Waleran de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, 1st Earl of Worcester, was the son of Robert de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth de Vermandois, and the twin brother of Robert de Beaumont, 2nd Earl of Leicester. He is not referred to by any surname in a contemporary document other than 'Waleran son of Count Robert'.

Waleran was an important twelfth-century character in ways other than political. He was a literate man educated in the liberal arts and philosophy. The elegy to him by Stephen of Rouen, monk of Bec-Hellouin, reveals that he composed Latin verse. In 1142 he tells us that he personally researched the deeds in the archive of Meulan priory before confirming its possessions. Like his twin brother, he also seems to have been an assiduous writer of letters and a number of them survive. He was also a literary patron, as Geoffrey of Monmouth dedicated the earliest edition of his History of the Kings of Britain to him in 1136.

Waleran founded Cistercian abbeys at Bordesley, Worcestershire (1139), and Le Valasse, Normandy (c.1150), though in both cases the abbeys were taken over by the king. He was a generous patron of the two ancestral Benedictine monasteries of Préaux (St Peter for men and St Leger for women). He was besides accepted as advocate of the abbey of Bec-Hellouin, and was patron of its priory at Meulan, founding another at Beaumont-le-Roger. He founded a Benedictine priory at Gournay-sur-Marne. He endowed a major hospital at Pont Audemer, which still survives.