Robin Hood and Maid Marian – Anne’s ancestors, Fulk FitzWarin and Maud le Vavasour, are thought to have partly inspired the legend.
Thank you so much to Beth Tashery Shannon for writing this article for The Anne Boleyn Files. I started corresponding with Beth when I was researching Anne Boleyn’s family tree and the roots of the Boleyns, and she was so helpful. Beth’s article follows on from my articles Anne Boleyn’s Family Tree and Boleyn Myth 1 – Anne Boleyn’s Arms are Evidence that Anne was Ashamed of Her Boleyn Roots
Some writers make much of the contrast between Anne Boleyn’s ‘noble’ maternal pedigree and her ‘mercantile’ paternal ancestors. Others try to push her entirely into one of these categories or the other. The reality is far more interesting. This brief description is just intended to provide a glimpse of the richly textured background of the Boleyn family and the larger kinship group within which they moved.
Academically-minded readers may feel this post should have citations, but early genealogy generates reams of discussion at every point, and I have cribbed no one researcher’s particular discovery. Those curious about the kinds of questions and documentation involved will find in the links below a good sampling. Meanwhile, here is a general picture of the female ancestry of Thomas Boleyn, and why, though it includes grounds for pride, Anne’s foregrounding of her Howard heritage made sense.
Anne Boleyn’s most prestigious ancestry certainly came thought her mother. Elizabeth Howard belonged to the ducal house of Norfolk, which enjoyed that honor by direct heir-to-heir descent from Thomas of Brotherton, a son of Edward I and his second queen, Marguerite le Hardi (Capet) of France. But Thomas Boleyn’s marriage with Elizabeth Howard was no mésalliance. They were distant cousins, sharing some illustrious ancestors. It was the most successful of a series of Boleyn ‘marryings up’ typical of the aspirations of a large, upwardly mobile sector of Tudor society. It was a patriarchal society and emphasized paternal lines (or, in the absence of sons, heiresses), yet by Anne’s generation the upstart element in the Boleyn pedigree was thin and her paternal cousins were an influential network holding substantial property and power in south-eastern England and along the Welsh borderlands.
Anne’s great-grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn (d. 1463), merchant and Lord Mayor of London, married the first Boleyn wife of whom we know much. She was Anne, daughter of Thomas, Baron Hoo, who fought with Henry V at Agincourt. This Anne Hoo should not be confused with her half-sister Jane (a.k.a. Anne), and was the step-daughter, not daughter, of the royally descended Eleanor Welles. Her mother’s exact identity is debated (Elizabeth Wynchingham of Norfolk? Elizabeth Echingham of Sussex?), but the Hoo family had cousins among the gentry and nobility of the south-eastern counties and beyond: old land owning families of the social status to which the Boleyns were gaining entry. The Hoos were also descendants, and cousins, to the influential FitzWarins of Shropshire, one of the warrior families that had long guarded English interests on the Welsh border. Through Anne Hoo, Anne Boleyn’s ancestors include Fulk FitzWarin and Maud le Vavasour, contemporaries of King John who are thought to have partly inspired the legend of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.
The post Anne Boleyn’s Paternal Ancestry: The Wives of the Boleyns by Beth Tashery Shannon appeared first on The Anne Boleyn Files.
