General Notes

Name Suffix:<NSFX> Earl Of Shrewsbury
ROBERT OF BELLÊME, EARL OF SHREWSBURY, was one of the most powerful Anglo-Norman magnates of the second generation after the Conquest. Son of Roger of Montgomery, first earl of Shrewsbury, he had already acquired large estates in Normandy and Maine before his father's death in 1094 when he received, as the elder surviving son, the patrimonial lands in the duchy. In 1098, on the death of his younger brother Hugh, he received the extensive Marcher earldom of Shrewsbury and the family property in Sussex, to which Robert added the Midland fief of Tickhill by purchase and the county of Ponthieu by marriage. He thus controlled lands stretching from the Somme estuary and northern Maine, through Normandy, southern England to the Midlands and into Wales. He personified a Norman 'Empire' linked rather than divided by the Channel. In Rufus's reign he was notorious for two things: his cruelty and his interest in military architecture, both useful attributes for a man in his position. If his power was spectacular, so was his fall. Robert had supported Robert Curthose for the English throne in 1088 and, although he had formally accepted Henry I in 1100, retained this loyalty, possibly calculating that his own power would be the greater under the ineffectual Curthose. In 1102, all his English lands were confiscated after an abortive attempt to resist Henry, who, unable to trust Robert, had determined to destroy him. The rest of Robert's political career was spent in Normandy, his opposition to Henry persisting even after Curthose's defeat in 1106. In 1112 Henry lost patience. Robert was arrested and incarcerated, first in Normandy, then, from 1113, at Wareham in Dorset. There he spent the rest of his life, hidden from view except for a reference in the Pipe Roll of 1130 to payments for his maintenance and clothing. The Wheel of Fortune had come round. His grandfather had been a minor ducal official in Normandy. Through good marriages, the patronage of William the Conqueror, and their own predatory instincts, the family had reached the highest rung of the nobility. Their rise had been spotted with blood, of their opponents and subjects; sometimes their own: Robert's mother, Mabel, had been brutally murdered; his brother Hugh killed by a viking on a raid to Anglesey. The ascent and destruction of Robert's family provides an object lesson in how Anglo-Norman politics worked away from the sanitized niceties of government bookkeeping. [Source: Who's Who in Early Medieval England, Christopher Tyerman, Shepheard-Walwyn, Ltd., London, 1996