KING JOHN
1206–1210
Sed processu temporis mollities illa in tantam crudelitatem
versa est, ut nulli praedecessorum suorum coaequari valeret, ut in
sequentibus patebit.
GERV. CANT. ii. 93.
[Sidenote: 1205]
The first business wherein John had an opportunity of exercising the
free kingship which he had, as he said, acquired by the death of Hubert
Walter, was the appointment of Hubert’s successor. Immediately after
Hubert’s funeral the king spent six days at Canterbury.[502] He “talked
much and graciously with the monks” of Christ Church about the choice
of a new archbishop, and even hinted that one might be found in their
own ranks. At the same time, however, he took possession of a valuable
set of church plate bequeathed by Hubert to his cathedral;[503] and
before leaving Canterbury he issued orders that the election of the
primate should be made on November 30 by the monks and the bishops of
the province conjointly.[504] A party in the chapter at once resolved
to vindicate its independence both against the bishops, whose claim
to share in the choice of their metropolitan was always opposed by
the monks, and against the king, whose prerogative of designating the
candidate to be chosen was in theory regarded by monks and bishops
alike as uncanonical, though in practice they had been compelled to
submit to it at every vacancy for a hundred years past at the least.
The younger and more hot-headed members of the chapter privately
elected their sub-prior Reginald, enthroned him at dead of night, and
hurried him off to seek confirmation from the Pope, pledging him to
secrecy till the confirmation should be secured.[505] The older and
more prudent brethren evidently connived at these proceedings without
taking part in them. Their policy was to consent to Reginald’s election
after the fact, if the Pope’s sanction of it could be obtained; but if
this were refused, they could repudiate the election as a matter in
which they had had no share. The convent was, however, unlucky in its
choice of a champion. Reginald was no sooner across the sea than he
began to announce himself publicly as “the elect of Canterbury,” and
even to show the credentials which he had received from his brethren
for the Pope. Of course this news soon reached England, and caused a
great commotion in high places there. The bishops, indignant at being
tricked out of their share in the election, despatched an appeal to
Rome. The monks sent a counter-appeal;[506] but to them the wrath
of the king was far more terrible than the wrath of the bishops, or
even the possible wrath of the Pope. Long before the appeals could be
decided, they sent to John a deputation charged with a communication
containing no allusion whatever to Reginald, but simply requesting
that the convent might be permitted to choose for itself a pastor.
John received the deputies graciously and assented to their request;
then, taking them aside, he “pointed out to them that the bishop of
Norwich” (John de Grey) “was attached to him by a great intimacy,
and the only one among the prelates of England who knew his private
affairs,” wherefore it would be greatly for the advantage of king and
kingdom if he became archbishop--a consummation which the king begged
the deputies would do their utmost to secure. He sent back with them
some confidential clerks of his own to assist them in this task, and
dismissed them with a promise of bestowing great honour on their
convent if it were accommodating in this matter. The result was an
unanimous election of John de Grey by the chapter of Christ Church.[507]
[Sidenote: 1206]
On December 6 the king obtained from both bishops and monks a
withdrawal of their respective appeals.[508] On December 11 John de
Grey was enthroned at Canterbury in the king’s presence, and invested
by him with the temporalities of the See; and on the 18th the king
despatched a messenger to ask for the papal confirmation of the new
primate’s appointment.[509] The Pope, however, at the end of March
1206, decided that the election of John de Grey was uncanonical;
on the validity of Reginald’s election he suspended his judgement,
ordering the Canterbury chapter to send sixteen of their number to
him by October 1, with full powers to act on behalf of all, and if
necessary to hold a new election in his court. The suffragans of the
province were desired to send proctors, and the king was invited to
do the like.[510] The king sent three proctors;[511] the bishops seem
to have contented themselves with writing a joint letter, of whose
contents we know nothing, except that they had the royal approval.[512]
Of the sixteen monks who went as representatives of the chapter,
twelve, before they sailed, secretly exchanged a promise with the
king. He pledged himself to ratify whatever they should do at Rome;
they pledged themselves to do nothing there except re-elect John de
Grey.[513] The assembly at Rome, originally appointed for October 1,
was postponed till the last week of Advent (December 17 to 24). Then,
in full consistory, the Pope, after examination, set aside the claim
of the bishops to a voice in the election, and declared the monks to
be the sole rightful electors; but he also set aside, as informal and
void, their election of their sub-prior, Reginald; and he bade them
elect, then and there, “whomsoever they would, so he were but an
earnest and capable man, and above all, an Englishman.” All eyes must
have turned instinctively upon the English-born Cardinal-priest of S.
