Tancred of Hauteville (c. 980 – 1041) was an 11th-century Norman petty lord about whom little is known. He was a minor noble near Coutances in the Cotentin. Tancred is primarily known by the achievements of his twelve sons.
Various legends arose about Tancred which have no supporting contemporary evidence that has survived the ages.
The Hauteville family was said by later traditions to descend from Hiallt, a Norseman active in 920, who is credited with founding the village of Hialtus Villa (Hauteville) in the CotentinofNormandy.[1][2] Tancred is a supposed descendant of Hiallt, from whom the village of Hauteville and the family drew their name. This cannot be identified with certainty, and some modern scholarship favours Hauteville-la-Guichard over Hauteville in Cotentin.[3]
Between his two wives, he had twelve sons and several daughters, almost all of whom left Normandy for Southern Italy and acquired some prominence there.
With his first wife, Muriella, he had five sons and one daughter:
Beatrix (d. 1101), married first to Armand de Mortain, son of Robert, Count of Eu, and second to a Roger (family unknown)
According to the Italian chronicler of the Norman feats in the south, Amatus of Montecassino, Tancred was a morally upright man, who would not carry on a sinful relationship and being unable also to live out his life in perfect celibacy, he remarried.
Coat-of-arms of Hauteville
With his second wife, Fressenda (or Fredesenda),[5] he had seven more sons and at least one daughter:
^Hill, James S. The place-names of Somerset. St. Stephen's printing works, 1914, Princeton University. Page 256
^Revue de l'Avranchin et du pays de Granville, Volume 31, Issue 174, Parts 3-4. Société d'archéologie, de littérature, sciences et arts d'Avranches, Mortain, Granville. the University of Michigan.
^Stanley Ferber, Islam and the Medieval West, vol. 2 (1979), p. 46: "the sons of Tancred of Hauteville-le-Guichard, a petty landowner in Normandy..."
^ abc[https://archive.org/details/zeittafelnderdeu00rich『...Wilhelm, Drogo und Humfred, den 3 ältesten Söhnen Tancreds von Hauteville.』Zeittafeln der deutschen Geschichte im Mittelalter von der Gründung des fränkischen Reichs bis zum Ausgang der Hohenstaufen mit durchgängiger Erläuterung aus den Quellen. Dr. Gustav Richter. Halle a. S., Verlag- der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses. 1881. Page 58. Accessed 20 August 2023.
^ abcThe New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 4, C.1024-c.1198, Part II, ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 760.
