During the late twelfth century, the physical security of the barony was threatened when Henry de la Pomeroy II joined Prince John’s high-treason rebellion against King Richard the Lionheart. Henry II fortified St Michael’s Mount against the Crown, but following the collapse of the rebellion in 1194, the rebel stronghold was surrendered and the entire barony was seized by royal officials. The total forfeiture of the lineage was mitigated in part by standard common-law dower protections (dos) assigned to Henry II’s widow, Rohesia Bardolf, daughter of Thomas Bardolf. While the Crown initially placed the main Devonshire manors under the custody of the royal administrator William Brewer, Rohesia’s dower rights preserved a legal holding in the interior. This financial and geographic anchor assisted the heir, Henry de la Pomeroy III, who successfully negotiated a 600-mark relief fine with the royal treasury in 1210 to fully repurchase and redeem his father’s forfeited estates, restoring the lineage within the land registers of the West Country. [1]

1. The Grandmother Identity Mirroring

The primary source of confusion in early genealogical charts is that Rohesia Bardolf married into a family that already featured a famous maternal anchor named Rohesia (Rohese) FitzRoy [WikiTree – Henry de la Pomeroy, WikiTree – FitzHerbert-98].

  • The Grandmother: Lady Rohesia FitzRoy (daughter of King Henry I) married Henry de la POMEROY I [WikiTree – Henry de la Pomeroy, WikiTree – FitzHerbert-98].
  • The Granddaughter-in-law: Lady Rohesia Bardolf married Henry de la POMEROY II (the rebel baron of St. Michael’s Mount) [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf, WikiTree – Henry (Pomeroy) de Pomeroy].

Because both women were named Rohesia, were married to men named Henry de la POMEROY, and both had direct ties to royal court circles [WikiTree – Henry de la Pomeroy, Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf], early antiquarians frequently conflated the two women. This error effectively compressed three generations of POMEROY history into a single narrative, incorrectly attributing Rohesia Bardolf’s 12th-century dower court battle to her predecessor [archive.org – History and genealogy of the Pomeroy family, WikiTree – Henry (Pomeroy) de Pomeroy].

2. The Sibling vs. Daughter Generational Shift

Among professional medieval historians, the secondary confusion lies within the Bardolf family tree itself [WikiTree – Alice (Corbet) Bardoff, Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf].

  • The Disputed Lineage: Thomas Stapleton, a prominent 19th-century researcher of the Norman Exchequer rolls, explicitly documented Rohesia Bardolf as a fourth sister to the baron Doun Bardolf, making her the daughter of Thomas Bardolf of Wormegay [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf, Wikipedia – Feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy].
  • The Alternative Record: Competing feudal Plea Rolls and regional Pipe Rolls from the reign of King John alternate between describing her as Doun Bardolf’s sister and his daughter [WikiTree – Alice (Corbet) Bardoff, Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf].

This discrepancy creates a chronological nightmare in standard pedigree charts, causing her estimated birth date to wildly swing between 1175 and 1180 across different database repositories [WikiTree – Bardolf-121, Geni.com – Lady Rohesia Bardolf].

3. The Second Marriage Erasure

Following the death of Henry de la POMEROY II, Rohesia Bardolf’s identity was obscured a third time when her remarriage became a financial asset of the Crown [Wikipedia – Feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy]. In 1201, Sir John Russell paid a 50-mark fine to King John to secure her hand in marriage [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf, Wikipedia – Feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy].

As a result, a massive portion of her later legal records regarding her dower properties in Devon and Cornwall are filed under the name Rohesia de Russell [WikiTree – Bardolf-121, Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf]. Genealogists searching strictly for “POMEROY” profiles completely missed these entries, leading to the false conclusion that she had died immediately after the St. Michael’s Mount treason crisis [archive.org – History and genealogy of the Pomeroy family, Wikipedia – Feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy].

📚 Academic Bibliography

Keats-Rohan, K.S.B. (2002). Domesday Descendants: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066-1166: II. Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf]

Pomeroy, Albert A. (1912). History and Genealogy of the POMEROY Family: Collateral Lines in Family Groups, Normandy, Great Britain and America. Toledo, Ohio: The Franklin Printing and Engraving Co. [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf]

Stapleton, Thomas. (1840). Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae sub Regibus Angliae. London: Society of Antiquaries. (The foundational text analyzing her multi-marriage transitions). [Geni.com – Thomas Bardolf]

📚 Primary Academic Bibliography