Chrysogonus, the most illustrious teacher of theology in his day, “than
whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any
equal to him in character and learning”--Stephen Langton. Innocent was
but speaking the thought of the whole assembly when he added that the
monks could not do better than choose Stephen. The unlucky twelve were
as willing to do so as the other four, but felt tied by their compact
with the king. After some shuffling, they confessed their difficulty
to the Pope. He scornfully absolved them from their shameful promise,
and the sixteen monks unanimously elected Stephen Langton. The king’s
proctors, however, refused to ratify the election in John’s name; so
Innocent at once wrote to request a formal ratification of it from John
himself.[514]
These things were done in the week following John’s return from La
Rochelle to England, which took place on December 12.[515] His recent
experiences had shown him that the recovery of his lost territories was
by no means impossible, but that it could not, under existing political
and social conditions, be achieved by means of the only forces which
the military organization of his own realm could supply. Those forces
must be supplemented, if not superseded, in any attempt at the
reconquest of the Norman and Angevin dominions, by the employment of
mercenaries on a large scale, and by an elaborate system of diplomacy,
the gradual knitting together of a complicated scheme of foreign
alliances. For both these purposes the first need was money; and the
difficulties with which the king had to contend in his efforts to raise
money were as much greater in John’s case than in that of any of his
predecessors, as his need was greater than theirs had ever been.
[Sidenote: 1194–1207]
The financial difficulties of the Crown had been accumulating ever
since Richard’s captivity. At John’s accession the arrears of taxes
were enormous. At Michaelmas 1201 arrears of all the three “scutages of
Normandy” imposed under Richard--in 1194, 1195 and 1196--were due from
almost every shire; hidage “for the king’s ransom” was still owing from
Dorset and Somerset, and there were many arrears even of the “scutage
of Wales,” which dated from 1190.[516] Some of these debts ran on as
late as 1207, and some much later still. The king’s claim to these
unpaid taxes, as well as to all other debts owed to his predecessor,
was, of course, never withdrawn. A grotesque instance of the way in
which the principle of inheritance might sometimes work in such matters
occurs in the treasury roll of 1201, where two men in Devon are set
down as owing a fine “because they had been with Count John”[517]--that
is, because they had supported, in his rebellion against Richard in
1193, the very man for whom, as king, the fine was now claimed. The
Crown had, however, no direct means of enforcing payment of either
fines or taxes, at any rate in the case of the barons. Its one remedy
was to seize the lands or castles of an obstinate and wilful defaulter;
and this remedy was fraught with danger to the crown itself. Neither
law nor custom defined the circumstances or fixed the limits of time
within which a defaulter was not, and beyond which he was, liable to be
treated as obstinate and wilful; in every case where the king exercised
his right of seizure on this ground, therefore, the defaulter and
his friends could always find a plea for denouncing its exercise as
arbitrary and unjust. It seems probable that at the close of Richard’s
reign his ministers may have thus seized the castles or lands of
certain barons in pledge for the arrears of their dues to the crown,
and that this may have been one of the grievances referred to in the
demand of the barons that Richard’s successor “should restore to each
of them his rights.” John’s demand for the castles of some of the
barons in 1201 was in all likelihood a proceeding of the same kind,
based on the same ground, and, as it seems, equally ineffectual in
compelling payment; all that the king obtained was the surrender not
indeed of the castles, but of some of the barons’ sons as hostages. The
deadlock was probably inevitable; but every year of its continuance
aggravated both the financial difficulties of the government, and the
unfriendliness of the relations between the barons and the king; and
this latter evil was yet further aggravated by the measures which had
necessarily to be taken in order to meet the former one. Plunged as he
was from the very moment of his accession in a costly struggle with
France, John had been forced to lay continually fresh burdens upon
that very class among his subjects who already were, or considered
themselves to be, overburdened by the demands of his predecessor. The
“first scutage of King John” seems to have been assessed immediately
after his coronation; it appears in the Pipe Roll made up at Michaelmas
1199. In the financial year ending at Michaelmas 1201, and in every one
of the five following years, there was another new scutage;[518] and
these scutages were independent of the fines paid by the barons who
did not accompany the king on his first return to Normandy in 1199, of
the money taken from the host as a substitute for its service in 1201,
of the equipment and payment of the “decimated” knights in 1205, and
the fines claimed from all the tenants-in-chivalry after the dismissal
of the host in the same year, as well as of the actual services which
many of those who had paid the scutage rendered in the campaigns of
1202–1204 and 1206.
