Margaret de Harcourt??
Cokayne's "Complete Peerage" (Leicester, p.536). Co heiress of her brother.
1. Robert de QUINCY
2. Roger de QUINCY
3. Robert de QUINCY*
4. Hawise de QUINCY

133WURTS’ MAGNA CHARTA provided a brief accounting of the feudal headquarters of some of the Magna Charta Barons. Some of the castles have been badly damaged. Some have disappeared entirely. Often we can learn of them through Medieval and Renaissance accounts, and some of them require the discerning eye of the archeologist. Others await the evidence brought out with a shovel and pick, by the trained archeological historian.

A portion of the information concerning Surety Baron SAIRE de QUINCEY is as follows:

SAIRE de QUINCEY, the Surety, born before 1154, was a Baron present at Lincoln when William the Lion of Scotland did homage to the English monarch in October 1200. He obtained large grants and immunities from King John and was created Earl of Winchester, 2 March 1207, having been governor in 1203 of the Castle of Ruil in Normandy. He is created with rewriting Magna Charta from the Charter of King Henry I and the Saxon Code. Because he had opposed the King’s concession to the Pope’s legate, he was bitterly hated by King John. One of the Barons to whom the City and Tower of London were resigned, Saire de Quincey was excommunicated with the other Barons the following year. He was sent, with Robert FitzWalter, the Surety, by the other Barons, to invite the Dauphin of France to assume the Crown of England and, even after the death of King John, he kept a strong garrison in Montsorell Castle in behalf of Prince Louis. When the Barons, being greatly outnumbered, were defeated by the troops of King Henry III, Saire de Quincey, with many others, was made prisoner and his estates forfeited. In the following October his immense estates were restored upon his submission. In 1218 the Earl of Winchester went with the Earls of Chester and Arundel to the Holy Land, assisted at the siege of Damietta in 1219, and died 3 November in the same year, on the way to Jerusalem. His wife was Margaret Beaumont, whom he married before 1173.

At the beginning of John’s reign, Saire de Quincey was not a Baron, much less a great one. In the civil war the King had had the advantage over the rebels. Few of the Barons had had much actual military experience. The Barons’ contribution to the war was the scutage they paid, a war fund substituted for the contingent of knights owed to the King’s service. The money was collected from vassals, and mercenary knights were paid from it. Many of the mercenaries were regulars who served the same Baron from campaign to campaign, but those Barons who are known to have had extensive military experience were only Saire de Quincey, Robert FitzWalter, William de Mowbray, William d’Albini, Roger de Cressi and Robert de Roos.

Saire de Quincey is associated with two stalwart Castles in the South of England: Colchester and Winchester, both with the Latin castrum root, signifying that they were once the site of Roman forts.

Colchester Castle could not have been built before the early 12th Century, though Roman materials may have been re-used in its construction. The keep, the only portion now surviving, is in complete harmony with other Norman castles. Colchester must have been a formidable stronghold, and a challenge to Saire de Quincey. The King's men held the Castle against Quincey, the first Earl to attack Colchester. John had given the fortress into the charge of a Fleming whom he thought he could trust. But Quincey took the Castle, and later found holding it more difficult. The fighting was of such a nature that John himself came to Colchester to see just how stubborn Saire de Quincey was. The Earl held the Castle for two months, but lack of food forced him to give up and take flight to France.

Colchester was the largest Norman keep in England. It measures one hundred fifty-two by one hundred seventeen feet, enclosing nearly twice the area of the Tower of London. Its walls vary between eleven and thirty feet in thickness. It was erected either by William the Conqueror or by William II. It is of the quadrangular variety, turreted at the corners. In it and elsewhere herringbone masonry has been noted.

Winchester Castle was first erected by William the Conqueror. Later alterations and extra height were added by Henry III, about the year 1138. The great Hall has Purbeck columns of 13th Century architecture, supporting a restored roof and containing handsome windows of the same approximate period. Only the keep remains. "How commonplace this saying, 'Only the keep still stands,' . . . thanks to the old builders who made the keep strong and high to withstand time, and so difficult to tear down that it escaped the looters of the ages." Perhaps Murphy was thinking of Colchester or Winchester when he thus wrote, for this was the fate of the Quincey strongholds.

Appreciation is expressed to Reed M. W. Wurts, one of the Heralds of the Society for furnishing the Baron’s Shield on this page.


