Fifth crescent moon before dawn
Saher de Cuincy, my 33rd great-grandfather, possibly a wandering soulmate
Let’s continue the Butler saga up my family tree, without tangling in the twigs. Suffice to say that the blow-in bastard sons of the Vikings to Northmen to Normans to medieval Ireland dynasty of mercenary bouncers, backstabbers, bedders, bitches, beery brawlers, boasters, blusterers, braggarts, and butchers finagled and fingered its wicked ways into the lineages of lords and ladies waiting in the wings and among the washrooms both of many European courts. Not a record to boost any accounts in the black, but as for the red, the books kept by chroniclers, connivers, and conspirators manage to graft the Butler clan into events no less than the arrival of the Mayflower.
But that may be for a later date as far as this scribe scribbles, timed for a three months from now in its due season. If a date less and less commemorated, as the quincentennial in the wake of summer 2020, the spurious suppositions of the 1619 Project, and the diminishment of the quincentennial mean fewer Americans care about this dramatic, inevitably divisive, controversial, but likely inevitable event. Although in passing, it seems the Plan-B links me to the Hopkins (read my review of Jonathan Mack’s bio A Stranger Among Saints for the life of Stephen), Brewster, and Rogers families, a hat-check score in that New England icy rink that was Plymouth Plantation the winter of 1620-1, when half of the roughly hundred souls perished. The Thanksgiving feast, by the by, was next autumn…not after the harbor landing itself.
“Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” oil on canvas by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, 1925 National Museum of Women in the Arts
So, what’s this about this blog entry’s title? Go back a century and a half from those Butler brigands. You’ll find a couple of folks with the distinctive name Saher/ Saer. Not Viking, not Norman, not Breton, not Irish. Nor Latin, Saxon, Welsh, or Norse.
Turning to Wiki: Saher (Arabic: سحر, Hebrew: סהר) is either a feminine given name of Arabic origin, common throughout the Persian-speaking and Muslim worlds, or unisex given name of Hebrew origin, used mainly in Israel. Though the Arabic and Hebrew names are phonologically identical and both derive from Semitic languages, they are nonetheless etymologically unrelated. In Arabic, the name means "just before dawn", coming from a common Semitic root meaning "dawn" (compare with Shahar, the Ugaritic god of the dawn). The origin of the Hebrew name is an ancient Akkadian word for the crescent moon.
Where’d that come from? I turn to Jewish Genealogy, and while this claimed Lord of Bushby or Long Buckby or both hailed from Daventry, Northampton, and died in the venerable Hampshire burg of Winchester is listed there as 1100-58 rather than WikiTree’s approximation of 1098, not much of a difference. He’d have been born around the time when the First Crusade was proclaimed. He married into the Clare family, linked to Norman nobility, from Cuinchy, which derives its name from the Latinate for the “fifth.” I note that this entry is handled in WT by a woman with a Jewish name, and crossing this with the JG data, it makes me wonder, if improbably.
I mumble to myself, how’d a lad in Northern Europe be christened with a non-sainted moniker? Could he have come from the Levant, the Near East, the lands soon to be taken back, lost, taken, lost finally, by knights, rabble, debtors, dreamers, a few to become saints, outnumbered surely by scoundrels the likes of Butlers, Clares, and de Cuincy/Quincy’s? A note, from your resident medievalist-by-training (who never got to practice his own craft in decades of “hiring trends,” but who nonetheless remains proud of his quirky bonafides): contrary to received wisdom, this wasn’t an imperialist land grab at least in theory. Pilgrims had been hassled, kidnapped, enslaved, the usual fate for pious travellers to the Holy Land amidst the Caliphate and the Mediterranean. The Church was bent on eliminating the bandits, and ensuring that the routes stayed safe for trade, pilgrimages, and their lucrative combination. As Mecca’s mirror image?
The name repeated with a grandson. The First Earl of Winchester joined the Fifth Crusade in 1218 and died the following November 3rd during the siege of Damietta. The same that Francis of Assisi braved to visit the Sultan. Buried at the citadel of Acre, his heart was burned and interned at Garendon Abbey in Leicestershire.
Seal of Robert Fitzwalter (d.1235). So close was the alliance between both men that the seal shows the arms of Saer de Quincy (seven mascles 3,3,1) on a separate shield before FitzWalter’s horse, FitzWalter’s own arms on his own shield and on his horse's caparison.
