Agnes of Essex

Agnes of Essex (married Agnes de Vere, Countess of Oxford ); (* 1151 ; † after 1206) was an English noblewoman.

Origin, engagement and marriage

Agnes of Essex was a daughter of Henry of Essex and his first wife Cecily. Her father engaged her as a young child to Geoffrey de Vere , a younger but already grown-up brother of Aubrey de Vere, 1st Earl of Oxford , so that at the age of three she came into the household of the Earl of Oxford. When she was six years old, Geoffrey took over the upbringing of his bride himself, but Agnes refused to marry him. The conflict was resolved by the fact that Aubrey de Vere, who had not yet had any sons, married twelve-year-old Agnes in early 1163 in their third marriage. As a dowry, Agnes received from her father possessions with five Knight's fees in eastern England.

Dispute about the validity of marriage

Shortly after the marriage, Agnes father was accused of treason and cowardice. He had to face a court battle that he lost. He was therefore considered a convicted traitor and was expropriated; the king only allowed him to enter a monastery. After this scandal, Aubrey de Vere tried to have his marriage to the daughter of a traitor annulled. Bishop Gilbert Foliot of London should decide on the annulment, but Agnes resisted the annulment of the marriage and appealed to the Pope in Rome on May 9, 1166. During this time Agnes lived rejected by her husband, who kept her under arrest in one of his castles. Bishop Gilbert reprimanded him sharply because he did not treat her appropriately as a wife and even forbade her to attend church services. Aubrey de Vere took this complaint to heart, because around 1168 Agnes gave birth to her first child.

When Pope Alexander III. enacted the rules of marriage under canon law , he took the marriage of Agnes and Aubrey de Vere as an example. Aubrey de Vere claimed that her marriage to Agnes was invalid because she had previously been engaged to his brother. Agnes replied that she had been engaged as a toddler and therefore could not express her own will. Shortly before her twelfth birthday, she had written to her father expressing her refusal to marry her fiancé, which was very unusual for the time. The Pope accepted this as a dissolution of the engagement and subsequently recognized her marriage to Aubrey de Vere as legal in 1171 or 1172.

Further life

Agnes and her husband had at least four sons and a daughter. Together with him, she founded a small Benedictine monastery near Castle Hedingham near her husband's headquarters around 1190 . To this end, she and her husband made donations in favor of Earls Colne Priory in Essex and in favor of the Order of St. John , to which a brother of her husband belonged. Her husband died in December 1194. As Wittum , Agnes received the Cockfield estate in Suffolk . In 1198 Agnes offered the king the sum of 100 marks to acquire the right to marry a man of her choice. She paid this sum within a year but did not remarry. She was buried next to her husband in Earls Colne Priory.

progeny

Agnes had at least five children:

• Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Earl of Oxford
• Roger de Vere
• Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford
• Henry
• Alice ∞ (?) Geoffrey de Say

Web links

• RaGena C. DeAragon: Essex, Agnes of, countess of Oxford (b. 1151, d. In or after 1206). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
• Agnes de Essex on thepeerage.com , accessed March 15, 2016.