Note 25 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 2)

As against the evidence afforded us by the charter of Henry III, we have the statements and documents relating to Barbery Abbey, a daughter of Savigny. It is alleged that the house was first founded in 114025 by that Robert Marmion who was slain at Coventry in 1143.26 Stapleton accepted this without question. Yet, so far as documents are concerned, we have only the charter of Robert Marmion (1181), in which he speaks of his father Robert as beginning the foundation.27 If that father were indeed the Robert who was slain in 1143, Stapleton's pedigree is duly proved as against that which I derive from Henry the Third's charter. But for this identification we have only, it would seem, the obiter dictum of the 'Gallia Christiana' editors, while the fact that the first Abbot was appointed about 1177,28 combined with the fact that Robert Marmion, in 1181, was avowedly completing that foundation which his father's death had arrested, certainly seems to point to his father's benefaction being then recent, and little previous to the said appointment of the first Abbot. In that case his father would be not the Robert who died in 1143, but a Robert who, as I suggest, came between the two.29