Joan of Bar, Countess of Surrey

• https://historytheinterestingbits.com/2016/01/09/joan-of-bar-abando...

Joan de Bar1

F, #104563, b. 1295, d. 1361

    Joan de Bar was born in 1295.

She was the daughter of Henry III de Bar, Comte de Bar and Eleanor of England.
She married John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, son of William de Warenne and Joan de Vere, before 1315.
She and John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey were divorced in 1315.
She died in 1361.

http://thepeerage.com/p10457.htm#i104563

Warenne

The following is from :http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/amatory-adventures-of-j...

by Kathryn Warner

"But the main subject of this post is Edward II's niece Jeanne de Bar and her husband John de Warenne, their spectacularly awful marriage, John's numerous illegitimate children, his high-born mistresses, and his unsuccessful-but-decades-long attempts to divorce Jeanne, which culminated in his amusingly implausible claim that he'd had an affair with Edward II's sister Mary, a nun.

John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey and Sussex (and Strathearn, much later in life) was born on 30 June 1286, the only son of Joan de Vere (died 1293, daughter of Robert, Earl of Oxford) and William de Warenne, who was killed in a tournament in December 1286 when his son was less than six months old. John's aunt Isabella de Warenne was married to John Baliol, who became King of Scotland in 1292. John's grandfather was John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey (1231-1304), the younger half-brother of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk (died 1270); he married Henry III's half-sister Alice de Lusignan, who died in early 1256. John never re-married and was a widower for almost half a century. The younger John succeeded his grandfather in September 1304, when he was eighteen, and became a ward of Edward I. The following year, Edward offered him the marriage of his granddaughter Jeanne de Bar, which John enthuasiastically accepted, and their wedding took place on 25 May 1306. Jeanne was only ten or eleven years old, John almost twenty.

Jeanne, born 1295 or 1296, was the only daughter of Edward I's eldest surviving daughter Eleanor (1269-98) and Henri, Count of Bar. Eleanor had been betrothed for many years to King Alfonso III of Aragon, but he died in 1291, and she married Henri in September 1293. Eleanor's son Edouard, born probably in 1294, succeeded his father as Count of Bar in 1302. Edouard married Marie, daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy; two of her sisters were Queens of France (married to Louis X and Philip VI).

[For a good laugh, check out Jeanne's hopelessly inaccurate Wikipedia page, which claims that she was the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, not to mention the mistress of the French king Jean II when he was a captive in England after 1356; Jeanne was at least sixty by then and Jean was a good twenty-five years her junior, so it seems pretty unlikely. She was not divorced from John, was married in 1306 not 1310, and was never regent of Bar.]

The first signs of marital discord came as early as 1309 - when it's quite likely that the marriage hadn't even been consummated, due to Jeanne's youth. Edward II gave John, his nephew by marriage - only two years his junior - permission to make whomsoever he chose his heir, provided that he didn't disinherit any children he might have by Jeanne.

By 1313, John and Jeanne were living apart. That spring, Edward sent his yeoman William Aune to John's Yorkshire castle of Conisbrough to fetch Jeanne to him; subsequently she lived at the Tower of London, at Edward's expense. At this time, the King's sympathies were clearly with his young niece, who was to become a close friend of Queen Isabella (the two women were about the same age).

The reason for their separation was that John was by now living with his mistress, the 'fair and comely' Maud (or Maude or Matilda) de Nerford (or Nereford or Neirford or Neyrford or Narford, etc etc). In May 1313, John was threatened with excommunication for his antics; Edward II, despite his sympathy for Jeanne, stepped in to prevent this, probably for political reasons. Since the murder of Piers Gaveston in June 1312, John had supported the King - although he was to waver several times over the years, he was loyal to Edward II far more often than not.

Maud, born around 1292, was the widow of Sir Simon de Derby and the daughter of Sir William de Nerford and Petronilla de Vaux, who married on 4 February 1288. Maud's grandfather had been Seneschal of Gascony; her great-uncle married the daughter of the Earl of Derby; her first cousin was William, Baron de Ros, who married Margery Badlesmere, daughter and co-heiress of Bartholomew, Steward of Edward II's household. William was one of the barons who informed Edward II of his deposition at Kenilworth Castle on 20 January 1327. William's sister Agnes married Payn, Lord Tibetot, who (along with John de Warenne) signed the Boulogne Agreement on 31 January 1308 and was killed at Bannockburn. Maud's uncle by marriage, William, Baron de Ros, was a competitor for the crown of Scotland in 1292 - a competition eventually 'won' by her lover's uncle by marriage, John Baliol.

