is his presence at the consecration of his church at Briouze in 1093. In 1096 his son Philip was issuing charters. From this we can deduce that William died between 1093 and 1096.

Brydges edition of Collins' Peerage claims he was first married to Agnes, dau of Waldron de Saint Clare but no evidence for this can be found. It may be an example of Bruce - Braose confusion.

According to L C Perfect, a 13th century genealogy in the Bibliothèque de Paris gives the name of his wife as Eve de Boissey, widow of Anchetil de Harcourt. There is a lot of evidence from contemporary charters which supports this view.

*Bramber Castle - Sussex is haunted;

The ghosts of William de Braose are seen here crying for food. The ghosts normaly appear in the month of December. King John besieged the castle and captured his de Braose's children and imprisoned them where they starved to death.

*More on this family to follow.
References
The Origins of Some Anglo-Norman Families, Lewis Christopher Loyd, David C. Douglas, The Harleian Society, Leeds, Reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Company, 1975, ISBN 0806306491,