In September 1229 he, with the sheriffs, received the king's command to deliver all the ships that he held in the various ports capable of carrying 16 horses to Portsmouth by the end of the month for the king's service, allowing any smaller vessels to go about their business. By the king's order the custody of Hastings Castle, "which Robert de Auberville had during the king's pleasure" was ordered to be given up by the Constable to John de Gatesden on 18 March 1230. In the spring of 1230 the King made his military expedition to Poitou, and in May full commands were given for the defence of the ports, in which John de Gatesden had some responsibility for Shoreham, Winchelsea, Rye and Seaford, in addition to Hastings and Pevensey Castles which he as Constable was especially instructed to prepare, arm and defend. Similar instructions were given to Bertram de Criol and Henry de Sandwich as Wardens of Dover and Sandwich respectively. This surrender is taken by Paget to indicate that Robert had died by 1230. His name disappears from the Rolls. If he died then, the date of 1245 given by Planché for a grant by William de Auberville the younger (Hugh's son) to the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, witnessed by Sir Robert de Auberville, Sir Simon de Haute (Hauth) and Sir Simon de Sandwich, begs an explanation. Family Clarice, daughter and heiress of Robert de Auberville and Claricia de Gestling, is introduced in the medieval French "ancestor romance" (an early 14th-century prose narrative based on a lost metrical romance) called The History of Fulk Fitz Warin, as the second wife of Fulk III FitzWarin, the marcher lord with whom the second and third parts of that narrative are particularly concerned. Clarice de Auberville is described as the wife of his later years, during which Fulke, having been restored to his English lands and grown very old, became blind. This outline was followed as if factual, in his Baronage, by Sir William Dugdale, and, despite occasional doubts, later accounts of the family have accepted this precedent. Clarice and her husband were living in 1250, when the Fine rolls record that they gave the king one mark for a writ ad terminum in the jurisdiction of Kent. In 1249 Fulk was recorded in the King's Bench to have acknowledged that he had given and confirmed to his daughter Mabil