William de Braose, 1st Lord of Bramber

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William de Braose, First Lord of Bramber (d. 1093/1096) was a Norman nobleman who participated in the Battle of Hastings in support of William the Conqueror.

De Braose was given lands in southwest England adjacent to Wales and became one of the most powerful of the Marcher Lords.

He was also installed in a new 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 to whom King William had granted Steyning, brought to a head by 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 port at Steyning. The monks challenged Bramber's right to bury its parishioners in the churchyard at William de Braose's new church of Saint Nicholas, and demanded its burial fees, despite it being built to serve the castle not the town. The monks produced forged documents to defend their position and were unhappy with the failure of their claim on Hastings^[1] In 1086 the King 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 court, forcing de Braose to curtail his bridge tolls, give up various encroachments onto the abbey's lands^[2] and organise a mass exhumation and transfer of all Bramber's dead to the churchyard of Saint Cuthman's Church in Steyning.

William was succeeded as Lord of Bramber by his son, Philip. William was present for the consecration of a church in his hometown of Briouze (whence the name Braose), France, in 1093, so we know he was alive in that year. However, Philip was issuing charters as Lord of Bramber in 1096, indicating that William died sometime between those dates.

[edit] References

^ 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 Bury St Edmund's.
^ Including a rabbit warren, a park, eighteen burgage plots, a causeway, and a channel to fill his moat