Margaret (Bigod) de Hastings (abt. 1182 - abt. 1237)

Born about 1182 in England [uncertain]

Ancestors

Wife of William (Hastings) de Hastings — married before 1205 in England [uncertain]

Descendants

Died about 31 Mar 1237 at about age 55 in England

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Biography

Margaret (or Margery) le Bigod was the daughter of Magna Carta surety baron Roger le Bigod, 2nd Earl of Norfolk, and Ida de Tony.^[1] Her date and place of birth are not known and are estimated.

It is thought that Margaret married William de Hastings, Knt., although no clear primary record seems to exist anymore (see Research Notes, below). "Margaret (or Margery) le Bigod, married William de Hastings, Knt., . . . younger son of William de Hastings" by Maud, younger daughter and co-heiress of Thurston Banastre.^[1][2] Their marriage date and place are not known and are estimated.

Margaret and William had two sons and two daughters:

• Henry, Knt., born about 1205, married Ada of Huntingdon^[1][2]
• Thomas, living 4 November 1268^[1][2]
• Maud, died in London in 1264 or 1265, married Gilbert Pecche, Knt., as his first wife^[1][2]
• Ida, died before 2 March 1288/9, married first to Stephen de Segrave, Knt. (as his 2nd wife), and second to Hugh Pecche, Knt.^[1][2]

William de Hastings died in 1224, Richardson cites no known date of death or place for Margaret.^[1] Clark somehow found a death date for her, 31 March 1237. Perhaps his source was Milles, who is one of the sources he mentions in that passage.^[3] (Clark is apparently wrong to equate her to a widow in a place called Thorpe though. That would be the widow of Gilbert de Hastings in Thorpe Morieux.)

Research Notes

Chronology checks. Her husband William de Hastings: died 1226, adult by 1194, but his older brother Henry was not adult in 1182. Record of his father stops by 1170, whereas his mother lived until 1222. Margery and William's son Henry was adult by 1226 and died about 1250.^[4]

Concerning Margery's existence, primary documentation was found and published in 2005 by Rosie Bevan.^[5] She found that in the Liber Vitae of Durham, the Bigod family was registered in this format, consistent with other families in the book:

Comes Rogu's Bigot. Ida uxor ei’ [Earl Roger and his wife Ida]

Hugo Will's Rogu's Johs Radulf [Hugh, William, Roger, John, Ralf]

Maria Margared Ida pueri ei’ [Maria, Margaret, Ida, their children]

Concerning Margery's marriage to William de Hastings:

1. We would not know of the marriage if it were not for remarks made by William Dugdale in the 17th century.

2. The other lines of evidence found so far are circumstantial but strong, because they match the remarks of Dugdale so well. These include:

• The relatively uncommon name Ida which this Hastings family used for one daughter (who married Gilbert de Pecche). If her mother was Margery Bigod then this was the name of her mother's mother and sister (see Liber Vitae of Durham, above). Margery's mother was important, apparently a royal mistress, and also Margery's connection to the Toeni inheritance which had been distributed between sisters.
• Study of the inheritance of the land which Dugdale mentions, Little Bradley.

This requires more discussion...

Dugdale's remarks

Dugdale's wording, the "almost primary" evidence (all footnotes refer to Glover's collection, but it is useful to show where he placed them):

• [Under Bigod (Baronage page 133):] "He [Earl Roger] had also a Daughter called Margery[d], Wife[e] of William de Hastings (Son of William) and had[f] by the gift of her Father, the Mannor of Little Bradley in Frank-Marriage."
• [Under Hastings (Baronage page 574) :] "This last-mentioned William took to Wife[i] Margerie the Daughter of Roger Bigod Earl of Norff. with whom he had[k] in Marriage the Lordship of Little Bradley, to enjoy after the death of Gundred Stepmother to him the said Roger; and left Issue by her two Sons, viz.[l] Henry, and William."