The other taxes levied during these years were a carucage in
1200[519]and a seventh of moveables in 1204.[520] But all the while
arrears went on accumulating, and year after year a budget had to be
made up by devices of the most miscellaneous character. The accession
of a new king could, of course, easily be made a pretext for selling
confirmations of existing rights and privileges, and John availed
himself of this pretext to the uttermost of his power at the earliest
opportunity--that is, on his visit to England in 1201. During that
time nobody in England seems to have felt secure of anything that he
possessed till he had bought it of the king. Individuals of various
ranks bought the sovereign’s “peace” or his “goodwill”;[521] the cities
of Winchester and Southampton and the county of Hants each gave him
money “that they might be lovingly treated”;[522] Wiltshire gave him
twenty pounds “that it might be well treated.”[523] The citizens of
York offended him by omitting to welcome him with a procession when
he visited their city, and to provide quarters for his cross-bowmen;
he demanded hostages for their future good behaviour, but afterwards
changed his demand to a fine of a hundred pounds.[524] The sale of
offices went on as of old;[525] while the sale of charters to towns,
which under Richard was already becoming a remarkable item in the royal
accounts, was a transaction of yet greater frequency and importance
under his successor.[526] On the other hand, John’s treasury rolls
contain many notices of persons who owe the king money “which he has
lent them.” These loans from the king to his barons and other subjects
were probably made chiefly in the hope of securing the fidelity of the
borrowers. In one way or another the speculation must have been in most
cases a paying one for John. The privilege of claiming interest in
hard cash for a loan was indeed reserved exclusively for the Jews, and
not shared even by the king; but he could take from his debtors ample
security on their lands or castles, or by means of hostages who were
usually their sons or other young members of their families, and whom
it was of the greater importance for him to hold in his power as his
relations with the barons grew more strained year by year.
[Sidenote: 1207]
In 1206 the tension had reached such a point that John did not venture
to impose a scutage of the full amount--two marks on the knight’s
fee--which had been usual since his father’s time, but contented himself
with twenty shillings.[527] In 1207 he evidently dared not attempt
to levy any fresh scutage at all. Nor was a carucage likely to prove
either less unpopular or more productive; for the agricultural interest
of the country was in a state of extreme depression, owing to a long
succession of bad seasons; while the taxation of moveables was an
expedient which seems to have found, as yet, but little favour with
either the people or the government. John now put forth a suggestion
which was, so far as we can see, a novelty in English finance. He “held
a council in London on January 8, and there requested the bishops and
abbots that they would allow parsons and others holding ecclesiastical
benefices to give to the king a fixed sum from their revenues.”[528]
Neither in equity nor in policy was the idea a bad one. While the
military tenants and the socage tenants had each their own peculiar
burden--scutage in the one case, carucage in the other--the beneficed
clergy, as such, had never yet been subjected to taxation. The king
might well argue that it was time for them to take their turn in
making a special contribution to the financial needs of the State;
and the argument was sure to meet with the approval of the laity. The
prelates, however, were unwilling; and the question was adjourned to
another council, in which “an infinite multitude” of ecclesiastical and
temporal magnates came together at Oxford on February 9.
At this second meeting the bishops of both provinces gave it as their
final answer that “the English Church could by no means submit to a
demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”[529] The
only approach to a precedent for it, indeed, had occurred in 1194,
when Archbishop Geoffrey of York, eager to collect money for Richard’s
ransom, had asked the canons of his cathedral chapter to give for that
purpose a fourth part of their revenues for the year, with the result
that they accused him of “wanting to overthrow the liberties of their
church,” and shut its doors in his face.[530] Between the council in
London and that at Oxford, Geoffrey and John, who had been more or
less at variance ever since the latter’s accession, were formally
reconciled;[531] John therefore probably counted upon Geoffrey’s
support of his scheme, and he may have hoped that the suffragans of
Canterbury, having no metropolitan of their own to lead them, would
not venture to stand out against the northern primate and the king
with the barons, for once, at his back. But what Geoffrey had himself
asked of his own chapter as a special favour to Richard in a wholly
exceptional emergency, he had no mind to give leave for John to claim
from all the beneficed clergy of his province as a matter of right, and
under entirely different circumstances. The king was prudent enough
not to press his demand; but it may be doubted whether the lay barons
agreed with the Waverley annalist in deeming its withdrawal a proof
that he “had taken wiser counsel,” since he substituted for it a demand
for a thirteenth of the moveable goods of every layman throughout the
realm.[532] This they had no excuse for refusing. “All murmured,
but no man dared contradict,”[533] except Geoffrey of York. He, it
seems, claimed exemption for laymen holding lands of the Church, or at
least of his cathedral church. His protest, however, was disregarded;
whereupon he excommunicated all spoilers of the Church in general, and
of the province of York in particular, and then withdrew over sea,[534]
to spend the rest of his life in exile.
