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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1998-12 > 0914198794


From: Urania< >
Subject: Re: Mahaude, illegit. dau. HENRY I, King of England
Date: 21 Dec 1998 00:06:34 GMT


>...........This Maud was a BASTARD and not a Princess
>and Paget does not give her a mother either. Schwennicke,
>on the same page as quoted before, also makes her a
>BASTARD (lovely word) and gives her no mother.
>
There is NO record for the mother of this daughter of Henry I Beauclerc,
but the great 19th C Breton historian Arthur la Moyne de la Broderie says
of her [Volume III of Histoire de Bretagne, 1899, page 35]: Conan epousa
mathilde, fille d'Henri 1ere de la main gauche, mais reconnue par le roi
pour sa fille et *elevee en princesse.*
He goes on to say this marriage was a disaster for Brittany because civil
war ensued when on his death-bed in 1148 Conan declared Mahaude's son
Hoel to be a bastard and named as his heir the husband of Mahaude's
daughter Berthe. It is one of history's little mysteries why, if Conan
thought that Mahaude had palmed him off with a cuckoo child as his heir,
he did not repudiate her (or better still burn her at the stake - the
correct punishment for adulterous royal women who endangered the
succession) and marry a more reliable bride ...

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