Ansel Marshal (also Ancel or Hansel, usually Anseau in French, died 23 December 1245) was the youngest and last of the five legitimate sons of William Marshal. The rarity of the name in England often led it to be mistaken for the Lombardic Anselm. He was named after his father's youngest brother, a household knight active in the 1170s.[1][2]
Life
Ansel was the youngest son of William Marshal and Sybil of Salisbury. He was probably born when his father was in his mid sixties, during his Irish exile. When his father was writing his testament in 1219, he had initially planned not to give anything to Ansel, despite loving him.[1] It has been suspected that he wished for the young Ansel to rise from low rank to high on his own merits as William himself had done as a young knight errant. He then reconsidered, after his advisors’s suggestment, and set aside an annuity of £140 for him, which was to come from a land in Leinster.[1]
Ansel was a present figure both in the earlship of his brother Gilbert and in that of his brother Walter, frequently witnessing their acts. He married Matilda, daughter of Humphrey de Bohun. It was probably upon the marriage that he was granted by his brother the marshal manors of Avilgton and Awre in Gloucestershire, which he was already holding in December 1244 while hosting his father in law.[1]
Inheritance and death
On 27 November 1245 his brother Walter died childless, and Ansel succeded him as Earl of Pembroke. On 3 December king Henry III communicated his intention of delivering him the inheritance as soon as he paid him homage, but Ansel never did this as he must have already been ill at the time. He died by the illness at Chepstow Castle, probably on 23 December 1245. He was buried at Tintern Abbey near his mother and brother, ending the legitimate male line of the Marshal family. Since he never received the inheritance, his widow Matilda was denied her dower (though she was assigned an annuity of £60) but she continued to call herself “Matilda Marshal” for the rest of her life, even after she remarried to Roger de Quincy. The king then assumed the control of the Marshal estate in order to divide them beetween Ansel’s five sisters.[1]
Aftermath
The title of Pembroke went into abeyance on Ansel's death, though the office of marshal of England passed to his eldest sister Matilda Bigot, countess of Norfolk and Warenne and is still held by the earls of Norfolk. The vast Marshal inheritance in England, Wales and Ireland was formally divided in 1245 between Matilda and the children of her three younger sisters, who had all predeceased her.
This remarkable and rapid extinction of the male line of the Marshal family was credited by the historian Matthew Paris to a curse bestowed upon the family in 1218 by the Bishop of Ferns, Ailbe Ua Maíl Mhuaidh (died 1223), as a result of the unjust exactions on his diocese levied by the elder William Marshal. Paris also repeats a story that Countess Isabel tearfully viewed her five sons in their prime in tears, foretelling that each would in turn be holders of the same earldom.
Sources
- Acts and Letters of the Marshal Family 1156-1248: Earls of Pembroke and Marshals of England, ed. David Crouch, Camden Society 5th series, 47 (Cambridge: CUP, 2015).
- Cokayne, George E. (1945), The New Complete Peerage, vol. 10, St. Catherine Press Limited
- R.F. Walker, 'The Earls of Pembroke, 1138-1389' in, Pembrokeshire County History ii, Medieval Pembrokeshire, ed. R.F. Walker (Haverfordwest, 2002).