Maud was thus an unusually highly born mistress, and John was determined to marry her. In 1316, he changed tactics and began a court case to divorce Jeanne. While at Westminster Palace in the company of Queen Isabella, Jeanne was cited to answer petitions of John and Maud; Edward II paid M. Simon de Invenzano two shillings a day for 142 days to prosecute the case for Jeanne. Maud claimed that she had previously contracted to marry John, which was almost certainly nonsense as she had been married to Simon de Derby, and John claimed consanguinity. He and Jeanne were indeed second cousins once removed (both were descended from Isabelle d'Angoulême), but Pope Clement V had granted them a dispensation, so there were no grounds for dissolving the marriage. John also claimed that he had been forced into marrying Jeanne against his will - also not true, as he had enthusiastically accepted the alliance to Edward I's granddaughter - that he couldn't have properly consented, as he was under twenty-one at the time, and so on...

By this stage, John and Maud had sons together, John and Thomas. Earl John was desperate for these sons to be acknowledged as his heirs. In 1316, he surrendered his lands to Edward II, and on 4 August received them back "with remainder to John de Warenna son of Matilda de Neirford, and the heirs male of his body, and failing such issue to Thomas de Warenna son of the said Matilda, and the heirs male of his body, with final remainder failing such issue to the heirs of the body of the said earl..." [Patent Rolls]

Again, it's likely that Edward II was keen to help John for political reasons - although he refused to fight for Edward in Scotland in 1314, John was for the most part a very loyal supporter of the King. But John paid the price for his desire to re-marry. In 1316, the Bishop of Chichester pronounced him excommunicate, 'for adultery and openly keeping a mistress'.

Edward II wrote two petitions to the Pope on behalf of John's sons. Here's the start of one: "The King to the Venerable in Christ: whereas our cousin John, Earl of Warenne, had two natural sons, our cousins Masters John and William de Warenne, begotten by him on a noblewoman, not married, the King asks for support of his application to the Pope on their behalf..."

Notice the different names in the petition and the Patent Rolls above: Thomas and William. This may be a mistake, or it may refer to yet another of John's sons. His son William was born early in his relationship with Maud, by the summer of 1310 at the latest, and is mentioned in the Chancery Writs of 7 March 1311: "Inspeximus and confirmation of a grant, 24 August, 4 Edward II, by John de Warenna, earl of Surrey, to his son William de Warenna and the heirs of his body..."

I don't know why this son William isn't mentioned as an heir in the Patent Rolls of 1316. Possibly because John had TWO illegitimate sons named William - one who became a knight, and one who became Prior of Horton. The son named in 1311 may be the Prior, and not stated as a possible heir of John in 1316 because John had already decided to give him to the Church. As far as I can work out, John had a whopping nine illegitimate children - more on them later.

John promised Jeanne £200 a year, a reasonably generous sum, while the court case was ongoing, and 740 marks' worth of land once the marriage was dissolved. The case dragged on for two years (some things never change, do they?) Finally, John lost. It was a highly complex case, involving members of the nobility as well - a council of nobles led by Thomas of Lancaster condemned John and Maud. John evidently held Lancaster at least partly responsible for his failure to obtain a divorce, hence his abduction of Lancaster's wife Alice de Lacy in May 1317.

1317, in fact, saw some very odd goings-on in connection with John's marriage: as well as Alice's abduction, the Earl of Pembroke was captured on his way back to England from Avignon, and held captive until an enormous ransom was paid (£10,400, worth countless millions today). Significantly, Pembroke was held in the county of Bar, and his biographer postulates that the Earl had presented a petition to the Pope (residing then at Avignon) on John's behalf, thereby infuriating Jeanne's brother Count Edouard. It's not clear if Edouard ordered Pembroke's imprisonment, but he certainly condoned it, at least. Edward II did his best to intervene with his nephew Edouard, and Pembroke arrived back in England on 23 June 1317. (Pembroke never managed to clear this enormous debt, and when his widow died in 1377, she still hadn't managed it.)

The feud between John and Thomas of Lancaster soon exploded into open warfare, and Lancaster attacked some of John's Yorkshire lands - and ejected the indignant Maud de Nerford from her property. [The private war between the two men is beyond the scope of this post, but formed a significant part of the political turbulence of the middle years of Edward's reign.]

In 1323, Maud de Nerford was granted some of John's lands in Norfolk, which later passed to their best-known child, Sir Edward de Warenne or Warren. Edward is thought to have been born in 1321, was presumably named after Edward II, and died in the late 1360s. He married Cecily, daughter of Sir Nicholas de Eton, and they had a son, John, born about 1343. Cecily and Edward thus founded the well-known Warren family of Poynton, Cheshire.

