Earl of Richmond
It was eventually merged into the English crown during the reign of Henry VII of England and has been recreated as a Dukedom.
From their first creation, the lords and earls of Richmond were leading members of the ruling class of post-Conquest England, as defined by Keats-Rohan as "[those holding fiefs, (the right to collect fees)] held in some relationship in the feudal chain from the king of England, whether the holder be Norman, Breton, Manceau, Poitevin, Fleming or Anglo-Saxon.
"[a] "[2] In William I's Conquest of England in fact "the regional origin of [the Conquerors] ...was not exclusively Norman, ... and the size of the Breton contingent ... is generally agreed to be the most significant.
It appears to have been in existence in England from 1071 shortly after the Harrying of the North, a military campaign which followed the Battle of Hastings (1066).
In 1435 the title was granted to the House of Plantagenet, before the Duchy of Brittany was permanently annexed to the crown of France.
He was a grandson of Duke Geoffrey I of Brittany and Hawise of Normandy and the second son of Odo, Count of Penthièvre.
This is taken by historians as symbolic of the loyalty that Alan Rufus displayed to William,[6] and from this time Richmond would remain in the hands of the most loyal of English kings' nobles and also represent a means for the King to allocate wealth to his closest "kin-group" in the sense defined by Keats-Rohan.
His succession settled quickly upon his younger brother, another Alan, nicknamed "Niger" (The Black), who seems to have died by 1098.
Stephen died between 1135 and 1138, and was succeeded in Brittany by his eldest son, Geoffrey Boterel II, a supporter of the Empress Matilda, and in England by a younger son, Alan, also nicknamed The Black,[g] who was an ally of King Stephen during The Anarchy.
Stephen of Tréguier's son Alan (c. 1116–1146), was the first of these lords to be styled "Earl of Richmond" in a strictly legal sense.
King Stephen also created Alan 1st Earl of Cornwall although this title would be forfeit in 1141 after the Battle of Lincoln.
[4] Arthur's legal heir, his full elder sister, Eleanor, is sometimes considered to have succeeded him as Countess of Richmond in 1208, but due to her claims to England, Brittany, Anjou and Aquitaine, King John kept her imprisoned from 1202 and gave her no lands of the earldom.
In 1241 Henry III granted the estates of Richmond to Peter of Savoy (1203–1268), uncle of his queen consort, Eleanor of Provence.
That year, 1268, Henry III granted the earldom to John I, Duke of Brittany (1217–1286), son of Pierre Mauclerc.
He had a distinguished record as a diplomat working on behalf of these Kings of England and was a frequent warrior in their military quests, both on the continent and in Britain.
In that adjudication, Charles of Blois, Joanna's husband, gained recognition as Duke of Brittany and John of Montfort fled.
John of Montfort fled Conflans in order to regain his troops who occupied many fortified castles in a line from Nantes to Brittany.
The king then proposed to Jean de Montfort that he would permit him to retain the Earldom of Richmond if John accepted the adjudication of Conflans and returned to the French court as a loyal vassal.
In Brittany, the Dukes who succeeded John V continued to use the title Earl of Richmond, or in French, Comte de Richemont.
Edmund Tudor had been educated by Catherine de la Pole, the Abbess of Barking, who brought him to Henry VI's attention.
The current dukedom of Richmond initially maintained the historic ties of Richmond to Brittany when it was created in 1675 for Charles Lennox: he was the illegitimate son of King Charles II of England and a noble bretonne, Louise de Penancoët de Kérouaille.
