Earl Roger De Breteuil HEREFORD

   Other names for Roger were FITZ OSBERN and HEREFORD Earl.

   Ancestral File Number: V9T2-1J.

   General Notes:

Earl of HEREFORD.

BOOK
The Political History of England, Vol II, George Burton Adams, Longmans Green and Co, 1905, Ch I
p55: "...One of the earliest to be made an earl was his old friend and the son of his guardian, William Fitz Osbern, who had been created Earl of Hereford; he was now dead and was succeeded by his son Roger, soon very justly to lose title and land..."
p62: [1075] "...Roger seems to have been a man of violent temper, and there was a woman in this case also, though we do not know that she herself influenced the course of events. The insurrection is said to have been determined upon, and the details of action planned, at the marriage of Roger's sister to Ralph Guader, Earl of Norfolk, a marriage which William [the Conqueror] had forbidden.
`There was that bride-ale That was many men's bale,' said the Saxon chronicler, and it was so indeed. The two chief conspirators persuaded Earl Waltheof to join them, at least for the moment, and their plan was to drive the king out of England and to divide the kingdom between them into three great principalities, `for we wish,' the Norman historian Orderic makes them say, `to restore in all respects the kingdom of England as it was formerly in the time of King Edward,' a most significant indication of the general opinion about the effect of the Conquest, even if the words are not theirs.
"After the marriage the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford separated to raise their forces and bring them together, when they believed they would be too strongfor any force which could be raised to act against them. They counted on the unpopularity of the Normands and on the king's difficulties abroad which would prevent his return to England. The king did not return, but their other hope proved fallacious. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester and Abbot Ethelwy of Evesham, both English prelates, with some Norman help, cut off the line of communication in the west, and Earl Roger could not force his way through. The two justiciars, William of Warenne and Richard of Bienfaite, after summoning the earls to answer in the king's court, with the aid of Bishop Odo and the Bishop of Coutances, who was also a great English baron, raised an army of English as well as Normans, and went ot meet Earl Ralph, who was marching westwards. Something like a battle took place, but the rebels were easily defeated. Ralph fled back to Norwich, but it did not seem to him wise to stop there. Leaving his wife to stand a siege in the castle, he sailedoff to hasten the assistance which had already been asked for from the Danes. A Danish fleet indeed appeared off the coast, but id did nothing beyond making a plundering raid in Yorkshire. Emma, the new-made wife of Earl Ralph, seems to have been a good captain and to have had a good garrison. The utmost efforts of the king's forces could not take the castle, and she at last surrendered only on favourable terms. She was allowed to retire to the continent with her forces... A clear distinction was made between the men who were serving Ralph because they held land of him, and those who were merely mercenaries. Ralph's vassals, although they were in arms against Ralph's lord, the king, were thought to be entitled to better terms, and they secured them more easily than those who served him for money. Ralph and Emma eventually lived out the life of a generation of those days, on Ralph's Bretons estates, and perished together in the first crusade.
"Their fellowrebels were less fortunate. Roger surrendered himself to be tried by the king's court, and was condemned `according to the Norman law,' we are told, to the forteiture of his estates and to imprisonment at the king's pleasure. From this he was never released. The family of William's devoted guardian, Osbern, disappears from English history with the fall of this imprudent representative, but not from the country. It has been reserved for modern scholarship to prove the interesting factof the continuance for generations of the male line of this house, though in minor rank and position, through the marriage of the son of Earl Roger, with the heiress of Abergavenny in Wales..."

ANCESTRAL FILE
Ancestral File Ver 4.13 V9T2-1J.