Note that:

• Gundred is known and Dugdale places her correctly. She was step-mother of Roger Bigod, a Magna Carta surety.
• The Glover collection is or was real and much (but certainly not all) of what Dugdale reports from such records can be confirmed as correct, and so a primary concern for modern researchers is whether the documents said something directly, or Dugdale had to put different ideas together, in which case he could make mistakes.

Several points therefore draw attention:

i. Dugdale must have made at least one mistake, but it seems minor, and not relevant. Eyton pointed out that under Hastings Dugdale attaches this marriage to the wrong William, at least according to all modern genealogies, but that he could be interpreted as getting it right under Bigod.^[6]

ii. More importantly, Dugdale's comments clearly show that one or more documents he saw concerned land in Little Bradley which had been assigned to Gundred as a widow, and would, by agreement, later come to the younger couple. There are various types of document which might mention this either directly or requiring inference.

iii. On the other hand, Dugdale's position that Margerie Bigod first married William Cumin and remarried William de Hastings not too long before 1216, is not tenable, and must come from a confused interpretation of different documents. There was a William de Hastings who had such a marriage. Round wrote this up, and noted that this Margerie was an heiress of the Giffard family of Font Hill, not a Bigod. This William de Hastings must have been dead long before the dapifer, according to the inheritance successions noted by Round.^[7] Furthermore, Henry de Hastings, the Bury dapifer's heir was an adult and able to take up in inheritance in January 1226, only 10 years later.

A less well-known claim is found in a 19th century article on the Bigods, saying that Margerie first married a William de Camville, before marrying William de Hastings, but the source is not stated.^[8]

Trying to look for any way to confirm Dugdale's information:

• An earlier source sometimes given for this marriage is Milles, The Catalogue of Honour (1610) p.503. But Milles was nephew of Robert Glover and so he apparently used the same sources as Dugdale.
• A hint of possible additional evidence of this marriage, also now perhaps lost might be found in Blomefield's article on Gayton Thorpe.^[9] He says that this manor also came to the Hastings family from the Bigod marriage, which he would have known of from Dugdale. But this looks a bit like he might have been giving his own interpretation of something likely. The branch of the Hastings who came to hold this seem unlikely to have been descended from any proposed Bigod marriage.)

Little Bradley

Apparently not noticed by Richardson, the lordship of Little Bradley appears in records some generations later (apparently for the first time) in the hands of the Pecche family, into which William de Hastings' (and therefore apparently Margery's) daughter Maud had married.^[10]

It should be noted that Maud's own children were somehow disinherited in favour of the son of a later wife.^[11] While this in itself is mysterious, it is however known to have happened and so Little Bradley could have been one of the lands transferred to that son, the Gilbert Pecche who married Isolde (or Iseult).

Weaker connections discussed in the past:

• Encouragingly, Little Bradley does seem to appear in the Inquisition Post Mortem of William's great grandson, the first Lord John de Hastings, some generations later.^[12] This is not very conclusive because some generations later the Hastings family had acquired an extremely large and widespread collection of lands.
• Richardson found evidence that the Bigod family had at least held Great Bradley (E 40/3775. Grant by William Bygod, lord of Great Bradley near St. Edmund's). But as Richardson admits this is also not strong evidence concerning Little Bradley.^[13] In fact, Great Bradley is known to have gone from Ida's Toeni family to the Bigods, but it stayed with the Bigods.^[14]

