Robert Malet

  General Notes:

~Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700, 8th Edition, 234A:25, thought to be the grandson of William Malet (d. 1071), of Granville St. Honorine, Normandy, who was at the Battle of Hasting in 1066 and was the sheriff of Yorkshire in 1068. Robert held the barony of Curry Malet, Somerset, 1135, previously held by the Courcelles family. ¹⁶⁰

~An Analysis of the Domesday Book of the County of Norfolk, pg. 17, calls him the son of William and Hesilia. Boyers has Gilbert as Robert's father, who is the son of William and Hesilia.⁷³³

~ Carl Boyer's Medieval English Ancestors of Certain Americans, p. 142, father of William and Baldwin, son of Gilbert. ⁷²²

  Noted events in his life were:

• Background Information: Taken from Notices of an English Branch of the Malet Family, by Arthur Malet, pp. 72-73:. ⁹⁵⁴
"Robert Malet was a witness to the charter granted by Maud the Empress to Geoffrey de Magnaville when she created him Earl of Essex, which is supposed to have been in about 1141, but he lived on at least to 1150; for Mr. Farbrother in his Notes on the History of Shepton Malet, page 220, states 'that there was not long ago in the chest of Shepton Mallet Church a letter from Robert Malet written in about 1150, in which he petitions the Pope on behalf of himself and the inhabitants that a cemetery may be added to the Church, for that the corpses were lost and frequently those also who carried them in going to Glastonbury, the place of burial, in bogs and quagmires.' Beyond this date I find no record of him. Supposing therefore that he was twenty-one years at the accession of Henry I, and this would be probable, as his father Gilbert must have been about fifty years old at that time, he must have been about seventy-one years old in 1150, the date of his petition to the Pope. He was succeeded by his son William."

• Background Information. ⁹⁵⁴
Robert Malet was sheriff of Norfolk as well as the largest landholder to be loyal to the king, and was likely involved in the suppression of the revolt against William the Conqueror by Earl Ralph Wader of East Anglia, Roger, earl of Hereford and Waltheof, earl of Northumberia.

At the time of the Domesday Survey, Robert held the largest fiefs in East Anglia with 511 holdings and lordships. He was one of the first of the Norman Lords to found a priory in England. He chose Eye in Suffolk as the site of this priory.

Robert Malet witnessed Henry I's coronation charter at Westminster. It seems that Robert was close to King Henry from the beginning of Henry's reign. Soon after Henry's coronation, Robert was made Henry's master chamberlain. At the same time he was appointed once more as sheriff of Suffolk and was restored the full honor of Eye, which had been seized by William Rufus.

Anglo-Norman Studies, XIX, pp. 152-