In 1325, Earl John was named captain of the English expedition to Gascony, during the War of Saint-Sardos. In 1326, he returned to England - with his wife, Jeanne, who had spent most if not all of the previous decade in her native France, latterly in the company of Queen Isabella in Paris. This may point to a reconciliation between the couple. In early 1327, they had a safe-conduct to travel abroad together. However, in 1331 Jeanne left England again with her entire household, so any reconciliation was not permanent.

At some unknown time, John and Maud ended their relationship, and John cancelled the arrangements he had made for their sons to inherit his lands. The end of the relationship led to a great deal of bitterness: Maud apparently hated him because he had 'ousted her from his company', and John did his best to prevent her holding a court case against him, complaining that the justices were members of her household and thus highly partial. Maud died sometime before 22 November 1345.

Sometime in the 1330s, John - who turned fifty in 1336 - took up with another long-term, nobly born mistress, Isabel(la) Holland. Isabel's mother was Maud, born about 1290, daughter and co-heiress of Alan, Lord la Zouche (born 9 October 1267), and the great-great-granddaughter of Henry II's illegitimate son William Longespee (and the third cousin once removed of both John de Warenne and Edward II). Isabel's father was Sir Robert Holland, a protégé of John de Warenne's great enemy Thomas, Earl of Lancaster. Lancaster's biographer has described Holland as the Earl's "junior partner", but his loyalty did not extend to committing treason, and he abandoned the Earl at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 - Lancaster subsequently lost the battle. Edward II, horrified at Holland's treachery, imprisoned him, but he was released by Queen Isabella in 1327. On 15 October 1328, Holland was captured at Boreham Wood in Essex by some of Lancaster's adherents; they beheaded him, and sent the head to Lancaster's brother Henry.

Robert Holland and Maud la Zouche married in about 1311. Ascertaining how many children they had is difficult, but it was at least seven and may have been as many as thirteen. Their eldest son Robert was born in about 1312, and their second son Thomas in 1314; he married Edward II's half-niece Joan, the 'Fair Maid of Kent'. Thomas and Joan's sons, Isabel's nephews, were the half-brothers of Richard II. Another brother, Sir Otho Holland, was one of the first Knights of the Garter.

Isabel, John's mistress, was probably the youngest daughter of Robert and Maud, born in about 1320, or even later - so was decades younger than John de Warenne, born 1286. John's new liaison led him to make renewed efforts to divorce Jeanne, so that he could marry Isabel Holland and make any children they had together his heirs. This time, he claimed to have had an affair with Edward II's sister Mary - Jeanne's aunt - who was a nun at Amesbury. It's not impossible that John had an affair with Mary, whose vocation for the holy life was sadly lacking, but it's unlikely, not least because she was seven years his senior. It's far more likely that he chose her for an 'affair' because she was related to his wife, but conveniently dead (she died in 1332), with no children to take offence at his claims.

In the 1340s, John - well into his fifties by now - managed to get a Papal Bull declaring that his and Jeanne's marriage was invalid, but the English bishops ignored it. In 1344, a mere thirty-eight years after his wedding, Pope Clement VI commanded him to treat his wife with 'marital affection' and absolved him of any sin he may have committed with his wife's aunt. John must have wondered what else he had to do to get a divorce. Obviously keen to provide for Isabel after his death, he persuaded Edward III to agree to a series of transactions whereby many of his lands would remain in Isabel's hands for the rest of her life. However, his nephew and heir Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel - son of the Arundel executed in 1326 and John's sister Alice - petitioned Edward, pointing out that he would be deprived of a large part of his rightful inheritance by such arrangements. Edward III agreed and revoked John's settlements.

John's will is dated 24 June 1347. He died five or six days days later, either on his sixty-first birthday or the day before, and was buried at Lewes Priory. He may have been in ill health for some time, as on 13 October 1346 Edward III exempted him for life from attending Parliament on the (rather brutal) grounds that he was "too feeble to work".

John left "ma compaigne" Isabel Holland "my gold ring with the good ruby," five other gold rings, all the vestments of his chapel, all his beds he hadn't bequeathed to other people, half his livestock, all his silver vessels, a gold cup and a variety of other plate. He also left Isabel all his possessions which he hadn't specifically bequeathed to others, and made a few bequests to his children [see below]. To Jeanne de Bar, his wife of forty-one years, he left nothing.

