William de la Plaunche

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• Background Information: From GEN-MEDIEVAL-L Archives.
From: John Carmi Parsons<jparsons@chass.utoronto.ca >
Subject: de Fiennes de la Plaunche
Date: 30 Aug 1998 04:31:36 -0700

In 1977, I published an edition of the wardrobe account book of Eleanor of Castile, queen of England, for the last year of her life (1289-90). Among other valuable contents, the material in that manuscript permitted me to identify correctly for the first time the wives of four English barons. All four of these women were then damsels in Eleanor's household and the clerk who kept the account identified all four as the queen's kinswomen (*consanguinee Regine*). For the record, the four were Joan, wife of John lord Wake of Liddell; Clemence wife of John de Vesci the younger; Marie wife of Almeric de St Amand; and Alice wife of John de Montfort of Beudesert. (Parsons, The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290 [Toronto, 1977], pp. 41-55.)

The Rest of the Article not included here.

It's Alice de Montfort in whose birth family I am presently interested. She has long been known as the daughter of a William de la Plaunche, and as a cousin of Queen Eleanor. It now appears that William de laa Plaunche was a cadet or bastard of the house of Fiennes. There exists in France today a family using the surname "de Fiennes de la Planche," whose arms are those of the Fiennes, though with slight differencing in tincture and charge that suggests either cadency or bastardy: a lion rampant on a field billetty, with (in different versions) a bend or a baton for difference. The Fiennes arms lack the billets and the bend or baton.

The thirteenth-century William de la Plaunche who was Eleanor of Castile's kinsmann also bore the lion rampant on a field billetty, as did his issue in England through his son James de la Planche (d. 13##), who in 1289, also by Queen Eleanor's agency, married Maud de Haversham, an heiress in Bucks. The de la Planche-Haversham descendants are traced in V.C.H. Buckinghamshire, iv, pp. 368-70. In addition to Alice and James, William de la Planche also had a son John, who received gifts from Edward I and Queen Eleanor when they arrived in France in the spring of 1286. Alice de la Planche married John de Montfort within a year thereafter, certainly by 28 March 1287 when Edward I, in an unpublished letter, ordered his lieutenant in England to deal favorably with John de Montfort who had married a cousin of the queen ("cum idem Johannes karissime consorti nostre racione uxoris quam de genere suo duxit...fuerit alligatus...."[Public Record Office, S.C. 1/45/46]).

The dates of William de la Planche's children's marriages suggests that like Queen Eleanor, he was a great-grandchild of Count Aubri II of Dammartin and a grandson of Aubri's daughter Agnes, who married William de Fiennes I.

To date, however, I have not been able to document specific links between William de la Planche and the Fiennes. Neither Dom Anselme nor Aubert de la Chenaye des Bois indicates any such cadet or bastard lines of the Fiennes in the first generations descended from the marriage of William I and Agnes de Dammartin. In 1977 I was able only to point to the kinship that certainly existed between Queen Eleanor and William; to the heraldic evidence linking the de la Planches to the Fiennes; and to the still-flourishing de Fiennes de la Planche family.

It seems very likely that the de Fiennes de la Planches originated with a younger sson of William de Fiennes I and Agnes de Dammartin.

John C. Parsons