is correct, King Louis had asked John of Beaumont, chamberlain of
France, to provide a galley to serve as a landing craft for Erard and
Joinville. In the event, though, the chamberlain was unable to do this,
and so the pair were obliged to use a much smaller boat.^6 As a result, the
boarding process proved very difficult. In the course of it, one of Erard’s
knights–bearing the remarkably onomatopoeic name of‘Plonquet’–fell
overboard and was drowned.^7 In a way, this was a sign of what was to
come, since the lord of Ramerupt himself would perish in Egypt. It is
curious, to say the least, that Joinville does not report Erard’s demise,
which occurred some eight months later at the battle of Man
_
sūrah.
However, both Erard’s death and that of his brother, Henry, were
recorded by the Ramerupt family monastery of La Piété.^8
Erard II does not seem to have married, and, certainly, he left no
children. Whilst we do hear a little about what seems to have been a young
nephew and namesake, the lord of Venizy, Ramerupt was divided up
amongst Erard II’s many sisters.^9 In the event, there were four who could
inherit, since one had predeceased Erard II, and another, Sibylla, had
become a nun at La Piété. (In the end, she rose to become its abbess.)^10
Over the course of the next twenty years, a number of the segments were
reunited by one of the sisters, Isabella, and her energetic husband, Count
Henry of Grandpré. Henry had recovered so much that he was able to style
himself as‘count of Ramerupt’in 1268.^11 In this manner, he tried to
return Ramerupt to the status that it had lost through the Brienne takeover
in the early to mid-twelfth century. The glory days of Ramerupt had
definitely gone for good, though: it had become little more than a minor
adjunct to the house of Grandpré. It is telling, therefore, that we lack
precise information about the way in which much of the lordship came
back into Brienne hands by the mid-fourteenth century.^12
(^6) See Smith’s comments inibid., p. 368.
(^7) Ibid., sections 150–3. See alsoThe Seventh Crusade, 1244–54: Sources and Documents, ed.
and tr. P. Jackson (Aldershot, 2007), doc. 58, and n. 114.
(^8) See d’Arbois de Jubainville,‘Les premiers seigneurs de Ramerupt’, 450.
(^9) Seeibid., 450, n. 9; and various charters in the BnF: MS Français 20690, fols. 198–211.
Much of this is repeated, as usual, in Duchesne 76. But see alsoLe premier cartulaire de
l’abbaye cistercienne de Pontigny, no. 240;Documents relatifs au comté de Champagne et de
Brie, i, no. 7279; and part of the copy of theLiber Principumin the BnF (Cinq cents
de Colbert, vol. lvii, fols. 431–2).
(^10) See d’Arbois de Jubainville,‘Les premiers seigneurs de Ramerupt’, 450; and Roserot,
Dictionnaire, iii, 1228.
(^11) D’Arbois de Jubainville,‘Les premiers seigneurs de Ramerupt’, 451–incorrectly cited
12 by Roserot inDictionnaire, iii, 1228.
D’Arbois de Jubainville, ‘Les premiers seigneurs de Ramerupt’, 451; Roserot,
Dictionnaire, iii, 1229.
The Champenois Remnant 77