Women's power (broadly defined) in the medieval British Isles remains a dynamic subject of enquiry for historians. In the absence of the administrative and legal documentation generated by the English central government at a slightly later date, one of the principal sources for propertied women's actions and influence in Norman England and its borderlands are charters of land grant. As Susan Johns demonstrated in 2003, eleemosynary bequests in particular yield some of the most telling insights into elite women's power in the Anglo-Norman world, revealing the extent to which that power was, as for men, rooted in land tenure. The inextricable interconnection of land, religious patronage and family esteem in Norman Britain afforded women of the settler aristocracy a critical (but insufficiently understood) role not just in the endowment of religious communities attached to their families’ estates but also in the creation and preservation of the memory of those acts of endowment.

In The National Archives in Kew (TNA), among the ‘Ancient Deeds’ collections, lies an attractive and well-preserved pancarte that sheds light on the founding years of Monmouth priory and the part played by three women of the seigneurial family of Monmouth in that genesis and its memorialisation. TNA E211/361 (as the pancarte is now unromantically labelled) is a single parchment sheet measuring around 540 x 205mm and ostensibly written in a protogothic hand of c. 1100. It relays a series of grants and confirmations made around the turn of the twelfth century by the Breton lord William fitz Baderon (d. c. 1125) with his wife Hawise and the couple's daughters, Yvette and Advenia; and it depicts the occasion of the consecration of the new priory church that was built for the Monmouth monks – a lavish affair attended by many of the great and good of Cambro-Norman/Breton society. Accompanying the text itself are the decorative crosses, not just of the lord of Monmouth himself but also, most intriguingly, of his wife and two daughters. The notice accompanying the women's signa reads: ‘Lady Hawise and her daughters, namely Yvette and Advenia, made these crosses’.

The following article is in two parts. In the first I shall explore the documentation itself, examining the TNA pancarte and considering analogous textual survivals that record the early days of Monmouth priory and the gifts of the founding family around the year 1100.

The romance of Fouke le Fitz Waryn speaks of a harmonious relationship between the sometime outlaw Fulk FitzWarin III of Whittington and his beautiful and wealthy first wife Dame Maud ‘de Caus’ who, amid the turbulence of the Welsh frontier, bore Fulk several surviving children. When Maud died around 1226 she was buried in the New Abbey at Alberbury, on Shropshire's western border, which her husband had founded a short time before (‘E, n'I a geres après, morust dame Mahaud de Caus, sa femme, e fust enteree en cele priorie’). For his part, Fulk FitzWarin went on to marry another beautiful and high-born Englishwoman called Clarice d'Auberville, with whom he probably sired further children; when husband and wife died within a year of each other, in the late 1250s, both were also interred at Alberbury.

Although the burial location of Fulk FitzWarin's two wives is recorded only in the romance, the harmony, if not affection, between Fulk and the Lady Maud, his first wife, is attested by Fulk's original grants to the priory, where he remembers Maud's soul in the pro anima clauses of his charters. Indeed, the charters reveal that Fulk FitzWarin continued to include his first wife – the lady who had borne him a son and heir – among those for whom he sought spiritual relief for nearly thirty years after her death. In 1252, despite his marriage to Clarice d'Auberville, he gave his own body for burial in the priory for the health of his soul and those of his first wife Maud, his father Fulk and his mother Hawise, each of them long dead.