The date of the birth of Lucy is usually given to be around 1074 (although other sources suggest perhaps earlier). Also referred to and recorded as Lucy of Bolingbroke and Lucia Thoroldsdottir, she was an Anglo-Norman heiress who died around 1136 or 1138. There has been much debate about her origins, but it seems to be now widely accepted that she was the daughter of Thorold, Sheriff of Lincoln, and by a daughter of William Malet (died 1071). She inherited a huge group of estates from both families, centred on Spalding in Lincolnshire. This group of estates was so substantial it acquired it’s own administrative identity; the Honour of Bolingbroke, with an administrative centre at Bolingbroke, Lincolnshire.

Lucy appears to have been an exceptional noblewoman, in the way she held and exercised authority in her own right rather than simply transmitting it to the men around her. She appears to have been castellan of Lincoln Castle, the dominant landholder across Lincolnshire, and the woman whose name the castle’s tower would carry long after her death. The shell keep on the south western motte, a roughly 15-sided stone structure remains bound up directly with Lucy of Bolingbroke.

Lucy married three times, and all three of her husbands predeceased her. Each marriage brought a powerful Norman lord into her orbit, and into her lands. The Honour of Bolingbroke passed through her husbands by virtue of the marriage and not the other way around. The first husband was Ivo Taillebois, a prominent administrator under both William I and William ll, who died in 1094. The second marriage was to Roger de Roumare, or Roger fitz Gerold (died in 1097 or 1098). Ranulf le Meschin (died in 1129) was her third and longest marriage, contracted sometime before 1101. When he inherited the Earldom of Chester in 1120, Lucy became Countess of Chester. The 1130 pipe-roll records that Lucy paid King Henry l, 1500 marks for the right not to be compelled to remarry.

Lucy as a widowed countess, founded the convent of Stixwould in 1135. Her religious patronage centred on Spalding Priory. Later she was responsible for many endowments and in 1135 she granted the priory her own manor of Spalding for the permanent use of the monks. Lucy went to great effort to ensure that, after her own death, her two surviving sons who were half-brothers, would honour and uphold her gifts.