Among those who at first adhered to the cause of Stephen were the two half-brothers, William de Roumare and Ranulph, Earl of Chester, who had hereditary claims upon a large Lincolnshire property, and, of some sort, upon the castle of Lincoln. These, as regarded the castle, were exercised mainly by the Earl of Chester, the younger, but, in England at least, the most powerful of the two. Their claims dated from a period before the Conquest, and were no doubt connected with the ownership of the English fortress. Ælfgar, Earl of Mercia, son of Earl Leofric, and lord of many Lincolnshire lordships, was father of the well-known Earls Eadwine and Morkere, and of Ealdgyth, widow of Gryffydd of Wales, and afterwards of Harold, and of Lucia, or Lucy, the eventual heiress of the family, and as such claiming not only the Lincolnshire lands, but, as it seems, the hereditary constableship of the castle. Mr. Nichols, in a very valuable paper upon the earls of Lincoln, has shown that Lucy married Ivo Taillebois, one of the Conqueror’s barons, a hero both of history and romance, and, in right of his wife, a great landowner in Lincolnshire. Her name occurs in his charter in 1085 concerning the church of Spalding. Ivo died in 1114, and their daughter, another Lucy, an heiress or co-heiress, and who claimed the constableship of Lincoln Castle, and fortified one of its towers, married, first, Roger de Roumare, and second, Ranulph de Briquesard, called Le Meschines, Earl of Chester, who died 1129. By each she had a son. (1) William de Roumare, afterwards Earl of Lincoln; and (2) Ranulph, called Gernons, Earl of Chester. These two half-brothers, unstable and greedy politicians and soldiers, played considerable parts in the war of the succession, and had much to say to Lincoln Castle.