The Flemish Origins

The marriage to Matilda of Flanders had taken place in 1053. A proof not only of the high regard that William of Normandy had for the princely Count of Boulogne but also of the respect in which he held the magical Carolingian descent is seen in the fact that he gave his beloved only sister, Adele, widow of Enguerrand of Ponthieu, to be the wife of Eustace’s younger brother, Count Lambert of Lens (the Lens territory was a wedge-shaped comte lying between Bethune andDouai). Such matrimonial bargainings were seldom one-sided, and this one can be assessed in the opposite was. Count Eustace I of Boulogne was one of the most powerful rulers of Europe, in terms of personality as well of wealth. Of his three sons the youngest, Godfrey, entered the Church, to become Bishop of Paris and Chancellor of France under it’s king, Philip I. The second, Lambert, he married off to the sister of the rising young Duke of Normandy, whose own wife was a daughter of the liege lord, the Count of Flanders. For the heir, Eustace, Count Eustace selected as bride the Princess Goda, a widow it is true, but sister of that King Edward of England later to be known as “the Confessor”. Thus were sown the seeds of what might have been the most brilliant alliance of all, for the Boulonnaise. By the time of Eustace’s marriage it must have been guessed that England’s King Edward would remain childless. Had Goda survived, or borne her husband a son, the history of Europe could well have been different. As it was, Count Eustace’s English wife was dead long before 1066, and visits they had made in her lifetime to his royal brother-in-law across the Channel had been marred by some deeply humiliating skirmishes with Godwin of Wessex and his son, Earl Harold.

For his part in the Norman Conquest, Count Eustace II of Boulogne was given manors in Kent, Surrey, Hampshire, Somerset, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Bearing in mind the stormy relationship which existed between Eustace and William during the twenty years between the Conquest and the compiling of the Domesday record, his initial reward may well have been even greater.

There is a temptation to read into the Domesday awards a recognition by William the Conqueror of personal acts of bravery witnessed by him on the battlefield at Senlac. For instance, Arnulf, brother of the Count of Hesdin, was given manors in Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Kent, Somerset, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire and Huntingdonshire – a very generous guerdon. The 19th-century historian, J.H. Round, called Arulf “the most mysterious personage in Domesday”, but of course he was well known to his Boulonnais kinsmen. Gilbert of Ghent, another younger son, brother of Baldwin, Lord of Alost, also gained a vast reward,his manors stretching into fourteen counties. Like most of the other Flemish noblemen, Gilbert was a close relative of Eustace of Boulogne, his great-aunt, Adele of Gand, being the Count’s grandmother.

Count Eustace II of Boulogne was the eldest of three brothers, the other two being Lambert, Count of Lens, and Godfrey, Bishop of Paris. Lambert of Lens, as we have seen, married Adele, sister of William the Conqueror, and died at the battle of Lille in 1055. This left Lens without a strong arm to defend it, and both Baldwin V of Flanders and Henry III, the Emperor, laid claim to what was constitutionally an appanage of Boulogne.  Count Eustace went to war to regain his late brother’s holding, and after intervention by Pope Victor II the comte of Lens was returned to him. But by then it must have become obvious to everybody that the territory could not be held by a minor; and if there had been any heirs of Lambert’s they were, for the time at least, disinherited.  This fact, that no one inherited from Lambert, seems to have confused historians on both sides of the Channel into thinking that he died childless. But not only did he have as heiress his infant, half-Norman daughter, Judith, but, as Flemish charters make plain, he also left two sons. He must, therefore, have been married and widowed before he wed Adele in 1054. Both boys were old enough to fight at Hastings – but perhaps only just. William Poitiers, in an enigmatic reference to a nephew of Eustace who was captured by the Normans in the abortive Boulonnais attack on Dover in 1067, speaks of the young man without naming him, as a “noble tyro”. What was the fate of this young captive is also not stated.