settlement, his claim to be chief steward of England and Normandy was recognised by Henry. Earl Robert began his career as chief justiciar of England probably as soon as Duke Henry succeeded as King Henry II in October 1154. The office gave the earl supervision of the administration and legal process in England whether the king was present in, or absent from the realm. He appears in that capacity in numerous administrative acts, and had a junior colleague in the post in Richard de Luci, another former servant of King Stephen. The earl filled the office for nearly fourteen years until his death, and earned the respect of the emerging Angevin bureaucracy in England. His opinion was quoted by learned clerics, and his own learning was highly commended. He died on 5 April 1168, probably at his Northamptonshire castle of Brackley, for his entrails were buried at the hospital in the town. He was received as a canon of Leicester on his deathbed, and buried to the north of the high altar of the great abbey he had founded and built. He left a written testament of which his son the third earl was an executor, as we learn in a reference dating to 1174. Church patronage Robert founded and patronised many religious establishments. He founded Leicester Abbey (1144) and Garendon Abbey (1133) in Leicestershire, the Fontevraldine Nuneaton Priory in Warwickshire, Luffield Priory in Northamptonshire, and made endowments to the hospital of Brackley, Northamptonshire. He refounded the collegiate church of St Mary de Castro, Leicester, as a dependency of Leicester Abbey around 1164, after suppressing it in 1139. Around 1139 he refounded the collegiate church of Wareham as a priory of his Abbey of Lyre, in Eure, Normandy. His principal Norman foundations were the priory of Nôtre-Dame du Désert in the Forest of Breteuil, and a major hospital in Breteuil itself (Eure). He was a generous benefactor of the Benedictine Abbey of Lyre, the oldest monastic house in the Honour of Breteuil. He also donated land in Old Dalby, Leicestershire to the Knights Hospitallers who used it to found Dalby Preceptory. About the year 1150, Robert le Bossu, Earl of Leicester, gave to one Solomon, a clerk, an acre of land at Brackley on which to build a house of hospitality for the poor, together with a free chapel and graveyard. Family and children He married after 1120 Amice de