Robert, Count of Eu

Robert, Count of Eu (d. between 1091 and 1093), son of William I, Count of Eu, and his wife Lesceline. Count of Eu and Lord of Hastings. Robert assumed the countship of Eu after the rebellion of his brother William Busac.

When Henry I, King of France, sent his army, under command of his brother Odo, to Normandy in 1054, he was met by the army of William, then the Duke of Normandy. William’s forces were under the command of Robert and Walter Giffard, Lord of Longueville. The Battle of Mortemer was decisive in defeating the French, resulting in what has been described as a blood-bath. Odo escaped and Henry promptly withdrew his forces.

Robert commanded 60 ships in the fleet supporting the landing of William in England and the Norman conquest of England. Around 1068, William awarded to Robert the Hastings Castle and the adjacent territories previously owned by Onfroy du Tilleul, the nephew of Hugh de Grandmesnil, a proven Companion of William the Conquerer. According to the the Domesday Book, Robert and his son William each possessed lands in separate counties. The sum of the annual income generated by the lands of the two men amounted to about 690 pounds sterling.

In 1069 he was charged by the king to support Robert, Count of Mortain, to monitor the Danes, whose fleet moored in the mouth of the Humber, while the latter was to repress the revolt initiated by Eadric the Wild the west. When the Danes left their sanctuary to plunder the neighborhood, the two commanders and their army fell upon them unexpectedly, crushing them, and forcing them to flee by sea.

After the death of William, the Robert followed the party of Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy. Rejected by his softness and debauchery, he turned, along with several other Norman lords, towards the king William II the Red, from whom he received several garrisons for his castles. During the attempted intervention of the English king in Normandy in February 1091, he was one of his supporters. He died after this episode and his son William II assumed the countship of the county.

Robert married first Beatrix de Falaise, sister of Arlette de Falaise. Robert and Beatrix had four children:

• Raoul d'Eu (d. after 1036)
• Robert d'Eu (d. 1149)
• Condoha (Condor) (d. after 1087) married in 1058 to Fulk d'Angoulême, and was mother of William V d'Angoulême and grandmother of Wulgrin II d'Angoulême.
• William II, who succeeded his father as Count of Eu and Lord of Hastings
• Eremburga of Mortain (possible), the second wife of Roger i, Count of Sicily.
• Armand of Mortain (possible), married to Beatrix, daughter of Tancred of Hauteville.

Very devout, he donated all his life to the Church, notably lands at Fécamp Abbey of Rouen in 1051. Widowed, he remarried, to Mathilde de Hauteville, daughter of Roger I, Count of Sicily, and Judith of Evreux, a second cousin of William the Conqueror.. But he repudiated her and she remarried in 1080 to Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse and Marquis of Provence

He was buried in the Abbey of Saint-Michel du Tréport,^[1] which he had founded in Tréport, near the town of Eu, between 1057 and 1066, in memory of his first wife and by the council of Duke William and Maurilius, archbishop of Rouen.

Robert was succeeded as Count of Eu and Lord of Hastings by his son William.

Sources

Waters, Edmund C., The Counts of Eu, Sometime Lords of the Honour of Tickhill, The Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Journal, No. 9, 1886

Douglas, David C., William the Conqueror, The University of California Press, Berkeley, 1964

Neveux, François , A Brief History of the Normans, Translated by Howard Curtis, Constable & Robinson, Ltd., London, 2008

References