RESEARCHING BEATRICE DE MOLLE

(Please note this is work-in-progress)

Beatrice de Molle gave the monks of Calder Abbey five oxgangs of land in Little Gilcrux and the fourth part of the mill in Great Gilcrux. (1)
The land had come to her through a family transaction: Adam son of Uchtred confirmed to Beatrice, his niece, five bovates of land in Gilcrux, given to her by his nephew William son of Liolf de Molle. The charter recording this confirmation is number XXXIII in the Register of the Priory of St Bees (pages 550–551 of Wilson’s 1915 edition). Beatrice’s subsequent gift to Calder Abbey appears in a Henry III confirmation charter of 19 April 1231, preserved in Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum.

The medieval place name “Molle” is now Mow in the Roxburghshire parish of Morebattle. (2) Uchtred son of Liulf gave the church of Mow to the monks of Kelso, along with adjacent land, and the family maintained connections to both sides of the border. (3)

My primary sources

The Register of the Priory of St Bees, edited by James Wilson (Surtees Society, 1915). Via Internet Archive. Charter XXXIII is my starting point. Wilson’s introduction and notes are invaluable for context. What I want to do next is spend some quality time reading the surrounding charters. It may be that the witnesses and the pattern of neighbouring grants will help me reconstruct the social world Beatrice inhabited.

Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum; The Kelso Liber (Liber S. Marie de Calchou, Bannatyne Club, 1846) and Lawrie’s Early Scottish Charters (1905). All via Internet Archive.

The Victoria County History for Cumberland, volume 2. The entry on Calder Abbey traces the various donations to the house, including Beatrice’s, and places them in sequence with the gifts of Robert Bonekill, Roger son of William, and other local landholders. Via Internet Archive.

My secondary sources

Articles and discussions concerning the “Five Odards” debate in Cumberland genealogy — the tangled family tree connecting Odard, Adam, William, Uchtred, and their descendants. The family’s cross-border character means I also looked at:

Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (2002), for the broader context of how land tenure worked for families with holdings in different places.

The People of Medieval Scotland database (PoMS). This is wonderful and my favourite resource.

Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (TCWAAS). Back issues are digitised and searchable.

Beatrice is visible only through the acts of men. Every trace of her passes through male relatives or male religious institutions.
Her family held land in Roxburghshire and Cumberland. Her possible kinswoman Eschina de Molle married Walter FitzAlan, the first hereditary High Steward of Scotland. (4) The de Molle family sat at the intersection of Scottish and English power during a period when the border itself was still porous and negotiable. Beatrice’s world spanned two kingdoms.

Could she have been a nun? Could she have married? The charter language itself holds some clues. The language of Adam’s confirmation charter is a clue. It grants the land to Beatrice “sibi et filiis et filiabus suis” – to her and her sons and daughters. That phrase is standard heritable formula and anticipates children, but doesn’t prove she had any. (5) If she had already become a nun, this clause would make little sense. So at the point when Beatrice received the land, she was likely either already married or expected to marry. But she gave it all away to Calder Abbey. The fact that she appears in the records only as “Beatrice de Molle,” never as “Beatrice wife of X,” is suggestive but not conclusive.

Calder itself was a male Cistercian house. (6) But Beatrice could’ve entered a nunnery elsewhere. I understand that Cumberland and Westmorland were among the English counties with no nunnery at all in the later medieval period – if Beatrice wanted to enter religious life, she would have had to travel. The nearest Cistercian nunneries were in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. (7)

Could Beatrice have lived somewhere other than Gilcrux? Absentee landholding was the norm in this period. (8) The de Molle family held land in Roxburghshire and Cumberland simultaneously. The genealogical debate around the charter witnesses places it no earlier than about 1140, based on the presence of Cospatric son of Orm and his son Thomas. (9)

So I have, in miniature, the central problem of medieval women’s history. The “filiis et filiabus” clause writes a future for Beatrice: sons, daughters, a continuing line that apparently never materialised, or that she chose to redirect towards the monks. The charter gives her a life narrative, and then the silence of the record takes it away.

For scholarly grounding on these questions, I’d recommend Holly Brown on Substack: https://medievalmusings.substack.com and Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It (2022), for the broader question of how women’s lives can be recovered from the margins of the medieval record. I also looked at Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, Women in the Medieval Monastic World (2015), and a dissertation by Susan Johns: Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (2003). All of these deal extensively with the kind of evidence I have here: women visible only at the edges of charter records, acting through and around the men who frame their legal existence. (10)

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(1) The Register of the Priory of St Bees, ed. James Wilson (Surtees Society, 1915), Charter XXXIII; William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. Caley, Ellis and Bandinel (London, 1817–30), vol. 5, Calder Abbey entry.
(2) G.W.S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots (London: Edward Arnold, 1973); Origines Parochiales Scotiae, vol. 1 (Bannatyne Club, 1851), parish of Mow.
(3) Liber S. Marie de Calchou [Kelso Liber], ed. Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1846); A.C. Lawrie, Early Scottish Charters prior to 1153 (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905).
(4) G.W.S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); The People of Medieval Scotland (PoMS), University of Glasgow, https://www.poms.ac.uk.
(5) John Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
(6) Victoria County History: Cumberland, vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1905), Calder Abbey entry. Calder was founded c.1134 as a daughter house of Furness Abbey.
(7) Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
(8) Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
(9) The Register of the Priory of St Bees, ed. James Wilson (Surtees Society, 1915), Wilson’s introduction; The People of Medieval Scotland (PoMS), University of Glasgow, https://www.poms.ac.uk.
(10) https://medievalmusings.substack.com by Holly Brown, Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It (2022) Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (eds.), Women in the Medieval Monastic World (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).