[Sidenote: 1208]
Thus for the next eight years the vast diocese of York was practically
without a chief pastor and the province without a metropolitan,
while the temporalities of the see were in the hand of the king. As
for Canterbury, John had answered the Pope’s request that he would
ratify the election of Stephen Langton by a flat refusal to accept as
primate a man of whom he declared that he “knew nothing, save that he
had dwelt much among his enemies”;[535] and when on June 17 Stephen
was consecrated by Innocent,[536] the king seized the estates of the
Canterbury chapter, drove the monks into exile,[537] and proclaimed
that any one who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted
a public enemy.[538] In August Innocent bade the bishops of London,
Ely and Worcester threaten the king, if he continued obstinate, with
an interdict upon his realm, and hinted that this might be followed
by a papal excommunication of John himself.[539] Negotiations went on
throughout the winter, but without result,[540] and on Passion Sunday,
March 23, or Monday, March 24, 1208, the interdict was proclaimed.[541]
It seems that notice of the intended date of its publication was given
about a week before, and that the king at first answered this notice
by ordering all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be
confiscated on Monday, March 24; but that he immediately afterwards
decided to anticipate, instead of returning, the blow, and caused
the confiscation to be begun at once.[542] For him the opportunity
was a golden one. The interdict enabled him to put the whole body of
the clergy in a dilemma from which there was no escape. They held
their property--thus he evidently argued--on condition of performing
certain functions: if they ceased from those functions, their property
was forfeit, just as that of a layman was forfeit if he withheld the
service with which it was charged. The logical consequence in either
case--from John’s point of view--was confiscation; difficult and
dangerous to enforce on a wide scale against laymen, but easy and
safe when the victims were clergy. The barons made no objection to
a proceeding which would fill the king’s coffers without drawing a
single penny from their own; the chief justiciar himself, Geoffrey
Fitz-Peter, earl of Essex, had no scruple in acting as _custos_ for
the Crown of all the Church property on his own estates, which were
scattered through thirty-one counties, and also of the revenues and
goods of the Templars throughout all England.[543] The spoliation was
indeed effected with a brutal violence which would have been impossible
had there been any strong feeling against it among the influential
classes of the laity,[544] and which so far outran the intentions of
the king that on April 11 he issued a proclamation ordering that any
man caught doing or even speaking evil to a monk or a clerk, “contrary
to our peace,” should be hanged upon the nearest oak.[545] The clergy,
like the Jews, were to be ill-treated by no one save the king himself.
Many of them made a compromise with their spoiler; within a very
few weeks five bishops, three cathedral chapters, the prior of the
Hospitallers, and the heads of fourteen important monasteries, besides
sundry individual priests, undertook to farm their own benefices and
other property for the king.[546] The Cistercians, asserting that
the privileges of their order exempted them from interdict, ceased
from performing the offices of religion for a few days only, and then
resumed them as usual;[547] whereupon their possessions, which had been
seized like those of the other orders, were restored to them on April
4.[548]
[Sidenote: 1209]
At the same time John despatched an envoy to Rome proposing terms on
which he professed himself willing to let Stephen take possession
of his see; and he contrived to spin out the negotiations for six
months before Innocent discovered that the terms offered were merely
a device for wasting time, and that the king had never intended to
fulfil them.[549] On January 12, 1209, the Pope informed the bishops
of London, Ely and Worcester that he had written to John a letter of
which he sent them a copy, and bade them excommunicate the king if
he did not repent within three months after its receipt.[550] John
upon this began a fresh series of negotiations, which kept the three
bishops--who had apparently gone over sea immediately after publishing
the interdict--flitting to and fro between the continent and England,
without any result, for nine more months. In October they finally
withdrew, but without publishing the excommunication; and by the end of
the year all possibility of its publication in England had vanished,
for every English bishop had fled save two, Peter des Roches, bishop
of Winchester, and John de Grey, bishop of Norwich, both of whom were
creatures of the king; John de Grey, moreover, was now justiciar
in Ireland, and the Poitevin Peter des Roches was thus left sole
representative of the episcopal order in England.[551]
[Sidenote: 1208–09]
It was John’s hour of triumph, not over the clergy alone, but over all
his subjects and vassals within the four seas of Britain. The action
of the Pope and the inaction of the barons had opened a way for him to
make himself “King of England” in his own sense of the words. To all
outward seeming his whole time, since his return from the continent,
had been devoted to mere amusement and self-indulgence. He “haunted
woods and streams, and greatly did he delight in the pleasure of
them.”[552] When he was not thus chasing the beasts of the forest,
his yet more relentless pursuit of other prey was making havoc of the
domestic peace, and rousing against him the deadly hatred, of some of
the greatest of his barons.[553] But their hatred was futile; they
were paralyzed partly by their own mutual jealousies, which the king
was continually stirring up,[554] partly by the consequence of their
selfish shortsightedness with regard to his persecution of the clergy.
