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- William de Braose, First Lord of Bramber born 1049 in Briouze, Normandy (today part of the Argentan Arrondissement in the region of Basse-Normandie). (d. 1093/1096) was a Norman nobleman who participated in the victory at the Battle of Hastings over King Harold Godwinson in support of William the Conqueror as he and his followers invaded and controlled Saxon England. His name at this early stage would have been Guillaume de Briouze.
De Braose was given lands in Sussex, England at Bramber in 1073, where he was lord of the Rape of Bramber and where he built Bramber Castle. De Braose was also awarded lands in the Welsh Marches, and became one of the most powerful of the new Lords of the early Norman era.
He continued to bear arms alongside King William in campaigns in England, Normandy and Maine in France.
He was a pious man and made considerable grants to the Abbey of St, Florent, Samur and to endow the formation of a Priory at Sele, West Sussex near Bramber and a Priory at Briouze.
He was soon installed in a new Norman castle at Bramber, to guard the strategically important harbour at Steyning and so began a vigorous boundary dispute and power tussle with the monks from Fécamp, in Normandy to whom King William I had granted Steyning, brought to a head by the Domesday Book, completed in 1086.
It found that de Braose had built a bridge at Bramber and demanded tolls from ships travelling further along the river to the busy port at Steyning. The monks also challenged Bramber's right to bury people in the churchyard of William de Braose's new church of Saint Nicholas, and demanded the burial fees for themselves, despite it being built to serve the castle not the town. The monks then produced forged documents to defend their position and were unhappy with the failure of their claim on Hastings, which were very similar. The monks claimed the same freedoms and land tenure in Hastings as King Edward had given them at Steyning. Though on a technicality William was bound to uphold all aspects of the status quo before Edward's death, the monks had already been expelled 10 years before that death. King William wanted to hold Hastings for himself for strategic reasons and ignored the problem until 1085, when he confirmed their Steyning claims but swapped the Hastings claim for land in the manor of Bury (near Pulborough in Sussex). In 1086 the King William called his sons, Barons and Bishops to court (the last time an English king presided personally, with his full court, to decide a matter of law) to settle this. It took a full day, and the Abbey won over the baron, forcing William de Braose to curtail his bridge tolls, give up various encroachments onto the Abbey's lands, including a farmed rabbit warren, a park, eighteen burgage plots, a causeway, and a channel to fill his moat, and organise a mass exhumation and transfer of all Bramber's dead to the churchyard of Saint Cuthman's Church in Steyning.
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Built Bramber Castle. William De Braose, 1st feudal baron, constructed the castle in about 1070, including a Norman church, on a natural mound. Most of the surviving masonry dates from this time. Except for a period of confiscation during the reign of King John (1199–1216), Bramber Castle remained in the ownership of the de Braose family until the male line died out in 1326. Little is known of Bramber Castle's history. Records dating from the Civil War mention a 'skirmish' fought in the village in about 1642. The church suffered badly as a result of Roundhead guns being set up in the transepts, where they afforded a better vantage point to fire on Bramber Castle. [1, 2]
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Old Dead Relatives
1049 - Abt 1093 (44 years)
