... From contemporary evidence, however, it appears that he [William de Arcis] had a second daughter, Emma, who married, first, Nigel de Monville, and secondly Manasses, Count of Guines, and that on the decease of William de Arcis, early in the reign of William Rufus, the honour of Folkstone, with all the lands of his fief in England, became the inheritance of Emma and her issue, whilst the Norman barony devolved on her sister, Matildis, and her descendants.
In the year 1095, Nigel de Munevilla and his wife Emma, with consent of Archbishop Anselm, founded the Priory of Folkstone, as a cell to the Abbey of Lonlay in Normandy. At the period of the death of Rufus, A.D. 1100, Nigel was living ; the precise time of his decease has not been ascertained, but in the brief addressed by Henry I to the Bishop of Thetford (Herbert de Lozinga, 1091-1119), respecting the grant by Emma to the nuns of Radyngfield, she is styled "Comitissa de Gennes."
From documents given by Duchesne, in the history of the Counts of Guines, it appears that Count Manasses and Emma his wife founded at Guines, about A.D. 1117, a monastery of nuns, in honor of St. Leonard, to which they gave the church of Newington, near Hythe, with lands and tithes thereto belonging, having obtained the sanction of William, Archbishop of Canterbury, who succeeded A.D. 1123. This property appears in the taxation of Pope Nicolas (A.D. 1___) to have been still in the possession of the nuns of Guines.
The manor of Newington had been comprised in the dower of Beatrix, wife of William de Arcis, a portion of whose lands, as it would appear, remained, after the death of Nigel de Munevilla, with Emma his relict, and in her right were held by her second husband during the reign of HEnry I. The castle Folkstone, and the daughter and heiress of Nigel, as a ward of the King, were kept in his custody.
Manasses, Count of Guines, succeeded to Baldwin his father, A.D. 1091, and is named with Emma, and their daughter Rosa, in a grant to the church of St. Sauveur, at Andres, made by him before the year 1106. He died about A.D. 1139 in the monastery at Andres, according to the chronicle of that house, Emma his countess surviving him. Rosa, his only daughter, wife of Henry, Castellan of Bourbourg, had died in her father's life-time, ...