The interdict had placed one whole estate of the realm at John’s mercy;
and the laity, having failed at the critical moment to make common
cause with their clerical brethren, now found themselves in their turn
without a support against his tyranny. His consciousness of power broke
out in the strangest freaks of wantonness; in causing the Michaelmas
session of the Exchequer to be held at Northampton instead of London,
“out of hatred to the Londoners”;[555] in forbidding the capture of
birds all over England;[556] in ordering that throughout the Forest
districts the hedges should be fired and the ditches made by the
people to protect their fields should be levelled, “so that, while men
starved, the beasts might fatten upon the crops and fruits.”[557] It
showed itself too in acts of graver political significance. A series
of orders to the bailiffs of the coast towns for the equipment and
mustering of their ships and the seizure of foreign vessels, issued
in the spring and summer of 1208, indicates that John was then either
meditating another expedition over sea, or, more probably, expecting an
attack from thence. The muster, originally fixed for Trinity Sunday,
was postponed to S. Matthew’s day,[558] and the end of the matter was
that John, finding he had no immediate need for the services of the
fleet, “took occasion”--no doubt on pretext of some deficiency in the
contingent due from them--“to oppress the mariners of the Cinque Ports
with great and heavy affliction. Some he hanged; some he killed with
the sword; many were imprisoned and loaded with irons”; the rest fled
into exile, and it was only by giving him fines and hostages that they
appeased his wrath and bought his leave to return to their homes.[559]
The barons were again required to renew their homage; the demand was
made literally at the sword’s point--for John’s lavish hospitality and
largesse[560] filled his court with mercenaries who were quite ready
to enforce his will in such a matter--and they were compelled either
to submit to it, or to give their sons and kinsmen as hostages for
their fidelity.[561] The king seemed indeed, as Matthew Paris says, to
be courting the hatred of every class of his subjects.[562] But hate
him as much as they might, they feared him yet more than they hated
him; and “burdensome” as he was “to both rich and poor,”[563] when
he summoned all the free tenants throughout the realm, of whatever
condition, who were above the age of twelve years, to swear fealty in
person to him and his infant heir in the autumn of 1209, rich and poor
alike durst not do otherwise than obey him.[564]
[Sidenote: 1209]
This ceremony took place at Marlborough in September,[565] just before
the final rupture of the negotiations with Langton and the bishops.
A few weeks earlier John had received the submission of the king of
Scots. Twice or thrice in the last two years a visit of William the
Lion to the English court had been projected.[566] It took place at
length in the middle of April 1209 at Bolton, whence John and William
proceeded together to Norham for a conference.[567] The shelter given
in Scotland to some of the bishops and other persons who fled from
John’s persecution in connection with the interdict[568] supplied the
English king with a pretext for demanding, once for all, security for
William’s loyalty. He bade him surrender either three castles on the
border or his only son as a hostage. William refused to do either.[569]
John, on returning to the south, summoned his host, and in July set
out to take the three castles by force. The papal excommunication was
hanging over his head, and its publication was hourly expected; his
troops shrank alike from his leadership and from an encounter with the
Scot king, who was considered “eminent for his piety,” the champion
of the Church and the favourite of Heaven, while they, being under
interdict, were virtually outcasts from the Christian fold. A dexterous
renewal of negotiations with Innocent and Stephen, however, staved
off the excommunication and prevented the threatened desertion of the
English troops;[570] and on August 4 John was at Norham[571] at the
head of a great host ready to do battle with the Scots. On hearing
this, William “greatly feared his attack, knowing him to be given to
every kind of cruelty; so he came to meet him and offered to treat for
peace; but the king of the English flew into a rage and insulted him
bitterly, reproaching him with having received his (John’s) fugitives
and public enemies into his realm, and lent them countenance and help
against him.” At last some “friends of both realms” arranged terms
which pacified John and which William dared not refuse. He sent his
son {Aug. 7}, not indeed as a hostage, but to do homage to the English
king “for the aforesaid castles and other lands which he held”;[572]
he undertook to pay John by instalments within the next two years
fifteen thousand marks “to have his goodwill”; he gave hostages
for the fulfilment of this undertaking; and he surrendered his two
daughters to be kept in John’s custody as his wards and married at his
pleasure.[573] According to Gervase of Canterbury, one of these ladies
was to be married to John’s son;[574] one of his many illegitimate
sons must be meant, for though John had now two sons by his queen, the
elder of them was not yet two years old, while the younger of William’s
daughters was thirteen at the least.[575] All that William obtained in
return for these concessions was the freedom of the port of Berwick,
and leave to pull down a castle which the bishop of Durham had built
over against it.[576] Of his claim upon Cumberland and Westmorland
nothing further was ever heard.