Born around 1165, so by the time Saher went to Egypt, he’d have been in his mid-fifties. He’d had an illustrious career, an envoy in 1190 to the warring Scots, marrying well into the Beaumonts, in Northern France with Richard the Lion-Hearted in 1198, accompanying King John on various diplomatic missions, revolting in Normandy against the same monarch, imprisoned there, ransomed, released by 1204. He got back in royal good graces soon in Scotland and Ulster battles, but an undeniably coveted ambassadorship to the Holy Roman Empire couldn’t quench his opposition to John.
A romanticised 19th-century recreation of King John signing Magna Carta. Rather than signing in writing, the document would have been authenticated with the Great Seal and applied by officials rather than John himself.[
He signed the Magna Carta in 1215. He was excommunicated that December. Offering the English crown to the French king’s son, one of those Louis’s, he came back in January with French forces. But he lost his English lands, and sided with their enemy.
Arms displayed by Earl Saer on his seal on Magna Carta. These differ from his arms used elsewhere but can also be seen in stained glass at Winchester Great Hall.
Henry II came to power, another foe who then captured Saher at the Battle of Lincoln in 1217. A slippery fellow. He got his lands back yet again once he swore fealty. His life up to the Crusades showed how inextricably a warrior could embed himself both with and against his king, and certainly Saer’s shrewdness had balanced suspicions when it came to those pardoning him for what’d be traitorous conduct, not once but twice. Oh, and he had an uncle named Saer, and a son who answered to the same. There’s at least three, maybe more, who bore this as their “Christian” who’s he when he’s at home tag. Curious how this went over with priests at baptism, or their peers.
Now, battles and DIY heraldry aren’t my primary expertise. Neither is genealogy. Yet, when I read about the concept that a soul once Jewish seeks another body to enter, however distant a millennium ahead, or that the very unlikely Saher sustains itself within an undeniably Catholic context for quite a few medieval years, among Crusaders battling Muslims, it nestles in my what-if mental file of discordant notes.
The WT site: "The origin of the family is unknown. The key presumably lies in the unusual first name "Saher". This suggests several possibilities. There is some similarity to the Portuguese or Galician "Soeiro", numerous references to which are found among the Portuguese nobility from the late 11th/early 12th centuries. Alternatively there could be a connection with the Near East: "saher" means "dawn" in modern Arabic, and "Saher" is one of the Jewish surnames listed by Zubatsky & Berent, Sourcebook for Jewish Genealogies + Family Histories (1993).
Happenstance or not, unanticipated encounters with longtime Jewish friends of various persuasions on my three-month stay in Los Angeles have led me to quiet moments multiplying as I also consider the involvement of the Franciscans in this situation then and now, for Francis’ fortitude won his new Order the custody of the “holy places,” a privilege it’s continued ever since that deadly, ugly siege of Damietta.
Gordon Conwell, “Damietta: Francis and the Sultan” gordonconwell.edu
Here in the Andes, contemplating my late wife’s heritage, that of my sons, of many or our circle in which our children have grown and now remain in many cases estranged from their identification with their ancestral, evanescent connections. Today’s climate of threat, shame, confusion, retaliation, “whataboutery” as the clannish Irish perfected during the Troubles, all shadow who wants to remain a member of the Tribe. I’ll be expanding on this soon, but the Adversary has his dark hand in sinister play; high winds mean I’ve labored about six hours on this between outages. I’ve had to summon up dwindling stores of patience to post today, all character-building, verily.
Let’s gently conclude by leaving me, romanticizing medieval minded, yearning for solace, indulging in fantasy, lonely for my departed “beshert,” down here in Ecuador, far from any tangible ties to MoT’s, mulling over how fate leaves its traces on my estranged, scattered, in and out of communication with the outside world, psyche, my ever-faltering and drifting spiritual quest, and my own blurred crusade towards some kind of Jerusalem, next year or this. I woke up this week hearing “tomorrow, babe,” in the voice of my late wife. Wherever her presence is, may it dwell among us who loved her. Who loved her llamas, Sebastian (really a guanaco similar to below; you’d see this panorama is what you’d see from a bespoke resort uphill from me) and Pepe Pancho.