Lucy of Bolingbroke

Notes:

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_of_Bolingbroke

Also known as Lucia, she was an Anglo-Norman heiress in central England and, later in life, Countess of Chester. She came to possess extensive lands in Lincolnshire which she passed on to her husbands and sons. She was a notable religious patron, founding or co-founding two small religious houses and endowing several with lands and churches.

There is much confusion about Lucy's ancestry in earlier writings, recent historians tend to believe that she was the daughter of Thorold, sheriff of Lincoln, by a daughter of William Malet (died 1071). She inherited a huge group of estates centred on Spalding in Lincolnshire, probably inherited from both the Lincoln and the Malet family. This group of estates have come to be called the "Honor of Bolingbroke."

The heiress Lucy was married to three different husbands, all of whom she outlived. The first was to Ivo Taillebois, around 1083. Ivo took over her lands as husband, and seems in addition to have been granted estates and extensive authority in Westmorland and Cumberland. Ivo died in 1094

The second marriage was to one Roger de Roumare or Roger fitz Gerold, with whom she had one son, William de Roumare (future Earl of Lincoln), who inherited some of her land. William was the ancestor of the de Roumare family of Westmorland. Roger died in either 1097 or 1098.

Before 1101, she was married to Ranulf le Meschin, her last and longest marriage. A son Ranulf de Gernon, succeeded his father to the earldom of Chester (which Ranulf acquired in 1121) and a daughter, Alice, married Richard de Clare.

Upon her death, most of the Lincolnshire lands she inherited passed to her older son William de Roumare, while the rest passed to Ranulf II of Chester (forty versus twenty knights' fees). The 1130 pipe roll informs us that Lucy had paid King Henry I 500 marks after her last husband's death for the right not to have to remarry. She died around 1138.

Lucy, as widowed countess, founded the convent of Stixwould in 1135, becoming, in the words of one historian, "one of the few aristocratic women of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to achieve the role of independent lay founder." Her religious patronage however centered on Spalding Priory, a religious house for which her own family was the primary patron. In 1135, Lucy, now widowed for the last time, granted the priory her own manor of Spalding for the permanent use of the monks. The records indicate that Lucy went to great effort to ensure that, after her own death, her sons would honour and uphold her gifts.

Buried:
This is the most likely place for her burial given her patronage. The priory was re-founded in 1074 as a dependent priory of St. Nicholas's Abbey, Angers. In 1540 when the house was surrendered at the dissolution and the ruins disappeared.

Lucy married Ranulf le Meschin, 3d Earl of Chester. Ranulf was born 1070, Bessin, Normandy, France; died Jan 1129, Cheshire, England; was buried , Chester Abbey, Chester, Cheshire, England. [Group Sheet]

1. Alice de Gernon