Wife of the crusader Stephen (Stephen-Henry), count of Blois, and recipient of two surviving letters sent by her husband in the course of the First Crusade (1096-1099).
A daughter of William I, king of England, Adela was probably born between November 1067 and May 1068. Around 1083 she wed Stephen (originally named Henry), the designated heir to the counties of Blois, Chartres, and Meaux, who was some eighteen to twenty years her senior. Already a mother when her father-in-law died (1089), the young countess exercised comital lordship alongside her husband and was well placed to rule in his stead when he joined the First Crusade. As Stephen admitted in the second of the two extant letters he sent from the East, Adela underwrote that venture, doubtless by tapping the liquid assets she had received in dowry. The language and content of those letters speak both to the mutual trust and affection the couple had developed and to the count’s confidence in his wife’s capacity to rule. Any plans to entrust one of their five sons to Alexios I Komnenos (a possibility transmitted by Stephen) came to naught once the emperor’s reputation plummeted in the West.
When Stephen returned to France with his reputation shaken, having left the crusade at Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey), Adela advised him to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, if only to avoid excommunication. She resumed her role as regent at the close of 1100, when Stephen (now in his early fifties) set out for the Holy Land at the head of a large host. Late in 1103, returning clerics well-known to the couple, such as Stephen’s chaplain Alexander and Bishop Ingelran of Laon, confirmed Stephen’s heroic death at the second battle of Ramla (May 1102); the countess, publicly affirming her status as a ruling widow, made a spate of bequests for his soul. Most significantly, she dedicated their youngest son to God at Cluny’s priory of La Char-ite-sur-Loire, where the recently freed Odo Arpin, who had fought alongside Stephen in 1102, soon became prior.
After assisting her brother Henry as he worked to supplant Robert Curthose as duke of Normandy, in the spring of 1106 Adela hosted lavish nuptial celebrations for Bohe-mund I of Antioch and her former sister-in-law Constance “of France,” during which Bohemund, mounting the pulpit of Chartres cathedral, outshone the legate, Bruno of Segni, as a preacher of crusade. Ironically, circulating at the time was a reworked version of the anonymous Gesta Francorum, which, in order to strengthen Bohemund’s claims to Antioch, added damning attacks on Stephen, who had been largely favorable to Alexios. However, those to whom the count was well-known, such as Guibert of Nogent, Baldric of Dol, and Robert the Monk, were prompt to deflate such rhetorical recourse to invective. The next year (1107), Adela substituted her son Thibaud for William as their father’s designated heir, generously assisted Pope Paschal II on his French tour, and prepared the way for her correspondent Baldric, abbot of Bourgueil, to be consecrated archbishop of Dol (1107).
Ruling until she took the veil at Marcigny (spring 1120), Adela proved a caring mother and able administrator, training her children (at least six, and possibly eight) for adult lives appropriate to their abilities and studiously increasing comital revenues in her husband’s share of the Thibaudian family’s domains. Most likely as prioress, she spent her final seventeen years securing her convent’s domains, intervening in the counties she used to rule, and tracking the turbulent politics after Henry I’s death that made her son Stephen king of England and duke of Normandy, with the help of his brothers Henry and Thibaud. Dying on 8 March 1137 and buried at Marcigny, Adela was commemorated widely across England and northern France.
-Kimberly A. LoPrete
Bibliography
LoPrete, Kimberly A., “A Female Ruler in Feudal Society:
Adela of Blois (ca. 1067-ca. 1137),” 2 vols. (Ph. D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992).
-, “Adela of Blois as Mother and Countess,” in Medieval
Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 313-333.
-, “Adela of Blois: Familial Alliances and Female
Lordship,” in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 7-43, 180-200.
-, “The Gender of Lordly Women: The Case of Adela of
Blois,” in Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women: Pawns or Players? ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), pp. 90-110.
Rowe, John Gordon. “Paschal II, Bohemund of Antioch and the Byzantine Empire,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 49 (1966-1967), 165-202.
World History
