Shaking more branches on the family tree

Until a recent family crisis which I may write about later, I have continued to pursue ancestors. On my mother’s side, I discovered someone had methodically put together a family tree of those Tremaynes whose roots sank into the fertile earth around Constantine, Cornwall all the way back to 1240.



Constantine is about five miles southwest of Falmouth.

At about that point, Peter (Perys) Tremayne, possibly a Knight Templar, produced two sons, John and Peter. My relative is John and his descendants are undoubtedly buried in this graveyard:



St. Constantine's was built in the 15th century on the remains of a Celtic monastery.

John married Margery, whose mother was Claricia Peverell and hereby hangs another tale.  Apparently, Claricia (and Margery, for that matter) were related to William the Conqueror.

It seems William married not only Matilda, daughter of a Norman baron, but had also linked himself previously in a secret marriage  to one Maud Ingelrica,  a Saxon princess. According to one genealogist, she was one of the “most celebrated beauties of her day.”  Born in 1032, the fair Ingelrica, was the daughter of the noble Saxon Ingelc, himself an “unrecorded son” of Aethelred the Unready, who seems rather well-named in these dubious circumstances, but he was unprepared (or, as other translators suggest,“ill-advised”) for other reasons as well, I'm sure.

Anyhow, William the Conqueror and Maud apparently had a son William. However, Maud  later married Ranulph Peverell who gave his surname to William. William the Conqueror, the real father, apparently wanted to spare his son the misery of being taunted ,as he had been, for illegitimacy. He was known as Bastard by his detractors, for his father Robert I, Duke of Normandy, was not married to his mother.  Goodness, the things you find out!

William the C., embroidered in the Bayeux tapestry, is lifting his
helmet to show he is alive after the Battle of Hastings (Source: Wikipedia).

As an aside, it is also intriguing that the Wikipedia entry about William the Conqueror ends by asserting clearly that in no way shape or form was William ever an unfaithful husband. A millennium later, these things still heat up people’s collars.

The Bastard/Conqueror gave his natural son William so many lands that, in the Domesday Book, he was recorded as having 162 manors, making him one of the major landholders in England. It probably helped that his adopted father had fought on the right side in the Battle of Hastings:

Horses and riders in disarray in the Battle of Hastings (1066) 
are depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry (Source: Wikipedia).

William, known as the Elder, to distinguish him from his son, the Younger, not to mention his half-brother, William Rufus, and his father, William the Conqueror, was a bit of a bounder. One source says he had “three wives and many concubines.” One of his wives produced William the Younger who was six generations removed from Claricia Peverell whose daughter married my Tremayne ancestor.

And 27 generations later (calculated by Ancestry.com, not me) I am here to write about it! Wow!