[Sidenote: 1199–1209]
Two months later, Wales followed Scotland’s example. Over Wales,
indeed, John’s triumph was won without the trouble even of a military
demonstration on his part. The anarchy of Wales had been growing worse
and worse ever since the death of Henry II. Its danger for England lay
mainly in the opportunities which it afforded to any of the English
barons of the border who might be treasonably inclined, for making
alliances with one or other of the warring Welsh princes, and thus
securing for themselves a support which might enable them to set at
defiance the authority of the English crown. John himself had held
the position of a border baron for ten years, as earl of Gloucester
and lord of Glamorgan, and had used it for his own private ends as
unscrupulously as any of his neighbours.[577] The familiarity with
Welsh politics which he had thus acquired stood him in good stead when
he became king. At his accession, a struggle which had been going on
for two years between three rival claimants to the succession in South
Wales, Griffith and Maelgwyn, sons of the late prince Rees ap Griffith,
and Gwenwynwyn, son of Owen Cyveiliog, prince of Powys, had just ended
in the triumph of Griffith, who, by the help of a force supplied to
him by the English government, overcame both his rivals at the close
of 1198. On Griffith’s death in 1200 Gwenwynwyn for a moment regained
the ascendency in South Wales; but he found a new and formidable rival
in the prince of North Wales, Llywelyn ap Jorwerth, who in a few years
succeeded in reducing most of the South Welsh princes to dependence on
himself.[578] Throughout these years John, amid all his political and
military occupations on the continent, watched every vicissitude of the
struggle in Wales, kept up constant relations with both parties, and
balanced the one against the other[579] with a mingled unscrupulousness
and dexterity for which even the Welshmen were scarcely a match, and
which at last brought them all alike to his feet. In July 1202 Llywelyn
promised to do homage to the English king as soon as the latter should
return from over sea;[580] before October 15, 1204, he was betrothed
to John’s illegitimate daughter Joan,[581] and in 1206 she became his
wife.[582] In 1208 his rival Gwenwynwyn was in an English prison,
whence he obtained his release by doing homage to John at Shrewsbury on
October 8.[583] Llywelyn’s promised visit to the English court seems
to have not yet taken place; but a year later, on the king’s return
from the north, there befell, say the chroniclers, “what had never been
heard of in times past: all the Welsh nobles”--that is, evidently,
the princes of both North and South Wales--“came to him and did him
homage,” not on the border, but in the heart of his own realm, at
Woodstock,[584] on October 18 or 19, 1209.[585]
[Sidenote: 1209–10]
The king’s triumph was complete. The last date which had been fixed for
the publication of the papal sentence was October 6;[586] the sentence
was still unpublished, and the bishops who should have published
it had fled. They proclaimed it indeed in France in November;[587]
but John took care that no official notification of the fact should
reach England, and the sentence remained a dead letter. Its existence
was known and talked of all over the country, but it was talked of
with bated breath. The excommunicate king held his Christmas feast
at Windsor surrounded by “all the great men of England,” who sat at
his table and held intercourse with him as usual, simply because
they dared not do otherwise.[588] Of the fate in store for those who
stood aloof, one terrible example sufficed. The archdeacon of Norwich
quitted his place at the Exchequer table at Westminster, after warning
his fellow-officers that they were perilling their souls by serving
an excommunicate king. He was seized by a band of soldiers, loaded
with chains, flung into prison, and there crushed to death beneath a
cope of lead.[589] The whole body of the clergy, already stripped of
their possessions, were now in peril of their lives. As the king was
passing through one of the border counties he met some of the sheriff’s
officers in charge of a prisoner with his hands tied behind him. They
said the man was a robber, and had robbed and slain a priest on the
highway: what, they asked, should be done with him? “Loose him and let
him go” answered John, “he has slain one of my enemies!” Nor was his
persecution limited to the clergy; the lay relatives and friends of
Langton and of the other exiled bishops were hunted down and flung into
prison, and their property seized for the king.[590] When he could
plunder his Christian subjects no more, he turned upon the Jews. At the
opening of 1210 all the Jews in England, of both sexes, were by his
order arrested, imprisoned, and tortured to make them give up their
wealth. It was said that the king wrung ten thousand marks from one Jew
at Bristol by causing seven of his teeth to be torn out, one every day
for a week,[591] and that the total sum transferred from the coffers
of the Jews to the royal treasury amounted to sixty-six thousand
marks.[592] Never before--not even in the worst days of William the
Red--had England fallen so low as she now lay at the feet of John. “It
was as if he alone were mighty upon earth, and he neither feared God
nor regarded man.”[593] John seems in fact to have been one of the very
few men of whom this latter assertion can be made with literal truth;
and in this utter recklessness and ruthlessness lay the secret of his
terrible strength. “There was not a man in the land who could resist
his will in anything.”[594] The very few barons who had dared openly to
resist it since his return from Poitou in 1206 were now all in Ireland;
and it was Ireland that he set himself to subdue in 1210.
[Sidenote: 1191–1200]
John de Courcy had apparently ceased to be governor of the Irish
March in 1191. The succession of governors there during the next few
years is obscure; but we know that, as John’s chief ministers, they
bore the same title which was borne by the chief minister of the
king in England, that of justiciar.[595] Owing to the paucity and
obscurity of the records it is difficult to gain any real understanding
of the vicissitudes of the English dominion in Ireland during the
twenty-five years which elapsed between John’s two visits to that
country, and especially during the fourteen years between his first
visit there and his accession to the English crown. He granted a new
and important charter to the city of Dublin in 1192.[596] In 1195
the intruders--neither for the first nor for the last time--fell out
among themselves: “John de Courcy and the son of Hugh de Lacy marched
with an army to conquer the English of Leinster and Munster.”[597]
They certainly did not succeed in wresting Leinster from William
the Marshal. As for Munster, Richard de Cogan was apparently still
holding his ground in Desmond; Raymond the Fat probably died in 1184
or 1185,[598] and as he had no direct heirs,[599] the share of that
kingdom which had been originally allotted to Fitz-Stephen lapsed
to John as overlord.[600] From the city of Cork the “English” are
said to have been driven out in 1196;[601] but their expulsion was
only momentary. Meanwhile they had at last begun to gain a footing
in Thomond. By 1196 they had got possession of the city of Limerick;
in that year or the next they lost it, but it was speedily recovered
by Meiler Fitz-Henry,[602] who in 1199 or early in 1200 became chief
justiciar in Ireland.[603] Limerick was put under the charge of William
de Burgh, who apparently had won for himself some lands within the
kingdom of Thomond, among them Ardpatrick, of which he received a grant
from John in September 1199.[604]
[Sidenote: 1198–1202]
The last Irish Ard-Righ, Roderic O’Conor, died in 1198;[605] he had
been dethroned sixteen years before, but his death was the signal for
renewed strife between his sons for the possession of his kingdom of
Connaught. The foreign settlers in Ireland took sides for their own
interest in the struggle between the native princes; John de Courcy
and the “English of Ulidia,” with the De Lacys of Meath and their
followers, supported Cathal Crovderg O’Conor, while his rival, Cathal
Carrach, was helped by “William Burke, with the English of Limerick.”
