Maud "Matilda" de Clere de Lacy - Alternative Data After Merges

She's a de CLERE, not a de CLARE, so Yorkshire is probably correct. The Cleres lived in Norfolk and Yorkshire, NOT Kent.

We've had no end of trouble with the Clere/Clare confusion....

Yorkshire does sound more probable. Do you want me to put a deClere not deCLare Curator note on her?
My urge is to remove the de Lacy from her name too?

Yes I think she had better have a "de Clere, not de Clare" note. As for the "de Lacy", women taking their husband's name didn't really start until Tudor times, so it's a judgment call.

Since the husband's name automatically populates when adding the wife's profile, this is most helpful info to know. Thanks for the clarification of the wife's name coming forward vs tacking on the husband's name as well.

:-) And then just when you think you have a handle on it, the female inheritors of estates sometimes get their husband's estate 'surnames' :-/

Will put deClare/Clere note on profile.

Have removed the de Lacy

I see somebody put her back on the Clare tree based on assumptions made by Cawley at FMG. He *doesn't have* primary documentation for her parentage, and he is IGNORING the explicit statement that she was "sister of the treasurer of the church at York" - as well as the lack of ANY Clare sons having anything to do with York Minster.

Cawley *can* get things wrong - he made a right mess of the early Camvilles due to Emma Siggins White Disease, for instance - and should by no means be taken as the Final Authority.

York is not a place where you find Clares. Cleres, on the other hand, do turn up in the neighborhood.

Dictionoary of National Biography (a relatively modern secondary source) came down on the "Clere" side of the question: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_18...

Soc. genealogy.medieval has been exercised about the question for something like three decades now, without reaching a clear consensus. This post https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/EDthyh06leQ/m/... goes over the various treasurers of York, what little is known about them, and which ones are plausible brothers of Maud.

Something that doesn't get gone into is the ramifications of "William de Rotherfield" being in the picture, under Archbishop of York Walter de Grey *of Rotherfield Greys*. (That is, the Archbishop bought Rotherfield Greys from a kinswoman and subinfeudated it to his brother Robert.) While there was a minor gentry Rotherfield family in North Yorkshire, it wouldn't do to overlook the possibility that we have an obscure Grey connection.

There's also the sticky little detail that if Maud were a Clare, daughter of Roger de Clare, her granddaughter Maud de Lacy would have required a Papal dispensation to marry Richard de Clare - they would have been second cousins once removed. A Clere (or Grey) connection would encounter no such obstacle.

The whole Clare/Clere problem is a problem only because time has forgotten the Cleres and most of their documentation, if it ever existed, has been lost. This leads unwary researchers to jump to the conclusion that any poorly documented "Clere" "must" be a Clare.

I still remember the gymkhana we went through over Amice de CLARE and Avice de CLERE. Very similar names, very different geography, very different husbands and destinies (Avice married a Yorkshireman, Nigel de Plumpton - very appropriate for a Yorkshire gal).

There's an Archive copy of the published book (dates 1896, 1904) at https://archive.org/details/coucherbookofcis00kirkrich/page/n7/mode...

The contents are an assortment of records from the 13th-14th centuries, mostly in Latin, and the relevant reference is in the middle of page 241: https://archive.org/details/coucherbookofcis00kirkrich/page/240/mod...

Sed et iste Rogerus constabularius duxit in uxorem Matildem de Clere,^ sororem thesaurarii Eboracensis Ecclesie, de qua genuit Johannem constabularium. Tempore quoque istius Rogeri constabularii fuit quidam comes Cestrie qui vocabatur Ranulphus,^

There is a quibble in the footnotes that an earlier MS. had "Clare", and a cross-reference to Ormerod's History of Cheshire, vol 1, p. 511 https://archive.org/details/historyofcountyp00orme/page/510/mode/2up wherein he points out that the only known Clare treasurer of York, Bevis de Clare, had no sister Maud and was from a later generation than Roger de Lacy.

By Ormerod's time (1785-1873, History first published in 1819) the Clere family had long been forgotten, so it shouldn't be surprising that he didn't think of so simple an explanation as a spelling error.

Bevis, alias Bogo, did not have a good reputation: https://archive.ph/20121202062237/http://217.169.56.135/view/articl...

He piled clerical office on clerical office, and delegated the responsibilities as much as possible while collecting the revenues. It is not recorded that he was ever ordained.

Just checked the Revisions on Maud - this mess is RECENT. Profile "Alice" de Clare created Dec 12, 2021 (by YOU, Sharon!), renamed to "Matilda" a few hours later (again by you), crash-merged with extant (from 2011?) Maud de Clere profile December 12, 2021 at 4:47 AM (again by you), DESTROYING the original profile.

The "Added by" and "Managed by" citations on the profile are now FALSE.

We now have two irreconcilable bits of information. If she was indeed a ClAre, she was NOT born in Yorkshire. If she was born in Yorkshire, she was NOT a ClAre but a ClEre. Sinnington, Yorkshire, was a ClEre holding and the ClAres had absolutely nothing to do with it. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/north/vol2/pp489-492

Incidentally, here are a couple of the go-rounds about Amice de ClAre vs Avice de ClEre;
https://www.geni.com/discussions/149461
https://www.geni.com/discussions/135343

Don't tell me we had another runaway GEDCOM messing things up? :-O Wonder why the "safeguards" keep failing....

Well, anyway, we still have to figure out Maud...if we can.

We can be reasonably sure she was *not* the sister of Bevis/Bogo de Clare, who glommed onto the treasurership of York Minster along with a pile of other benefices from about 1255 (when he was about seven, precocious little devil) into the 1290s - the dates don't mesh at all, at all. (And he had no sisters named Matilda or Maud.)

There are no other known Clare treasurers of York in this time period.

The most likely "brothers of Maud" are William no-last-name, referred to only as "treasurer", 1218-1222, and William de Rotherfield, treasurer 1222-about 1241. But unless we find a Clere-Rotherfield connection, the latter is problematical.

The bottom line seems to be that if Maud was the sister of a treasurer of York, she wasn't a Clare. This would explain why her granddaughter didn't need a Papal dispensation to marry into the Clares. (It's true some people thumbed their noses at Canon law and married anyway - but if the Church hierarchy got antsy about it, and they often did, the willful partners could find their marriage summarily annulled on them.)

Geographically, you generally find Cleres to the North and East, Clares to the South and West, and there's not a lot of overlap.

The Lacys started out as a mostly-Northern family, heading up around Pontefract in West Yorkshire, and associating with other Northern families such as the Vescys and Mowbrays. They later expanded south, west, and overseas to Ireland.

All in all, I rather think she was a Northern Clere rather than a Western Clare.

One of the very worst problems with the Cleres is that they are so poorly documented it's hard to figure out who's who and connected to whom. And a lot of *that* is because they keep getting overwritten with Clares.

I think we can get rid of the ambiguous "First Wife or Mabel" - she dated from when I wasn't too sure which wife had birthed Matilda. Probably she was Mabel's if she was Ralph de Clere's daughter at all.