KS Mythbusters -- Catherine d'Avesnes

First Installment of KS: Mythbusters!

In this inaugural installment, I will examine the claim repeated all over the world in genealogical websites that Payne/Giles Roet married a sister of Philippa of Hainault named Catherine d'Avesnes.

I am more than half-way finished reading Kathryn Warner's biography of Philippa of Hainault.  Throughout the book but most extensively and intensively in Chapter 1 "The Hainault Family," she identifies all know natal family members of Queen Philippa.  Her parents and grandparents have long been known to us but her many siblings and half-siblings have not been identified with the same degree of certainty.

Warner notes that Queen Philippa was "sometimes also known as Philippa of Avesnes, the name of her dynasty."  Her parents had nine or ten identified offspring consisting of four sons and five or six daughters.  While the years of birth are not necessarily known (but the daughters are identified via proposed marriages for them), the names and proposed birth order are thus:

1.  Margaretha (b. ca. 1310/11).

2. Johannna (b. ca. 1311/1312).

3. Sybilla (? Mentioned in record; died young)

4. Philippa (married Edward III)

5. Agnes (b. ca, 1310s/early 1320s)

6. Isabella (b. ca. 1320s).

Not a Catherine among them.

Philippa's father's illegitimate daughters (two, possibly three of them; all nuns):

1. Aleide (nun, 1332)
   
2. Matilde (Abbess of Nivelles in 1351)
   
3. Elizabeth 'of Holland' (Nun at Stratford-le-Bow, d. 1375).
   

Again -- no Catherine.  She is quite possibly a myth that arose due to what Warner calls "the enduringly popular" novel written about KS by Anya Seton.  Seton of course made no mention of a Catherine d'Avesnes, however, the popularity of the novel prompted one or more persons to try to have religious ordinances for the dead performed and contributed genealogical information to an American church for three 'people' who only existed in a novel, namely, 'twins little Hugh and Dorothy' (presented using those words by Seton herself as offspring of KS' son, Thomas Swynford) and a 'Catherine d'Avesnes' (to serve as a royal mother of KS' and wife to her father Payne/Giles).

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