Countess Jeanne received John's Lincolnshire lands as her dower. She died on 31 August 1361, in her mid-sixties, and was buried at Saint-Maxe, Bar-le-Duc, France. John's lands in Surrey, Sussex, Yorkshire, Shropshire, Wales, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Norfolk were shared out between John's nephew Arundel (who took the title 'Earl of Surrey' after Jeanne's death), the Earl of Salisbury, and Edward III, who used the Yorkshire lands, and the Lincolnshire lands after Jeanne's death, to endow his fourth son Edmund of Langley - John's godson.

I don't know what happened to Isabel Holland after John's death - whether she married and had children, when she died. I've read that she lived till 1389, but can't confirm it. Her family the Hollands thrived in the later fourteenth century - for example, her brother and nephew were Earls of Kent, her nephew John Holland became Duke of Exeter, her great-niece Joan Holland married Edmund of Langley in 1393 and became Duchess of York - so I suppose she was looked after."

• 1. Sir Edward de Warren, knight, illegitimate son of the last Earl of Warren and Surrey by Maud de Nerford. Died before 1369. • + Cicely, daughter and finally heiress of Sir Nicholas de Eton of Poynton and Stockport. (Last Earl of Warren being John de Warrenne, Earl of Surry and Sussex).

http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/amatory-adventures-of-j...

Jeanne, born 1295 or 1296, was the only daughter of Edward I's eldest surviving daughter Eleanor (1269-98) and Henri, Count of Bar. Eleanor had been betrothed for many years to King Alfonso III of Aragon, but he died in 1291, and she married Henri in September 1293. Eleanor's son Edouard, born probably in 1294, succeeded his father as Count of Bar in 1302. Edouard married Marie, daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy; two of her sisters were Queens of France (married to Louis X and Philip VI).

For more on her marriage: http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/amatory-adventures-of-j...

Countess Jeanne received John's Lincolnshire lands as her dower. She died on 31 August 1361, in her mid-sixties, and was buried at Saint-Maxe, Bar-le-Duc, France. John's lands in Surrey, Sussex, Yorkshire, Shropshire, Wales, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Norfolk were shared out between John's nephew Arundel (who took the title 'Earl of Surrey' after Jeanne's death), the Earl of Salisbury, and Edward III, who used the Yorkshire lands, and the Lincolnshire lands after Jeanne's death, to endow his fourth son Edmund of Langley - John's godson.

Note: On May 25, 1306 Warenne married Jeanne of Bar, daughter of count Henry III of Bar and Eleanor, eldest daughter of King Edward I of England. The two were soon estranged and live apart, and had no children, both parties sued for divorce, though the marriage was never dissolved.

Sources:

• 1. Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700 by Frederick Lewis Weis
• 2. [http://www.warrenfamilyhistory.com/Docs/Our%20Warrens%20in%20Englan...]

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John and Jeanne married at Westminster on 25 May 1306, when he was almost twenty and Jeanne probably only ten, and certainly no more than eleven. Evidently sick of waiting for his little wife to grow up, John looked elsewhere, and his biographer F. R. Fairbank commented in 1907 "his wife when they married was a child, and half his own age; it is not wonderful [i.e. not to be wondered at] that the marriage was not a success. He was probably not one whit worse than the great majority in his own station." [1] On 16 August 1309, Edward II gave John licence "to make whom he please heir of the lands which he holds," as long as he "will not disinherit any heir he may have by the king's niece," which suggests that even then, despite her extreme youth, John wasn't sure if he would ever have children with Jeanne and that their marriage was not a success. [2] John had an illegitimate son called William born sometime before 24 August 1310 (see below), and it may have been his birth or imminent birth which prompted John to ask this favour of the king. In the spring of 1313, John and Jeanne's marriage collapsed completely: Edward sent William Aune to bring Jeanne to him and subsequently paid all her expenses at the Tower of London, and specifically invited her to come with him on his trip to France that year. John meanwhile was openly living with his mistress Maud Nerford and was threatened with excommunication on this account in 1313, a sentence finally carried out three years later. He had at least three sons with Maud, and in 1316 made strenuous though ultimately unsuccessful efforts to annul his marriage to Jeanne, marry Maud and make these boys his heirs. By the autumn of 1320, though, his relationship with Maud had ended: he petitioned parliament to ask for her brother John to be removed from a commission of oyer et terminer in Norfolk on the grounds that John Nerford and his fellow commissioners were doing all the harm they could to John, because he had "banished Maud de Nerford from his heart and ousted her from his company." [3]