For a moment Cathal Carrach’s party was victorious; but next year
(1200) he was attacked by “Meiler and the English of Leinster,” while
De Burgh changed sides and joined Cathal Crovderg. In 1201 or 1202
the united forces of Cathal Crovderg and De Burgh won a battle in
which Cathal Carrach was slain. Cathal Crovderg being thus master of
Connaught, De Burgh at once began to plot against his life; but the men
of Connaught slaughtered the followers of the double-dyed traitor, and
he himself escaped as best he could back to Limerick.[606]
[Sidenote: 1179–1201]
The “honour of Limerick”--exclusive of the city and the Ostmen’s
cantred, which the king retained in his own hands, and the service
due from the lands held within that honour by William de Burgh, which
was also reserved to the Crown--had meanwhile been granted by John,
on January 12, 1201, to William de Braose, “as King Henry gave it to
his uncle, Philip de Braose.”[607] These last words define the extent
of the “honour,” as corresponding (with the exceptions specified) to
the “kingdom of Limerick” (Thomond) named in Henry’s grant of 1177.
Philip de Braose was probably now dead. William was the son of Philip’s
elder brother, another William who to the family estates of Bramber in
Sussex and Barnstaple and Totnes in Devon had added, by his marriage
with an heiress, the lordships of Radnor, Brecon, and Abergavenny
in Wales.[608] The younger William probably succeeded to all these
possessions soon after 1179.[609] Before 1189 his sister Maud was
married to Griffith Ap Rees, who from 1198 to 1201 was Prince of South
Wales; and throughout the last ten years of the twelfth century William
was constantly concerned in the quarrels of the South Welsh princes and
people.[610] His daughter Margaret had before November 19, 1200 become
the wife of Walter de Lacy,[611] the lord of Meath, who was already
her father’s neighbour on the Welsh border, where Ludlow formed part
of the Lacy heritage; a younger daughter was married before 1210 to a
son of another baron of the Welsh March, Roger Mortimer.[612] Count
John of Mortain, as earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan, was also
for ten years a neighbour of William de Braose, and evidently made a
friend of him, for in 1199 William was at the head of the party which
most vigorously urged John’s claim to the crown.[613] In June 1200 he
received a royal grant of “all the lands which he had acquired or might
at any future time acquire from our Welsh enemies, to the increase
of his barony of Radnor.”[614] As the king was at the same time in
diplomatic relations with several of the “enemies” whom William was
thus authorized to despoil, this grant was of doubtful value. The same
may be said of the grant of Thomond; this, however, was a speculation
on both sides; William covenanted to pay the king five thousand marks
for it at the rate of five hundred marks a year.[615]
[Sidenote: 1201–1204]
De Braose immediately went to Ireland;[616] and in process of time he
succeeded in obtaining possession of the greater part of his new fief,
though the difficulties with which he had to contend were many and
great. The other persons who had previously received from John grants
of land in Thomond[617] no doubt resented and resisted the change in
their position from tenants-in-chief of the king to under-tenants of
William de Braose. It seems that they were upheld in their resistance
by the justiciar, Meiler Fitz-Henry, and that John in consequence
summoned Meiler to his court, suspended him from his office, and put it
into commission in December 1201. In August 1202 John issued further
orders for enforcing the claims of De Braose in Thomond; in September
he forgave him all the debts which he owed to King Henry and King
Richard; in October he granted the entire custody of the lands and
castles of Glamorgan, Gwenllwg and Gower to “William de Braose, whose
service we greatly approve.”[618] In the winter William was with the
king in Normandy, and had the custody of the captive Arthur. This he
resigned, seemingly at the end of the year,[619] and in January 1203 he
was in charge of some matters connected with the fleet.[620]
[Sidenote: 1204–1206]
Meanwhile the governor of Limerick city, William de Burgh, had escaped
from the vengeance of the Irish allies whom he had betrayed, only to
fall under that of the English justiciar whom he had set at defiance.
