Comments on Maurice (FitzHarding) Fitzharding

Question

On 12 Jan 2024 Debi (McGee) Hoag wrote on FitzHarding-56:

It looks like this profile has a lot of content that might be more readable in a biography format. If not, would someone please remove the [[Category:Long_Profiles_in_Need_of_Cleanup]]

Answer 1

Thanks Debi
The current biography appears to consist of copy and paste from 3 or 4 different biographies and it definitely needs to be amalgamated and put into 'own words'.

However as there are a great many pre-1500 profiles with issues, it is going to have to wait until someone has the time to do that.  Unless there is a problem with the category, I suggest it remains.

Comments

Yes we still have quite a few of these. As he was a pre magna carta feudal baron I will probably hit this one eventually if no one else does. It is probably best not to delete everything before someone starts that editing process because occasionally it is important to see what past editors were thinking about the profile. (For example we sometimes have profiles which combine two real people or hypotheses.)

---

John it might be an oppostunity to check a few things. This is a line which has progression boxes. I think they might not be really appropriate because feudal baronies were basically bundles of private property that could be split up and merged. They were not treated as assiged offices or titles, at least not in any consistent way. But what is the current thinking on those generally? Secondly I suppose we no longer call such people nobility or aristicrats and we would probably delete that badge?

---

Thanks Andrew,
The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed, vol. 2, starting p. 124 does have this family as Lords Berkeley, and as we do tend to follow CP in terms of titles, the succession boxes can stay. However the badge can go.

---

I have Smith's Lives of the Berkeleys. I suppose that must be the source for most later family history of the Berkeleys. I could make a start and pluck a few items from there.

On edit: I have made a start on the bio, from Lives of the Berkeleys.

---

Hi John, Hi Vance,

I looked and I see indeed there is a list on CP which has numbers going back this far. Surprising, because this is a long time before parliamentary barons. They did not get called to parliament until centuries later.

However, this page of CP is actually giving a list of holders of the castle and the feudal barony connected to it. So this is not a list of peers which is what we normally use CP for? There are commonly a few extra generations before the peerages themselves start, but these are NOT peerages and I think it could get complicated if we use those too much for the reasons I already mentioned. (Feudal baronies can be split, merged, or have various types of uncertainty connected to them. CP was not aiming to create an authoritative list for these, and I don't think these extra generations are always intended to show any other type of succession than just parent to child succession.)

Context seems important. This relatively long list comes after a sort of special essay about the family, and specifically about the claims which Smyth made about these earlier generations. These claims were apparently influenced by a special legal dispute in early modern times.

It seems there are claims that the Berkeleys are a special case where they should be considered peers back into the 12th century, as if there was already a parliament. In their case, it was argued, their feudal territory should be considered to be the same as their MUCH later parliamentary peerage.

CP calls those claims WRONG, and I think there position is the standard modern one. We should therefore be careful of Smyth on this point.

Concerning succession boxes more generally, I have no strong opinion, but at the moment they are not extremely common. I know from Wikipedia that such boxes can become a problem if they are over-used. Some of the real aristocrats in England would have held quite a few such feudal baronies at once, and had many different successors and predecessors, and so if we keep going this way then things could get messy. We don't have the benefit of something like CP to help us work out each case, and the cases are sometimes much more complicated and more difficult to track.

OTOH I would love us to find some kind of way of at least sometimes tracking feudal holdings through the generations, which could be a great service to genealogy. While BIG infoboxes like these at the tops of articles could make our articles unreadable, I do wonder sometimes about trying to invent a more compact style of info-table for the bottom of the page, or even on a special project page, in order to show the descents of knights' fees and the like. With the Sanders baronies I have just used Categories for now. Maybe that's the best we should hope for. Potentially that type of system can be used for manors as well, and project pages could be used to show the descents.

To be clear, there is no urgent problem with this case, or more generally for adding the extra generations which CP sometimes gives before a peerage begins, at least in simple cases. Still, it seems worth asking where we will draw the line, and how we will handle such cases when there is a problem.

Answer 2

Is there any objection to deleting all that extra junk at the bottom? is there anything worth saving?

Comments

Not really. The way I do these is that most often I move them down and then start deleting them bit by bit after I collect sources myself. My reason for caution is that I can then have a last look to see if there might be some aspect to a person's life which for some reason hasn't yet come up in my own searches. Perhaps over cautious in many cases.

---

I have deleted the rubbish. Most of it derives ultimately from John Smyth. The bio now contains the basics of Maurice's life, mostly from Smyth. As for additional sources: Maurice and his father were witnesses to various charters in (estimated) 1150-53. Not worth listing them all; of interest only to give an estimate of Maurice's date of birth.

Feel free to add more information of interest.

---

Good. Indeed some primary records are more relevant to us as genealogists than others when it comes to notable people. I agree with the approach. I have Sanders and Keats-Rohan and will do a quick comparison to them as well.

---

I have one question about this profile: was he ever called Maurice Fitzharding? Filius Roberti and Fitz Robert, and later in life de Berkeley, but Fitzharding wasn't his surname.

Edit: Also that nickname "make peace". That was almost certainly invented by John Smyth, not contemporary.

---

There was a discussion on these points in a previous G2G discussion about this profile. I tend to agree with you on both points. I think for example that even if he was called fitz Robert fitz Harding in a record this can't be shortened to fitz Harding. I have not looked hard but I don't think fitz Harding ever solidified into a surname.

---

I just looked at the discussion from 2017. I think it's time to fix this.

---

Sanders calls him Maurice I de Berkeley (p.13), kicking the new surname off already in this generation. 

CP actually says "fitzRobert fitzHarding, otherwise de Berkeley" so they saw de Berkeley as OK.

Although in the old thread says he found an entry in Domesday Descendants, my copy does not have any entry for him? In the entry for his father he is just "Maurice his son".

---

I added a note from The Cartulary of St Augustine's Abbey. He apparently started to be called "of Berkeley" sometime in the 1170s.

---

There is a fairly well-cited article about his father, but I don't have a copy. I see Patterson has probably discussed the topic in his later book, which I also don't have. https://academic.oup.com/book/26683/chapter-abstract/195475410?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

• R. Patterson, "Robert fitz Harding of Bristol", Haskins Society Journal 1 (1989).

Answer 3

There's one final question: where did he die? The profile now says he died at Berkeley Castle, but he was buried at Brentford, Middx, about 100 miles away. So that's more likely where he died, on his way to or from London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentford

Comments

FWIW Sanders uses mainly chancery records such as Pipe Rolls and Fine Rolls, which don't normally give much detail. He only gives the year 1190.

I notice Smyth does not say where he died and he seems to be everyone's source. OTOH he also claims that Maurice was a benefactor to the place he was buried, which could give us reason to doubt that he died close by?

I can't see any reason to think anyone knows where he died but it seems like he died in England at least.

---

I suppose if any source is going to say more on such matters it might be a cartulary.