wickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire, with the isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire. Axholme ultimately became the centre of the Mowbray power, lying half-way between their lands in Warwickshire and Leicestershire and their Yorkshire estates. These latter, which stretched in a great crescent from Thirsk, whose valley is still called the Vale of Mowbray, to Kirkby Malzeard and the sources of the Nidd, with the outlying castle of Black Burton in Lonsdale, were forfeited by Robert de Stuteville, baron of Frontebceuf, who took the losing side at Tinchebrai, and were conferred by King Henry upon the loyal Nigel (Hoveden ; Dugdale, Baronage, i. 455). It is just possible that the former lands of Geoffrey de Wirce came into Nigel's possession as part of the Stuteville forfeiture. For when Stuteville's descendants sued for the recovery of their heritage they laid claim not only to the Yorkshire estates, but to Axholme and other lands which had undoubtedly belonged to Geoffrey de Wirce (ib. p. 457 ; Rotuli Curies Regis, ii. 231). But although there is no evidence that the second house of Mowbray was founded on the English estates of the first, it seems not improbable that they secured some of the Norman lands of the first house, including perhaps the honour of Montbrai itself (Stapleton, Rotuli Scaccarii Normannice, ii. xcv; see pedigree in Stonehouse, Isle of Axholme, and cf. Monast. Anal. vi. 320).
Nigel was buried in the priory of Bee, of which he is said to have become a monk before his death (Cont. of William of Jumièges, ed. Duchesne, p. 296; Eyton, Shropshire, viii. 212 ; Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I, ed. Hunter, p. 138).
Roger, his young son, was probably born between 1120 and 1125 (Ailred of Rievaulx in Chron. of Reigns of Stephen, &c. iii. 184 ; Dugdale, Monast. Angl. v. 349, 352, and Baronage, i. 122). His name is said to have been changed from Albini to Mowbray at the command of Henry I. He became a ward of the crown, and Ailredus, who was abbot of Rievaulx, a few miles from Roger's castle of Thirsk, relates, in illustration of the enthusiasm with which Yorkshire prepared to repel the Scots in 1138, that the barons took Roger de Mowbray, though but a boy (adhuc puerulus), to the battle of the Standard, but carefully avoided exposing him to danger (Chronicles of the Reign of Stephen, &c., iii. 183 ; cf. Rich. of Hexham, ib. iii. 159). Three years later, he is said by one authority to have been taken prisoner with Stephen in the battle of Lincoln (John of Hexham in Decem Scriptores, p. 269). In these years he seems to have been at Thirsk with his mother, Gundreda, under whose guidance he became a generous benefactor to the church. In 1138 they sheltered the monks of Calder, flying before the Scots ; Roger gave them a tenth of the victuals of the castle, and, on their forming themselves into a convent subordinate to Savigny in the diocese of Avranches in 1143, bestowed upon them his villa of Byland-on-the-Moors (Monast. Angl. v. 349-50). When the monks of Byland Abbey found their first site inconvenient and intolerably close to Rievaulx Abbey, whose bells they could hear all day long, Roger in 1147 (when the abbey became Cistercian) granted them a new site, some eight miles to the south, near Coxwold (ib. p. 351 ; cf. English Hist. Review, viii. 668-672). In the course of his long life he frequently made additional gifts to the abbey, including the great forest of Nidderdale. But, 'being a frugal man, and, so to speak, the standard-bearer of liberality among the magnates of the land,' Roger did not confine his generosity to a single object. As early as i 1145 he joined his relative Sampson de Albini in the foundation of the great abbey of Austin canons at Newburgh, not far from the second site of Byland Abbey (Monast. Angl. vi. 317-21 ; William of Newburgh in Chron. of the Reigns of Stephen, &c.) He endowed Newburgh with land, and the church of Thirsk with fifteen other churches and chapels on his Yorkshire estates ; while Sampson de Albini, with his consent, gave to Newburgh Abbey the churches of Masham and Kirkby Malzeard, with four in the isle of Axholme, and that of Landford in Nottinghamshire. About the same time he gave some of his land in Masham to the Earl of Richmond's infant foundation of Jervaulx in Wensleydale, which in 1150 was affiliated to Byland and the Cistercian order {Monast. Angl. v. 569). Mowbray was also a generous benefactor of the abbeys of Fountains, Rievaulx, and Bridlington in Yorkshire ; Kenilworth in Warwickshire ; and Sulby in Northamptonshire, and gave to the church of St. Mary in York the isle of Sandtoft in Axholme, and to the hospital of St. Leonards in that city the ninth sheave of all his corn throughout England (Dugdale, Monast. Angl. iii. 617, v. 282-3, 307, aronage,\. 123). He doubled his father's endowment to the priory of Hurst in Axholme (Monast. Angl. vi. 101). In Normandy he gave all his lands in Granville to the Abbaye des Dames at Caen when his daughter became a nun there (Neustria Pia, p. 660). In the exaggeration of tradition he was credited with the foundation of no less than thirty-five
