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ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT (927-935)


Robert was known as the Saint or the Devil depending on whose side you had been on in the Norman civil war and whether or not you believed he had been responsible for the poisoning of his brother Richard to become the sixth Duke of Normandy.

The unrest continued with some nobles leaving the Duchy to establish a new kingdom in Southern Italy while others pressurised the church with the monastic records filled with complaints against them. Robert the Duke’s uncle and Archbishop of Rouen since 989 was besieged at Evreux and forced into exile where he laid the Duchy under an Interdict. The Duke was also at war with Alan III of Britanny, his cousin. The situation couldn’t continue and Robert was recalled and helped to make peace between his two nephews at Mont St Michel in 1030.

The duke’s cousin Edward the Confessor, the son of Robert’s aunt Emma, was living in exile in Normandy after his father Aethelred had lost his throne to the Dane Canute in 1016. In an attempt to help Edward win back the English throne the two of them in 1029 set off with a naval fleet from Fécamp bound for the Sussex coast. They were met by bad weather, however and Wace wrote ‘they could neither land nor return to Normandy, so they came to the Island of Gersui’ This was the only recorded time that a Norman duke was to set foot on Jersey. They ‘were detained many days’ hoping for the winds to change and when the didn’t abandoned the project and left for Mont St Michel.

The Duke when about seventeen had met a tanners daughter from Falaise called Herleve who had a child called William in 1028. She must have been a remarkable girl for she was married off to Herluin, Vicomte de Conteville and was to give birth to the famous Odo Bishop of Bayeux and Robert Count of Mortain who was to become one of the largest landowners in England. But her son William was also made the heir to the Duchy.

In 1031 the young King Henry I of France fell out with his mother Constance and fled to Rouen where Robert provided him with refuge. In thanks Henry gave the Duke part of the Vexin to control and also gave permission for the right of William to accede.

Having finally brought peace and assured the accession Robert then surprised everybody by announcing he was going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem following the example of the likes of Fulk of Anjou in 1002 and Geoffrey of Britanny in 1008. Wace describes the great treasure that Robert presented to the Holy Sepulchre in what could have been seen as an act of penitence for the death of his brother. On his return journey Robert was taken ill in the city of Nicaea in Bythinia and died. It is claimed by William of Malmesbury that he was poisoned by an official called Ralph Mowin which could have been seen as poetic justice.