The South Tawton red herring

In the 1120s Henry I married off one of his numerous illegitimate daughters to a lord on or just outside the southern borders of Normandy. This may be seen as part of a strategy aimed at promoting loyalty through kinship ties in future generations. 

That lord was Roscelin, the "vicomte" of Maine, who had castles at Sainte-Suzanne and Beaumont-sur-Sarthe. Sainte-Suzanne perhaps in particular is well worth a visit.

King Henry gave South Tawton in Devon as Constance's dowry. 

The 1129/1130 Pipe Roll thus shows Rotscelino de Belmonte excused two silver marks in Devonshire (Pipe Roll p. 155).

Constance and her husband had a son Vicomte Richard, who named one of his daughters Constance, and she in due course married a baron called Roger de Tosny. South Tawton was given again as her dowry or marriage portion.

Here is a note of the charter in which king John in 1199 confirms -

to Constance de Toeni daughter of Richard vic de Bellomonte our kinsman, her land of Aelrichescote which is in Devon in the parish of Sustanton namely the land which king Henry the first, the grandfather of king Henry our father gave, with the said vill of Suthauton, to Constance his daughter and grandmother of the said Constance, in free marriage, etc etc., given at Le Mans 22 Sept. [1199] (Rotuli Chartarum, ed. T.D. Hardy (1837), pp.20-21).

Added this 10 May 2021. Book of Fees p.98 also shows the history of South Tawton to 1212. Given by Henry I to Roscelin de Bello Monte in marriage with Constance his [the king's] daughter, and given by Roscelin's son Richard de Bello Monte to Roger de Tony in marriage with his daughter Constance "who now holds this land."

Amended this 13 May 2021. Keats-Rohan, Domesday Descendants, page 741, states that Roger de Tosny's Constance was Roscelin's daughter.  I think grand-daughter is more likely.

Amended this 10 May 2021. There seems to be no clear evidence as to the date Roger de Tosny married his Constance. As his widow she was living as late as 1210-12 (Book of Fees p.98) (Red Book p.484).

The Tosny family continued to hold South Tawton and it is mentioned in the Inq. Post Mortem of Roger de Tony who died in 48 Henry III, about 1264 (Cal. IPM 1 no.588).

See:- Ethel Lega-Weekes, Neighbours of North Wyke, Transactions of the Devonshire Association vol. 33 (1901).  This is well-written and thorough. 

But:-

Contemporary with Vicomte Richard (father or perhaps brother (deleted 10/5/21) of the younger Constance) was Thomas de Bellomonte, a significant land-holder in Devon, holding four knights fees of the honor of Okehampton.

Sir William Pole, in Collections Towards a Description of the County of Devon (various editions I think, including one of 1791 long after his death), considered that this Thomas was descended from Roscelin and Constance. But given that there was Robert de Bellomonte in Devon in 1086, a tenant of the same honor and (I think) occupying some of the same lands as Thomas, and given that Roscelin's predecessors of the 1086 generation were Hubert, and his son Ralph, and that the name Thomas is not found in the Vicomtes' family, that is clearly not a credible theory.

The fact that the mother of the first Constance was ?fictitiously? supposed to be a lady of the same family as Robert Earl of Leicester and Waleran Count of Meulan (i.e., a woman called Beaumont) has probably worsened the old muddle.

Information available today (eg online) which connects "the Beaumonts" with South Tawton seems to derive from E.T. Beaumont's unreliable book "The Beaumonts in History," about which I posted an article on this blog in May 2017. That book contains a fantastically wrong section about the Devonshire Beaumonts at pages 57-60, chunks of which seem to have been pasted into various websites.

It is confused and confusing to say that South Tawton was anciently a possession of the Beaumont family. There was at least one Beaumont family in Devon but those "Beaumonts" who were connected with South Tawton for a couple of generations were the "vicomtes" of Maine, who had little or no other dealings or lands in England.

EMB 1 February 2021 / 10 May 2021

PS The Vicomtes de Maine were lords of Sainte-Suzanne and other castles, and patrons of an abbey at Etival-en-Charnie. Their male line continued until the mid c13 when there was an heiress Agnes who married Louis de Brienne, sometimes called Louis of Acre. Their younger son Henry, who must have been born in the 1270s or early 1280s, used the name Beaumont, and as a fairly young man moved to England and made his career working for Edward II.

Henry did very well for himself indeed, in terms of wealth and honours, and died in March 1339/40. His descendants were a new "dynasty" of Beaumonts in England, apparently for practical purposes unrelated to the several Beaumont families who were in England long before.