Bishop Odo De Conteville BAYEUX ¹

   Other names for Odo were KENT Earl and BAYEUX Bishop.

   Ancestral File Number: HRVT-X2.

   General Notes:

Bishop of BAYEUX 1049, and Earl of KENT.

BOOKS
Kings and Queens of Great Britain, Genealogical Chart, Anne Taute and Romilly Squire, Taute, 1990: "Odo Bishopof Bayeux Earl of Kent, Died 1097."

The Political History of England, Vol II, George Burton Adams, Longmans Green and Co, 1905, Ch I, p54:
[1074] "Already Norman families, who were to make so much of the history of the coming centuries, were rooted in the land. Montfort and Mortimer; Percy, Beauchamp, and Mowbray; Ferrers and Lacy; Beaumont, Mandeville, and Grantmesnil; Clare, Bigod, and Bohun; and many others of equal or nearly equal name. All these were as yet of no higher than baronial rank, but if we could trust the chroniclers, we should be able to make out in addition a considerable list of earldoms which William had established by this date or soon afterwards, in many parts of England, and in these were othergreat names. According to this evidence, his two half brothers, the children of his mother by her marriage with Herlwin de Conteville, had been most richly provided for: Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, as Earl of Kent, and Robert, Count of Mortain, witha princely domain in the south-west as Earl of Cornwall..."
p65: "...The failure of Walcher, Bishop of Durham, to keep his own subordinates in order, led to a local riot, in which the bishop and many of his officers and clergy were murdered, and which was avenged in his usual pitiless style by the king's brother Odo...The great ambition of Bishop Odo, and the increase of wealth and power which had come to him through the generosity of his brother, led him to hope for still higher things, and he dreamed of becoming pope. This was not agreeable to William, and may even have seemed dangerous to him when the bishop began to collect his friends and vassals for an expedition to Italy. Archbishop Lanfranc, who had not found his brother prelate a comfortable neighbour in Kent suggested to the king, we are told, the exercise of his feudal rights against him as his baron. The scene must have been a dramatic one, when in a session of the curia regis William orderedhis brother's arrest, and when no one ventured to execute the order laid hands upon him himself, exlaiming that he arrested, not the Bishop of Bayeux, but the Earl of Kent. William must have had some strong reason for this action, for he refused to consent to the release of his brother as long as he lived..."

A History of the English Speaking People Winston S Churchill Vol I The Birth of Britain Dodd Mead & Co p156:
"All this story is told with irresistible charm in the tapestry chronicle of the reign commonly attributed to William's wife, Queen Matilda, but acutally designed by English artists under the guidance of his half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Baueux. It is of course the Norman version, and was for generations proclaimed by their historians as a full justification- and already even in those days aggressors needed justifications- of William's invasion of England..."
p171: "Says the chronicler: `...[William the Conquerer] was a very stern and violent men, so that no one dared do anything contrary to his will...He expelled bishops from their sees, and abbots from their abbacies, and put thanes in prison, and finally he did not spare his own brother, who was called Odo; he was a very powerfulbishop in Normandy and was the foremost man next to the king, and had an earldom in England. He [the King] put him in prison...'"

The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, Antonia Fraser, 1975, Alfred Knopf, p24: "Odo Bishop of Baueux, andEarl of Kent, died 1097..."
p26: "William I was born at about the time that his father, Robert, became Duke of Normandy (1028). William's mother was Herleva, daughter of a wealthy citizen of Falaise. Not long after William was born she had two more sons: Robert, who became Count of Mortain, and Odo, who was made Bishop of Bayeux in 1049 when he was not yet twenty years old..."

ANCESTRAL FILE
Ancestral File Ver 4.13 HRVT-X2 Born Abt 1036 Conteville France Died Unmarried Palermo Sicily Italy Bur Cathedral Palermo Sicily Italy.