GUY DE LA VAL

I shall conclude this chapter with a notice of a companion and connection of the Conqueror, about whom there is no mystery, and consequently I fear little interest.

Laval, or Laval Guion, is a town of some importance in the south of the province of Maine. At the time of the Conquest the Seigneur de la Val was Guy II, who, in 1066, when considerably stricken in years, confirmed certain grants made to the Abbey of Marmoutier by a son named Jean, who at the age of three-and-twenty had assumed the monastic habit in that establishment. Hamon, his second son, was at that date the father of Guy, afterwards the third of that name, called the Young and the Bald, and both of them joined the forces raised by William Duke of Normandy for the invasion of England.

Hamon received for his services several lands, which were inherited by his descendants down to the reign of John, and his son Guy was rewarded by the Conqueror, in 1078, with the hand of his niece Denise, daughter of Robert, Earl of Mortain and Cornwall.

Hamon succeeded his father, Guy II, in the lordship of Laval, the year after the Conquest, and died in 1080, when his son Guy became Sire de la Val, and subsequently losing his wife Denise, remarried with a lady named Cecile, supposed to have been a kinswoman of the Counts of Mayenne. He died in 1095, and was buried at Marmoutier beside his first wife.

The fact that neither the name of Drogo de Brevere or De la Val, father or son, is to be found on the Roll of Battle Abbey is tolerable evidence of the dependence to be placed upon it.

Added to this site through the courtesy of Michael Linton, who provided scanned text.