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6} Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, 4 vols., ed. Kimball G. Everingham, 2nd edition, (Salt Lake City, Utah: the author, 2011), vol. III, pages 313-321, PEMBROKE #2, Margaret le Bigod.
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4} Douglas Richardson, Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, 5 vols., ed. Kimball G. Everingham (Salt Lake City, Utah: the author, 2013), vol. III, pages 244-249, HASTINGS #7, Margaret le Bigod; #8, Henry de Hastings.
3. ↑ Clark, G. T. C. (1869), "The Rise and Race of Hastings" (in 3 parts), Archaeological Journal, Vol. 26. Online at Archive.org, page 302.
4. ↑ See the long collection and analysis of primary source information at Andrew Lancaster, Hastings Families in the 12th Century: Part 2
5. ↑ Bevan (2005) "Durham Liber Vitae" in Foundations 1 (6): 414-424 at FMG.
6. ↑ Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire Vol. 5. Online at Google Books, page 140.
7. ↑ Round, J.H. (1904) "The Cumins of Snitterfield" in The Ancestor, IX. Online at Archive.org, page 146ff
8. ↑ Planché (1865) "On the Earls of East Anglia" in Journal of the British Archaeological Association XXI. Online at Archive.org, page 98.
9. ↑ Francis Blomefield, "Freebridge Hundred and Half: Geyton-Thorp" in An Essay Towards A Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 8 (London, 1808), pages 437-441. Online at British History Online, accessed 28 Oct 2018.
10. ↑ Andrews, H.C. (1928) "Notes on families at Great Thurlow and Little Bradley" in Proceedings of The Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, Volume XX, Part 1, pages 43-47 pdf
11. ↑ See for example Richardson, Royal Ancestry, Vol.4 under PECCHE.
12. ↑ Calendar of Inquisitions
13. ↑ Richardson's words: "Margaret le Bigod, is alleged by Dugdale to have had the manor of Little Bradley, Suffolk in marriage, which might well be true. However, I don't find any of the later male members of the Hastings family dealing with this manor, so the manor was probably passed in marriage to one of the later Hastings women in this time period." soc.gen.medieval post
14. ↑ Historian Judith Green has written that: "Adeliza Bigod was addressed in writs of Henry I and Stephen concerning tithes at Bradley, Suffolk." (Green (1999) "The Descent of Belvoir", Prosopon, No. 10.) She cites Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, II, nos 1485 [sic but 1458 must be intended], 1495; III, no. 82. The citations she made show that Bradley was land which was associated with Gundred's Bigod mother-in-law, Adeliza de Tony, and the monks of Belvoir had rights there. This fits well at first sight with Bradley having become Bigod land associated with wives, and therefore widows.

• Richardson, Douglas. Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, 4 vols., ed. Kimball G. Everingham. 2nd edition. (Salt Lake City, UT: the author, 2011). See also WikiTree's source page for Magna Carta Ancestry.
• Richardson, Douglas. Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, 5 vols., ed. Kimball G. Everingham. (Salt Lake City, UT: the author, 2013). See also WikiTree's source page for Royal Ancestry.

See also:

• Lewis, Marlyn. Margaret le Bigod entry in "Our Royal, Titled, Noble, and Commoner Ancestors and Cousins" website, accessed 2 Mar 2020.
• Wikipedia: Roger Bigod, 2nd Earl of Norfolk.

Acknowledgements

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Magna Carta Project

This profile was reviewed and approved for the Magna Carta Project by Thiessen-117 21:33, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Margaret le Bigod is in project approved/badged trails to Magna Carta Surety Baron Roger le Bigod from the following Gateway Ancestors:

• Anne Bainton (MCA I:128-134 BAYNTON): badged July 2021. See it HERE.
• Claypoole Gateways (James, Edward and Norton (MCA IV:352-358 WINGFIELD): badged June 2020. The trail can be seen HERE.
• Francis Dade (MCA IV:352-358 WINGFIELD): badged 28 Sep 2021 - see trail here HERE.
• Mary Gye (MCA II:325-326 GYE): trail was badged 19 Nov 2020 and can be seen HERE.
• Simon Lynde (MCA III:86-89 LYNDE): trail was badged 22 April 2021 and can be seen HERE.
• Richard Palgrave (MCA I:297-303 BRANDON): trail was badged 19 March 2021 and can be seen HERE.

Margaret le Bigod also appears in unbadged trails (needing work) to the following Gateways:

• William Skepper (MCA IV:30-33 SKEPPER): trail not yet developed. See the trail HERE.

See Base Camp for more information about Magna Carta trails. See the project's glossary for project-specific terms, such as a "badged trail".