Adela of Normandy

Adela of Normandy, also called Adela of Blois, was a daughter of William I, known as William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy and King of England, and of Matilda of Flanders. She was born in the Duchy of Normandy in the second half of the eleventh century; historians commonly place her birth in the mid-to-late 1060s, but no surviving contemporary record gives a precise year or a specific town. She grew up in a court that combined Norman military culture with Flemish and French ecclesiastical learning. Like several of her sisters she was taught to read Latin, and later in life she was able to correspond with bishops and abbots in that language. Her brothers included Robert Curthose, who inherited Normandy; William Rufus and Henry Beauclerc, who successively ruled England; and her sisters included Cecilia, who became abbess of the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen, and Constance, who married Alan IV, Duke of Brittany.

In the early 1080s her parents arranged her marriage to Stephen-Henry, Count of Blois, Chartres, Meaux, and Brie. The union linked the Norman dynasty to a leading princely house of the Loire and Champagne regions. Adela brought a substantial dowry and from the outset took an active share in the government of her husband’s counties. When Stephen-Henry took the cross and left for the First Crusade in 1096, she remained behind as regent. He quit the crusading army during the siege of Antioch in 1098 and returned to Blois; clerical writers close to Adela report that she upbraided him for the shame of an unfulfilled vow and urged him to go back to the Holy Land. He did so and was killed at the second battle of Ramla in May 1102. Widowed, Adela continued to rule Blois and Chartres as regent for their underage sons, issuing charters, settling disputes, and defending the family’s rights against neighboring lords and against the claims of the French crown.

She and Stephen-Henry had a large family. The eldest surviving son, William, was set aside from the principal inheritance, traditionally because of mental or physical incapacity, and received the lordship of Sully through marriage. The second son, Theobald, succeeded to Blois and later acquired Champagne, becoming one of the most powerful princes in France. A younger son, Stephen of Blois, crossed to England, was granted extensive estates by his uncle Henry I, and in 1135 took the English crown as King Stephen. Another son, Henry, was dedicated to the church, became a monk of Cluny, abbot of Glastonbury, bishop of Winchester, and eventually papal legate in England. Daughters included Lucia-Mahaut, who married Richard d’Avranches, Earl of Chester, and drowned in the White Ship in 1120, as well as others married into the nobility of northern France. Throughout these decades Adela was a prominent patron of religious houses, especially those connected with Cluny, and of scholars; letters addressed to her survive from Anselm of Canterbury, Ivo of Chartres, and Hildebert of Lavardin.

About 1120, once Theobald was firmly established, Adela retired from the world and took the veil at the Cluniac priory of Marcigny-sur-Loire in Burgundy, a house closely associated with the abbots of Cluny. She spent her last years as a nun there, though she remained well informed about the affairs of her children. She lived to hear that Stephen had been accepted as king of England after the death of Henry I in December 1135. Adela died at Marcigny on 8 March 1137 and was buried in the priory. Medieval chroniclers praised her literacy, her energy as a ruler, and her piety, but she was not the object of a formal papal canonization, and no feast day or official patronage was assigned to her by the medieval church.