Weis" "Ancestral Roots. . ." (53:27), (54:28), (60:27), (236:8).
Saher IV had a public life which was busy and important. He served King Richard I and KING JOHN in Normandy in 1197-9 and his position in Scottish society made him a fit person to conduct KING WILLIAM THE LION to meet KING JOHN in 1200. During the war with France he was captured, but raised a ransom and returned to England.
Created earl of Winchester, about 1206-7, he remained active in royal affairs: he served in the exchequer, acted as justice in many counties and travelled abroad on the king's business, to Scotland, Ireland and Germany. In 1209, he had with him in Scotland a force of 100 knights and 100 sergeants. While baronial opposition to KING JOHN grew stronger, Saher remained loyal to the king, but joined the confederate barons a month or so before the granting of Magna Carta in June 1215.
In 1216, he went to France to invite PRINCE LOUIS to England and as a result the crown confiscated his estates. After taking part in several military expeditions on behalf of LOUIS, Earl Saher was defeated and captured by the royal forces at Lincoln on 20 May 1217. Soon afterwards he returned to his allegiance and was given back his lands.
In January 1219, he despatched a ship from Galloway to collect at Bristol necessaries for the journey he proposed to make to Jerusalem. Following his father's example, he duly became a Crusader, but fell ill and died at Damietta, on November 1219, and was buried at Acre. Before his death, he commanded that his heart should be taken back to England for burial in Garendon abbey, Leicestershire.
One event in Saher's private life was largely responsible for raising him to the position of public importance which he held. This was his marriage, the most brilliant match so far achieved by any member of the family. His wife was MARGARET, daughter of ROBERT DE BEAUMONT, third earl of Leicester, sister and co-heir of Robert 'Fitz Pernel', fourth earl of Leicester. The date of this important marriage is unknown. The most obvious effect of the marriage on the Quincy family was that it brought great additions to their estates. On the death of MARGARET's brother, Robert Fitz Pernel, in 1204, Saher IV became, in right of his wife, co-heir to the estates of the honours of Leicester and Grandmesnil. The other co-heir was SIMON DE MONTFORT, husband of MARGARET's sister AMICE, and grandfather of the famous Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. The Leicester estates were vast and lay mainly in the English midlands, particularly of course in Leicestershire. To the Scottish and English estates which he had inherited from his father, Saher and MARGARET thus added lands many times the value of the ancestral holding.
The earls of Leicester, who took their origin from ROGER DE BEAUMONT, one of WILLIAM THE CONQUERER's Normans, had also possessed considerable French estates, particularly in Eure, where lay the Beaumont which provided some members of the family with a surname. But these Norman estates passed from the family in 1204 when AMICE DE MONTFORT resigned to PHILIP AUGUSTUS the castle of Breteuil, dep. Eure, the caput of the earls' Norman honour, and with it everything that the last earl held in Normandy. At the same time AMICE undertook to indemnify her sister MARGARET, Saher's wife, out of the English estates and guaranteed that MARGARET would raise no claim to the French properties. Although Saher and MARGARET seem thus to have been denied any share in the French lands of the earls of Leicester, which PHILIP AUGUSTUS added to his own demesne, the upheavals caused by KING JOHN's loss of Normandy may have left the question open. When in 1206-7 Saher and MARGARET came to divide the Leicester lands with AMICE and SIMON DE MONTFORT, it was agreed that Saher should have *40 of land per annum from SIMON's share until SIMON put Saher in possession of his due portion of the
Leicester lands in Normandy. This arrangement may have been the origin of a Quincy claim to Norman estates which apparently survived, after Saher's death, as part of the Quincy family inheritance. Nevertheless, Beaumont estates in England were a rich prize for Saher, not only in themselves, but also since it was because he possessed half of the Leicester lands that he was created earl of Winchester about 1206-7, at the time of the partition.
His earldom was considered to be equivalent to the earldom of Southampton, from which county he received *10 a year _nomine comitis_, although he held no lands in the county. For the third time a Quincy had married well--so well that he was raised to the peerage. The family had moved rapidly up the social scale since the day, some eighty years before, when Saher I held one and a half fees in Long Buckby. Marriage to a Beaumont also opened up for the Quincys a new and wide range of family connections, which were always important within a social structure which depended greatly on the links of family with family and generation with generation. Partition of the Leicester inheritance put Saher on a level with the great Montfort family, and links with them survived under Earl ROGER, who, for example, made a grant to the nunnery of Pre'aux, dep. Eure, in conjunction with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, and resigned to that earl, 'his dearest kinsman', the advowson and site of Garendon, Leics.

Born in 1155. Died on November 3, 1219 in the Holy Land while journeying towards Jerusalem.

Saher de Quincy was one of the 25 sureties of the Magna Charta, for which he was excommunicated.
His singular christian name of Saher, or Saier, is a likely a corruption from the Saxon Segher, Sigher, or
Seagar, a Conqueror. Eliza S. Quincy refers to him as "John de Quincy, created Earl of Winchester by
King John, 1207. He was a leader of the Barons who forced John to sign the Magna Charta."

The arms of Saher de Quincy are described as "Or, a fesse gules, a file of 11 points azure". As with the genealogy, the arms of Saher de Quincy are uncertain. Argent can be used instead of or, and the colours of the fesse and file can be transposed. As well, the file doesn't appear to be definite, and is pictured in different places with 5, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12 points. (Richard Thomson: An Historical Essay on the Magna
Carta of King John, London, 1829)

He is noted as one of the more militarily capable barons... "At the beginning of John’s reign, Saire de Quincey was not a Baron, much less a great one. In the civil war the King had had the advantage over the rebels. Few of the Barons had had much actual military experience. The Barons contribution to the war was the scutage they paid, a war fund substituted for the contingent of knights owed to the Kings service. The money was collected from vassals, and mercenary knights were paid from it. Many of the mercenaries were regulars who served the same Baron from campaign to campaign, but those Barons who are known to have had extensive military experience were only Saire de Quincey, Robert FitzWalter, William de Mowbray, William dÁlbini, Roger de Cressi and Robert de Roos.