Nigel d'Aubigny

He is described as "one of the most favoured of Henry’s 'new men'".[2] While he entered the king's service as a household knight and brother of the king's butler, William d'Aubigny, in the years following the Battle of Tinchebrai in 1106 Nigel was rewarded by Henry with marriage to an heiress who brought him lordship in Normandy and with the lands of several men, primarily that of Robert de Stuteville.[3] The Mowbray honour became one of the wealthiest estates in Norman England. From 1107 to about 1118, Nigel served as a royal official in Yorkshire and Northumberland. In the last decade of his life he was frequently traveling with Henry I, most likely as one of the king's trusted military and administrative advisors. He died in Normandy, possibly at the abbey of Bec.[4]

Nigel's first marriage was in 1107 to Matilda de L'Aigle, who had her marriage to the disgraced and imprisoned Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, annulled. She brought to the marriage with Nigel her ex-husband's lordship of Montbray (Mowbray). Following a decade of childless marriage and her powerful brother's death, Nigel repudiated Matilda and in 1118 married to Gundred de Gournay (died 1155), daughter of Gerard de Gournay. Nigel and Gundred had son who, inheriting from his father the former Mowbray lands, would become known as Roger de Mowbray and was progenitor of the later noble Mowbray family.