Aveline de Forz
Aveline de Forz, Countess of Aumale (by marriage also Aveline, Countess of Leicester ) (born January 20, 1259 in Burtwick , Yorkshire , † November 10, 1274 in Stockwell , Surrey ) was an English noblewoman . After her death, King Edward I secured her inheritance in what is considered one of the cases in which the king manipulated inheritance law.
Origin and life
She was a daughter of William de Forz, Count of Aumale († 1260) and his wife Isabel de Redvers († 1293). As a pretender to the county of Aumale in Normandy, which has since been annexed by France, her father was titled Count of Aumale , but as Lord of Holderness he also had extensive property in northern England and was an influential magnate there . After her father died in 1260 and the last of her siblings died in 1269 with her brother Thomas de Forz, Count of Aumale , she inherited most of the family's estates. Her mother, who received an extensive Wittum from her father's estates , was a wealthy heir herself and was entitled to the Earldom of Devon .
Aveline was born on April 8, 1269 at Westminster Abbey with Edmund, Earl of Leicester , a younger son of King Henry III. and married his wife Eleanor of Provence . The marriage also gave her the courtesy title of Countess of Leicester . Her husband set out on a crusade to the Holy Land in February or March 1271, from which he returned in the summer or fall of 1272. Aveline died childless in 1274 at the age of fifteen. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, where her elaborate grave monument, probably made after 1290, has been preserved.
Dispute over their inheritance
With her death, her husband lost the right to her inheritance. Various people now claimed this inheritance, most of whom claimed to be descendants of Aveline's great-great-grandfather Wilhelm von Aumale . One of these possible heirs was a John de Esthon who claimed to be a descendant of Avice , a daughter of William of Aumale. His claim to inheritance was extremely controversial, because the existence of an Avice could not be proven, and if she had really been a daughter of Wilhelm von Aumale, she was at most an illegitimate daughter. However, in 1278 Esthon was recognized as an inheritance. He soon ceded his inheritance to King Edward I, brother of Aveline's husband, Edmund, in return for the payment of £ 100 and estates with annual income of also £ 100. Eshton is considered unlikely to have been the rightful heir, not least because £ 100 annual income was a very small amount for an extensive legacy that included Holderness , Skipton and Cockermouth . It is more likely that he was a swindler who, with the consent of and even on behalf of the king, illegally claimed the inheritance.
Web links
- Aveline de Forz, Countess of Holderness on thepeerage.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Westminster Abbey: Edmund, Earl of Lancaster and Aveline de Forz. Retrieved August 28, 2018 .
- ^ Michael Prestwich: Edward I. University of California, Berkeley 1988, ISBN 0-520-06266-3 , p. 104
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas de Forz |
Titular Countess of Aumale 1269–1274 |
Title expired |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Forz, Aveline de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Forz, Aveline, Countess of Aumale; Aveline, Countess of Leicester |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English nobles |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 20, 1259 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Burtwick |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 10, 1274 |
| Place of death | Stockwell (London) |