Joanne of Barre long survived her husband. She died on 31 Aug. 1361, and was buried abroad. As there was no issue of the marriage, Warenne's nephew, Richard Fitzalan II, earl of Arundel (1307?–1376) [q.v.] , was heir-at-law to the earldom. The estates which Warenne held at his death are enumerated in ‘Calendarium Inquisitionum post mortem’ (ii. 137). They now mainly reverted to the crown. The Yorkshire and other estates beyond the Tweed were regranted by Edward III to his son Edmund Langley [see LANGLEY, EDMUND DE, first Duke of York]. But on 25 June 1349 the southern Warenne estates were granted to the Countess Joan, with remainder to the Earl of Arundel. As long as Joan lived, Arundel did not assume the Warenne titles. However, after 1361, Arundel entered into possession of the estates, and henceforth styled himself Earl of Surrey or Warenne, as well as Earl of Arundel. Thus the house of Warenne became merged in the house of Fitzalan.

Warenne married Joan of Bar, daughter of count Henry III of Bar and Eleanor of England, eldest daughter of king Edward I of England. The two were soon estranged and live apart, and had no children, though the marriage was never dissolved.John and Jeanne married at Westminster on 25 May 1306, when he was almost twenty and Jeanne probably only ten, and certainly no more than eleven. Evidently sick of waiting for his little wife to grow up, John looked elsewhere, and his biographer F. R. Fairbank commented in 1907 "his wife when they married was a child, and half his own age; it is not wonderful [i.e. not to be wondered at] that the marriage was not a success. He was probably not one whit worse than the great majority in his own station." On 16 August 1309, Edward II gave John licence "to make whom he please heir of the lands which he holds," as long as he "will not disinherit any heir he may have by the king's niece," which suggests that even then, despite her extreme youth, John wasn't sure if he would ever have children with Jeanne and that their marriage was not a success. John had an illegitimate son called William born sometime before 24 August 1310 (see below), and it may have been his birth or imminent birth which prompted John to ask this favour of the king. In the spring of 1313, John and Jeanne's marriage collapsed completely: Edward sent William Aune to bring Jeanne to him and subsequently paid all her expenses at the Tower of London, and specifically invited her to come with him on his trip to France that year. John meanwhile was openly living with his mistress Maud Nerford and was threatened with excommunication on this account in 1313, a sentence finally carried out three years later. He had at least three sons with Maud, and in 1316 made strenuous though ultimately unsuccessful efforts to annul his marriage to Jeanne, marry Maud and make these boys his heirs. By the autumn of 1320, though, his relationship with Maud had ended: he petitioned parliament to ask for her brother John to be removed from a commission of oyer et terminer in Norfolk on the grounds that John Nerford and his fellow commissioners were doing all the harm they could to John, because he had "banished Maud de Nerford from his heart and ousted her from his company."

By the end of John's life, he was living with another highborn mistress, Isabel Holland, and was once more attempting to annul his marriage to Jeanne in order to marry Isabel instead. In June 1346, he made an arrangement with Edward III regarding the settlement of his lands which makes it clear that despite his age - he turned sixty that month - he hadn't given up hope of marrying and fathering a legitimate heir by Isabel, who was over thirty years his junior (even her mother was three or four years younger than he was). [4] In his will of 24 June 1347, John referred to Isabel as ma compaigne, the same way men of the era referred to their wives - but however John might have wished that she was, Isabel wasn't his wife as he never managed to annul his marriage to the childless Jeanne de Bar, and although he fathered lots of children by other women, his heir was his sister Alice's son Richard 'Copped Hat', earl of Arundel. (His Yorkshire lands passed to Edward III's son Edmund of Langley, John's godson.) John completely ignored his wife of forty-one years in his will but left numerous possessions to his mistress Isabel, including all his beds, half his livestock, various gold rings, chapel vestments, a gold cup and a large amount of other valuable plate, and "all the residue of all my goods and chattels" after his bequests and debts had been paid.

REF: Kathryn Warner holds a BA and an MA with Distinction in Medieval History and Literature. http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2009/09/illegitimate-children-o...

Courtesy of fantastically full family tree cf.:

Hughes of Gwerclas 1/2/3/4:

http://www.maximiliangenealogy.co.uk/burke1/Royal%20Descents/hughes...

http://www.maximiliangenealogy.co.uk/burke1/Royal%20Descents/hughes...

http://www.maximiliangenealogy.co.uk/burke1/Royal%20Descents/hughes...

http://www.maximiliangenealogy.co.uk/burke1/Royal%20Descents/hughes...