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From: Nat Taylor < >
Subject: Re: Descent from Hugues "l'Abbe"
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 04:02:09 GMT


In article <v02120d00acbfa3b3ed49@[136.152.71.59]>, GEN-MEDIEVAL
< > wrote:

> The descent from Charlemagne through Hugues "l'Abbe"
> appears in Turton, The Plantagenet Ancestry, p. 6. [Turton
> cites Louis de Mas Latrie, Tresor le chronologie, 1889]. It
> also is outlined in Michel Call's Pedigree Chart No. 502 and
> Family Group Sheet No. 935. Call cites Turton and Collett's
> collection of unpublished pedigree charts.
>
>
> Alan B. Wilson
>

Turton cannot be cited as an authority; his source, the "Trisor de
chronologie", must also be incorrect if it indeed identifies Hugh the
Abbot with Hugh, illegitimate son of Charlemagne.

Hugh the Abbot (d. 886) was, as Cam Dyck said correctly, son of Conrad,
count of Paris and Auxerre (d. ca. 862), of the Welf family (see
Europaische Stammtafeln III:736) and Adelaide, daughter of Hugh, count of
Tours (Adelaid married second Robert the Strong, and was mother of the
first Robertine kings Odo and Robert I, who were thus Hugh the Abbot's
half-brothers. Hugh of Tours was probably of the Etichonid family (see
Vollmer, "Die Etichonen" in Studien und Vorarbeiten zur Geschichte des
grossfrankischen Adels, ed. Gerd Tellenbach (1957), especially the chart
at p. 183).

It is through this Hugh of Tours (d. 826) that the given name "Hugh"
passed both to the Capetians, and (through the Welf brother of Hugh the
Abbot) to the early Burgundian dynasty (where it appeared in the person of
Hugh "the Black", Duke of Burgundy, d. 952), and also, through Adelaide's
sister's marriage to Emperor Lothar I, to the Carolingians and their
successors in Italy and Savoy.

The Welf Hugh the Abbot was generally believed to have died s.p.. His
identification as the father of Petronilla, wife of Tertullus, ancestor of
the Angevins, is based on a mistaken reading of the medieval text "Gesta
consulum andegavensis", edited by Louis Halphen and Rene Poupardin (Paris,
1913). The text actually says that she was a relative of Hugh the Abbot
and doesn't say he was her father. Bernard Bachrach discusses the
accuracy of this text in his article "Some Origins of the Angevin
Dynasty," _Medieval Prosopography_ 10/2 (1989), 1-23. He corrects it by
drawing a dotted line between Hugh the Abbot and Petronilla in his
genealogical table of the Angevins. But at any rate Hugh was not the son
of Charlemagne. That was another Hugh, abbot of Saint-Quentin, who died
in battle on June 14, 844 (see Bernard W. Scholz, _Carolingian Chronicles
(Ann Arbor, 1970), p. 207, note 7).

But this is all nitpicking as the original point of your message, to
demonstrate multiple descents of the earliest Anglo-Norman kings of
England from Charlemagne, is perfectly correct. The problem is, of
course, that mistaken identifications made by Turton and others continue
to make the rounds in people's databases and on their pedigree charts and
on the usenet even when contradicted by perfectly clear, solid scholarly
work.

Nat Taylor

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