Notes:
Weis" "Ancestral Roots. . ." (53:27), (54:28), (60:27), (236:8).
Saher IV had a public life which was busy and important. He served King Richard I and KING JOHN in Normandy in 1197-9 and his position in Scottish society made him a fit person to conduct KING WILLIAM THE LION (RIN 1913) to meet KKING JOHN in 1200. During the war with France he was captured, but raised a ransom and returned to England. Created earl of Winchester, about 1206-7, he remained active in royal affairs: he served in the exchequer, acted as justice in many counties and travelled abroad on the king's business, to Scotland, Ireland and Germany. In 1209, he had with him in Scotland a force of 100 knights and 100 sergeants. While baronial oppositon to KING JOHN grew stronger, Saher remained loyal to the king, but joined the confederate barons a month of so before the granting of Magna Carta in June 1215. In 1216, he went to France to invite PRINCE LOUIS (RIN 3161) to England and as a result the crown confiscated his estates. After taking part in several military expeditions on behalf of LOUIS, Earl Saher was defeated and captured by the royal forces at Lincoln on 20 May 1217. Soon afterwards he returned to his allegiance and was given back his lands. In January 1219, he despatched a ship from Galloway to collect at Bristol necessaries for the journey he proposed to make to Jerusalem. Following his father's example, he duly became a Crusader, but fell ill and died at Damietta, on November 1219, and was buried at Acre. Before his death, he commanded that his heart should be taken back to England for burial in Garendon abbey, Leicestershire. One event in Saher's private life was largely responsible for raising him to the position of public importance which he held. This was his marriage, the most brilliant match so far achieved by any member of the family. His wife was MARGARET, daughter of ROBERT DE BEAUMONT, third earl of Leicester, sister and co-heir of Robert 'Fitz Pernel', fourth earl of Leicester. The date of this important marriage is unknown. The most obvious effect of the marriage on the Quincy family was that it
brought great additions to their estates. On the death of MARGARET's brother, Robert Fitz Pernel, in 1204, Saher IV became, in right of his wife, co-heir to the estates of the honours of Leicester and Grandmesnil.
The other co-heir was SIMON DE MONTFORT (RIN 870), husband of MARGARET's sister AMICE (RIN 871), and grandfather of the famous Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. The Leicester estates were vast and lay mainly in the English midlands, particularly of course in Leicestershire. To the Scottish and English estates which he had inherited from his father, Saher and MaARGARET thus added lands many times the value of the ancestral holding. The earls of Leicester, who took their origin from ROGER DE BEAUMONT (RIN 1033), one of WILLIAM THE CONQUERER's Normans, had also possessed considerable French estates, particularly in Eure, where lay the Beaumont which provided some members of the family with a surname. But these Norman estates
passed from the family in 1204 when AMICE DE MONTFORT resigned to PHILIP AUGUSTUS the castle of Breteuil, dep. Eure, the caput of the earls' Norman honour, and with it everything that the last earl held in Normandy. At the same time AMICE undertook to indemnify her sister MARGARET, Saher's wife, out of the English estates and guaranteed that MARGARET would raise no claim to the French properties. Although Saher and MARGARET seem thus to have been denied any share in the French lands of the earls of Leicester, which PHILIP AUGUSTUS added to his own demesne, the upheavals caused by KING JOHN's loss of Normandy may have left the question open. When in 1206-7 Saher and MARGARET came to divide the Leicester lands with AMICE and SIMON DE MONTFORT, it was agreed that Saher should have *40 of land per annum from SIMON's share until SIMON put Saher in possession of his due portion of the Leicester lands in Normandy. This arrangement may have been the origin of a Quincy claim to Norman estates which apparently survived, after Saher's death, as part of the Quincy family inheritance. Nevertheless, Beaumont estates in England were a rich prize for Saher, not only in themselves, but also since it was because he possessed half of the Leicester lands that he was created earl of Winchester about 1206-7, at the time of the partition. His earldom was considered to be equivalent to the earldom of Southampton, from which county he received *10 a year _nomine comitis_, although he held no lands in the county. For the third time a Quincy had married well--so well that he was raised to the peerage. The family had moved rapidly up the social scale since the day, some eighty years before, when Saher I held one and a half fees in Long Buckby. Marriage to a Beaumont also opened up for the Quincys a new and wide range of family connections, which were always important within a social structure which depended greatly on the links of family with family and generation with generation. Partition of the Leicester inheritance put Saher on a level with the great Montfort family, and links with them survived under Earl ROGER, who, for example, made a grant to the nunnery of Pre'aux, dep. Eure, in conjunction with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, and resigned to that earl, 'his dearest kinsman', the advowson and site of Garendon, Leics.