According to the account by the
Continuator of Wace and others, in his youth Brictric declined the romantic advances of
Matilda of Flanders (c. 1031 – 1083), later wife of King
William the Conqueror, and his great fiefdom was thereupon seized by her. Whatever the truth of the matter, years later when she was ruling England as
regent, she used her authority to confiscate Brictric's lands and threw him into prison, where he died.
Samuel Lysons in his
Magna Britannia refers to a Godeva as being the "widow of Brictric, in dower" of two manors in Devon in a footnote to his table of the general division of property at the time of the Domesday survey. Brictric's other lands were granted after Matilda's death in 1083 by her eldest son King
William Rufus (1087–1100) to
Robert FitzHamon (died 1107), the conqueror of
Glamorgan, whose daughter and sole heiress
Maud (or Mabel) FitzHamon brought them to her husband
Robert de Caen, 1st Earl of Gloucester (pre-1100 – 1147), a natural son of Matilda's younger son King
Henry I (1100–1135). Thus Brictric's fiefdom became the
feudal barony of Gloucester. ==Landholdings==