They first appear during the rule of Duke Richard II of Normandy, in the early 11th century, and they would hold L'Aigle for the Norman Dukes and Kings of England until the first half of the 13th century, when with the fall of Normandy to the French crown the last of the line was forced to abandon the ancestral French lands, only to die in England a few years later without surviving English heirs.
Their position on the borderlands, and near the headwaters of three rivers, the Risle, Iton and Avre, gave their small holding a special importance, as did a set of marriage connections that provided this relatively minor Norman noble family with a more elevated historical visibility.
[3] The location of his origin, as represented by his toponymic Beina, remains unidentified and it is not possible to definitively identify him among the several men named Fulbert appearing at the ducal court.
Like his father, Richer died fighting for William the Conqueror at the Siege of Sainte-Suzanne in 1084, where his brother Gilbert of L'Aigle led a revenge assault in January 1085.
[5] As 'Gilbert de Aquila', this famous Norman knight would feature in Rudyard Kipling's tale, "Old Men at Pevensey", part of his Puck of Pook's Hill.
[9] Gilbert, lord of L'Aigle, would serve successive Norman dukes, first Robert Curthose, then following his departure, William II of England, who would leave him to garrison Le Mans after its capture.
L'Aigle was restored to Richer, again through Rotrou's influence, [13] but the young lord had lost the king's confidence and would only appear at court once during the rest of Henry's reign.
[16][2] The dispossessed brothers, Engenulf and Geoffrey, would die in 1120 in the wreck of the White Ship along with Rotrou's son and wife, and the Count would leave his County of Perche in the hands of his sister Juliana, Richer's mother, and turn his attention to fighting Muslims in Aragon.
With the succession of King Stephen and his struggle to solidify his southern Norman frontier, Richer was again to gain royal access, and again the relationship with Rotrou paid dividends.
To make matters worse, the next year Henry was named Stephen's heir, and thus a new king brought Richer no respite from royal displeasure.
[21] Richer seems to have reached a rapprochement with the new king in the late 1050s, surrendering Bonsmoulins but again holding at least a portion of his lost English lands, though he largely disappears from royal records.
His death in 1176 brought an end to a career that had squandered his father's power and royal good will through a particular penchant for choosing the wrong side in one conflict after another.