Ramerupt’s fate looks rather like the reverse of what happened to
Bar-sur-Seine. Walter II inherited the county of Brienne from his father
and the county of Ramerupt from his mother, and went so far as to style
himself as count of both in the mid-1130s.^31 Yet Ramerupt ended up
downgraded from a county into two lordships, one of which went to
Walter while the other passed to his sole surviving sibling, Felicity.^32
Walter’s marriages and children constitute a highly contentious subject,
as Genealogy 1indicates. However, naming patterns once again suggest
that the count always intended to divide up his territories. Conse-
quently, it may well have been the eldest son, Erard II, who received
the county of Brienne on Walter’s death, while it was a younger child,
bearing the traditional Ramerupt name of‘Andrew’,whowassetto
inherit his father’s share of that lordship. Indeed, by the time that Erard
II relinquished the territory in question in or around the mid-1170s,
Andrew had already made afine marriage to Alix, the heiress to the
lordship of Venizy, not far from Joigny.^33 Although, again, it was rare
for members of the house of Ramerupt to describe themselves as‘de
Brienne’, it can be suggested that Andrew and his descendants thought
of themselves as Briennes for noticeably longer than the cadet branch
of Bar-sur-Seine had done before them. Whilst there are a number of
possible reasons for this, it may well be connected to the fact that the
counts of Brienne seem to have managed to fashion some kind of lasting
suzerainty over Andrew’s new lordship of Ramerupt in a way that
had not been possible vis-à-vis Bar-sur-Seine.^34 Certainly, Andrew was
a frequent visitor to his older brother’s court and often assented to
charters that he issued.^35
It is only too easy to write off Ramerupt as an uninteresting, provincial
backwater. In one respect, at least, this cannot be said to be true. It is
well known that the Champagne region was a crucially important centre
for Jewish culture and learning in the central Middle Ages, and this is
exemplified, above all, by the career of ‘Rashi’: Rabbi Solomon ben
Yitzhak of Troyes, who died in 1105. Rashi’s eminence gave rise to what
was, effectively, a school, the‘Tosafists’(that is, those who‘added’or
contributed to his work), and it has been noted that the Tosafists
‘revolutionized the study of the Talmud through their close, critical
(^31) ‘Catalogue’, no. 38.
(^32) See H. d’Arbois de Jubainville,‘Les premiers seigneurs de Ramerupt’,Bibliothèque de
l’École des chartes22 (1861), 445–6; and Roserot,Dictionnaire, iii, 1227.
(^33) See Evergates,Aristocracy, pp. 240–4. For various charters issued by Andrew as lord of
Venizy, seeLe premier cartulaire de l’abbaye cistercienne de Pontigny (XIIe–XIIIe siècles), ed.
34 M. Garrigues (Paris, 1981), nos. 80–3.
35 See below,23, 57, 77.
See‘Catalogue’, nos. 61, 63, 67–9, 73, 75–6, 82, 85, 93, 95.
The Briennois Context 17