"David" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Thank you ever so much for the information about Hugh de Mapenore.
>If I may just ask you secondly whether you think it possible that this
bishop may have actually had children, giving rise to the Mapp family, which
is predominant even today around Hereford, northwards through
Worcestershire, as far as Shrewsbury and Shropshire ? I imagine that a
Bishop should have been celibate, but ....?
cf. the case of Hugh of LePuiset ("of Pudsey" in some perverse English
sources, though he was clearly of the family from the _castrum_ in the beauce
which gave Louis VI so much trouble), Bishop of Durham (?? or Archbishop of
York??, i can't recall) in the late 12th century, who is known to have at
least two bastard sons, one of whom became the King's chancellor (??memory
fails).
i've suspected that fathering children --even marriage-- was not nearly
as uncommon pre-, say, 1150 in England and France than we might think.
in my attempts to run down the families of some of the canons of Chartres i've
come across at least two in the late 11th-early 12th cc. who were almost
certainly married; one of them, i think, a subdeacon, ran afoul of the reforms
of fastidious Bishop Ivo. (the other was a doctor, casually mentioned by
Orderic Vitalis as a canon of the cathedral --but he may not have been in
priestly orders.)
somewhere i came across a modern reference which ventured that something like
20+% of the canons of the cathedral of London were married before 1150 or
somesuchlike. the reference is locked up on my un-backed-up
hard drive which seems to have died recently..... man, i *hate* it when that
happens!
i'd be interested to hear others thoughts on this matter, as i seem to recall
that it was quite difficult to turn up any good litterature on
this subject. the 19th c. secondary Chartres sources, being good sons of the
Church, were particularly into thoroughly fudging the issue, even to the point
(i *think*) of supressing (destroying??) the evidence.
just my anti-clerical paranoia, i'm sure.
best from here,
christopher
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