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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1998-11 > 0911144650
From: Nathaniel Taylor< >
Subject: Godfrey de Bouillon: English family?
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 10:44:10 -0500
ED MANN gave the following line of descent:
> 1 Godfrey de Boulogne [i.e. de Bouillon]
> 2 William de Boulogne
> 3 Pharamus de Boulogne
> 4 Sibyl de Boulogne
> 5 William de Fiennes ...
(citing Weiss' _Ancestral Roots_, 7th ed., Line 158a).
Whereupon (Leo van de Pas) wrote:
>I have never seen a remark that Godfrey of Bouillon was married, and that
>was the reason that his brother took over in Jerusalem.
Leo cites Schwennicke's ES NF 3:621, to show that this Guillaume de
Boulogne is actually son of a Godefroy, illegitimate half-brother to the
Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre (not King of Jerusalem) Godefroy de
Bouillon.
A "Goisfrid", son of Count Eustace [of Boulogne] is mentioned in Domesday
Book as an English landholder, married to Beatrice de Mandeville (aunt of
the first earl of Essex). Round (whom Schwennicke cites) and later Sir
Anthony R. Wagner (in _Pedigree and Progress_, pp. 159 & 253) were
convinced that this man was a separate person from the Crusader Godfrey
(and was thus necessarily illegitimate, because Count Eustace's
[legitimate] sons were known and did not include a "Goisfrid/Geoffrey").
However, The brief by David H. Kelley inserted in Weiss' _Ancestral
Roots_, 7th ed., presents compelling arguments to show that the two men
may have been the same. He points out that Goisfrid was onomastically
equivalent to Godfrey (something Round ignored as the modern derivations,
Geoffrey and Godfrey, are distinct but not their medieval equivalents),
and that there is no evidence that the known data on the English
landholder with a wife and heir in England and the leader of the first
crusade cannot apply to one and the same person. This identity has indeed
been on the table, as a query, since Round's day: Kelley mentions the work
of Felix Liebermann, Joseph Armitage Robinson, and H. W. C. Davis as
"pro".
One significant counterargument, raised by Wagner, is that none of the
sources for the First Crusade ever allude to a marriage for Godfrey:
rather they tout his chastity. This is less compelling when it is
understood that contemporary writings of the first crusade don't talk much
about the crusaders' home lives, and many of them left families behind.
Thereafter much of the surviving historiography of the Crusades (from the
twelfth century onward) is tainted with the themes of moral fitness for
possession of the Holy Land. Godfrey succeeded in an enterprise which
others, later, could not sustain: therefore in retrospect his virtue must
have been beyond theirs. Think of Tasso's oberblown moral epic
_Gierusalemme liberata_.
While this is not a proven descent (as Mr. Mann's database dump suggests),
nor is it a fruitless and closed case as Mr. van de Pas thought. It is an
intriguing hypothesis which deserves more complete scrutiny, and in a
different forum, than it has yet had. Kelley, at least, suggests that
determined digging may turn up more English records which will help tip
the scales one way or the other. Any takers?
Nat Taylor
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