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2 Itinerant Archbishop, Itinerant Familia Little can be said with any certainty about Eudes Rigaud’s social origins, but it is possible that he was the son of Adam and Adeline Rigaud, who are recorded in 1209 as ceding a mill and land at La Louverie to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés for a sum of thirty livres tournois.1 In 1230, there is a record of an Adam Rigaud, a knight from Courquetaine, selling all that he possessed at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges to the abbey of Saint-Germain.2 Whatever the case, contemporary chroniclers clearly believed that Eudes came from a noble and illustrious family, and from what is known of Eudes’s siblings and nephews, the family does seem to have been part of the petite noblesse in the Île-de-France and to have wielded considerable influence.3 For seventeen years of Eudes’s archiepiscopate, his brother Adam, also a Franciscan, was a regular member of his familia. Several of Eudes’s other blood relatives appear from time to time in the Register, although not as part of the episcopal familia. The archbishop had at least one other family member who was a religious, a sister, named Marie, who was abbess of the Paraclete , the convent known for its founder, Abelard, and first abbess, Heloise. Eudes visited Marie at the Paraclete on several occasions, consecrating her as abbess during his visit in June 1249.4 In addition, Eudes had at least two other sisters, whose names do not appear in the records but whose sons do. One sister had a son named Adam de Verneuil (de Vernolio), a magister and Rouen canon beginning in 1263 and mentioned as dean of the Rouen chapter in 1299.5 The other sister’s son was Amaury de Muzy, an esquire, whom Eudes visited in 1261 at the nephew’s manor in Normandy at Motelle-sous-Muzy (Eure).6 Eudes also maintained ties with a brother, Pierre Rigaud, a knight, who possessed a fief at Courquetaine, in the region of Brie-Comte-Robert, about 25 kilometers southeast of Paris, quite possibly the town where Eudes grew up.7 Eudes returned to Courquetaine several Itinerant Archbishop, Itinerant Familia 31 times to see this brother.8 In 1263, Eudes went to Paris to celebrate a certain Pierre Rigaud’s marriage to Nazarea, the daughter of a road surveyor from Auxerre.9 It is not known whether this Pierre Rigaud was Eudes’s brother or another nephew, the latter more likely, given the date.10 Another nephew mentioned in the Register, Adam Rigaud, was a doctor in theology who, like Eudes’s nephew Adam de Verneuil, was a canon in the Rouen chapter in the 1260s; he may have been the son of Eudes’s brother Pierre. It was Eudes who conferred prebends on his two nephews.11 Eudes Rigaud was no stranger to Rouen when he arrived on Easter Day, April 19, 1248, after having been consecrated archbishop by Pope Innocent IV in Lyon. In 1246, while regent master of the Franciscan studium in Paris, Eudes had been sent to Rouen by the Franciscan order to be guardian of the Franciscan convent of Saint-Marc, which only that year had been founded by the then archbishop of Rouen, Eudes Clément.12 Although Eudes surely spent most of the period from 1246 to 1247 in Paris, he would have made important contacts in Rouen as well. Little can be said for certain about the events leading up to his election to the archiepiscopate, but there appears to have been nothing unusual about it.13 According to the seventeenth-century Franciscan chronicler Luke Wadding, it was through Eudes’s role at the Rouen convent that his outstanding virtues became known to the chapter and he was elected archbishop.14 A dubious but much repeated story suggests that the canons of the Rouen cathedral, unable to agree on whom they should elect, decided that the first cleric to enter the Rouen cathedral to pray would be their new archbishop. According to this story, Eudes was on his way to the convent of Saint-Marc early the next morning when he stopped by the cathedral to pray, thereby unknowingly electing himself the next archbishop.15 The implication of this claim of miraculous election was that it was Eudes’s piety or divine fate that got him elected rather than the personal involvement of the king or pope. Claims of miraculous elections were...

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