Did Lucy Fitzpiers have 2 husbands?

Question

Lucy Fitzpiers was wife of William de Ros. She is currently shown as having had a second husband, Thomas de Newsom(e), with a daughter Constance who married William le Scrope. I have been able to find no source for Lucy's marriage to Thomas de Newsom, and there is no mention in the Complete Peerage or Magna Carta Ancestry of her marrying a second time. (I do not have access to Richardson's Royal Ancestry.) Cokayne speculates that Constance wife of William le Scrope was daughter of Thomas - Complete Peerage vol XI p. 534 - but does not name her mother, nor have I found a source which names Thomas's wife. Does anyone know of a source? If not, I suggest I detach her from Thomas de Newsom and his daughter Constance.

Comments

 Recently there was mention of the Court of King James of Scotland (think it was Scotland) and their ideas of what constituted a "marriage" which sounds very human but which lawyers and legislatures have fought about for centuries so this puzzle over Lucy Fitzpiers --

Lucy may herself have been a "wrong side of the blanket" child (in Olden Days, the "Fitz" did indicate that) or that her father had been 

Such things as legally sanctioned marriage (or not) made a difference when it came to inheritance of money and land and social rank  along with such points as political influence with the Court (the Crown) 

And among the Royalty, calling someone a Royal Bastard was not an insult, it was a fact, in that the King (usually) had acknowledged the child and made some provision for it -- so too the siblings of the Kings and Queens, they were also Royal ....

And then again it might be errors have crept into the accounts

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Thanks, Susan. The question is not who Lucy’s father was - that seems fairly well attested - but whether she really married Thomas de Newsom.

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 Oh, yeah. My bad. I suppose all the usual routes such as church registers in the 13th Century in England have been sought and examined?  ... the Church did keep pretty good track of just about everyone -- at least in the more affluent level of society -- birth, death, marriage(s) 

Only place I can imagine that a reference librarian would know about this would be one in Britain although I suppose it would be helpful start with the question of are there any extant collections of these registers and in this particular area of Britain, and where those are located and are they accessible? 

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I am afraid church registers were not kept until rather later. So we can't look to them for any help.

Answer 1

 Well, that puts an end to my ideas. Surely there is someone at WT who can address the question of whether she and he were indeed legally married. 

Comments

I think it is not a question of whether they were legally married but whether Lucy FitzPiers and Thomas de Newsom had any relationship at all. This looks to me like one of the fictions one unfortunately finds quite often on Wikitree. Thanks though for your attempts to help.

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If true, it would mean that Geoffrey le Scrope married his 1st cousin

https://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Scrope-Family-Tree-153

I suspect it's just the internet taking precautions.  If it turned out that Yvette was somebody else's daughter, all would not be lost - her descendants would still have an alternative route to some interesting ancestors, including the ever-popular Lady Godiva.

But it doesn't work if Constance was born before William de Ros died, which she probably was.

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R J, I do enjoy the humour of some of your input in G2G. :-D

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And it doesn't work if Lucy was too old to have any more kids after William died.

But the dates we have might all be just guesses.

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 R.J. I've heard / read the www blamed for a lot of dad-blamed (pun, pun) situations, conditions, conundrums, mysteries, pleasant (unpleasant) discoveries, .... but blaming it for the dad-blamed situation that CONSTANCE (the possible daughter) was in -- or not in -- is .... ah ... never mind. I cannot "go there". I'd be red flagged.