Meiler Fitz-Henry had been restored to his post; in 1203 he and Walter
de Lacy joined with the Irish of Connaught in expelling De Burgh from
Limerick,[621] and on July 8 William de Braose was appointed by the
king to succeed De Burgh as constable of the city.[622] Meiler and
De Burgh had already appealed against each other to the king;[623]
in March 1204 a commission was appointed to hear their reciprocal
complaints;[624] in September all De Burgh’s Irish estates except those
in Connaught were restored to him on his promise of “standing to right
in the King’s Court of Ireland.”[625] There is no record of the trial,
which may have been prevented by his death, for at the end of the year
or in 1205 he died;[626] and on April 3, 1206 the justiciar was ordered
to take all his Munster estates into the king’s hand.[627]
The reservation of De Burgh’s Connaught lands in 1204 may have been
made in consequence of some negotiations which were at that moment
going on between Meiler, as John’s representative, and the King
of Connaught, Cathal Crovderg. Cathal, it seems, offered to cede
two-thirds of Connaught to John, on condition that the remaining third
should be secured to himself and his heirs for a yearly payment of one
hundred marks. John was willing to accept this offer, but he insisted
that the portion of land to be ceded to him should be chosen by Meiler,
and bade Meiler take care that it was “the best part, and that which
contained the best towns, ports, and sites for castles.”[628] Possibly
this claim of John’s to choose the land for himself was refused by
Cathal; the negotiations certainly came to nothing, for in December
1206 Cathal made another proposition. He would hold one-third of
Connaught of King John for a hundred marks a year; out of the other
two-thirds he would cede to John two cantreds, and for the remainder he
would pay him a tribute of three hundred marks. John authorized Meiler
to accept these terms, if he could get no better.[629] Whether the
agreement was ever actually made, there is nothing to show; it was not
likely to have any practical result. The invaders had evidently already
gained some slight and precarious footing in eastern Connaught; but
they had too much to do within their own March--as the dominions of the
English crown in Ireland were called in those days[630]--to make any
real progress westward for some years to come.
[Sidenote: 1199–1205]
The turbulence and lawlessness which prevailed in the Irish March
reflected that of the Welsh March whence most of its original settlers
had come. William de Braose and William de Burgh were far from being
the only barons at feud with Meiler Fitz-Henry, either simply as a
fellow-baron, or in his official capacity of representative of the
king. In September 1199 John de Courcy and Walter de Lacy are mentioned
in a royal writ as having acted together “for the destruction of our
realm of Ireland.”[631] The reference probably is to their joint attack
upon Leinster in 1195, which had been followed by the forfeiture of
Lacy’s English and Welsh lands; these, however, he had regained in
1198.[632] In 1203, as has been seen, he helped Meiler to expel William
de Burgh from Limerick; and in February 1204 he was appointed one of
four commissioners to assist Meiler in dealing with escheats.[633] His
former ally, John de Courcy, had a safe-conduct to and from the king’s
court in July 1202;[634] but he evidently did not come to terms with
the king; and next year the Lacys turned against him; Hugh de Lacy,
Walter’s younger brother, defeated him in a battle near Down and drove
him out of Ulidia.[635] In September he had another safe-conduct to
go to the king and return “if he does not make peace with us.”[636]
This time it seems that he did “make peace,” but failed to fulfil its
conditions. On August 31, 1204, he was summoned, on pain of forfeiture,
to come to the king’s service “as he swore to come”; and Meiler was
instructed, if the forfeiture should take place, to give to the two
De Lacys the eight cantreds of De Courcy’s land which lay nearest
to Meath.[637] De Courcy incurred the forfeiture; Meiler seemingly
committed its execution to the De Lacys; they again attacked De Courcy,
and drove him to take refuge in Tyrone;[638] and on May 2, 1205, King
John granted Ulster to Hugh de Lacy, to hold “as John de Courcy held
it on the day when Hugh defeated him.”[639] A few weeks later Hugh was
belted earl of Ulster;[640] and at the end of June the triumph of the
Lacys was completed by a royal order forbidding the chief justiciar to
“move war against any man of the March” without the consent of Earl
Hugh and his brother Walter.[641]
[Sidenote: 1204]
With the colleagues thus forced upon him Meiler was soon at strife. His
strife with Walter de Lacy, indeed, had recommenced already. Walter’s
appointment as a commissioner of escheats in 1204 had been made in
connexion with a demand which John--anxious to prepare for an attack
upon France, as well as to guard against an expected French invasion
of England, and scarcely daring to ask his English subjects for more
money--addressed to all his vassals in Ireland, that they would furnish
him with an aid.[642] They undertook to do so; on September 1 the king
thanked them for their services and their promises, and desired that
the latter might be fulfilled.[643] At the same time he was taking
measures for the security of the March and of his own authority there;
on August 31 he had ordered Meiler to build a castle at Dublin,[644]
and in September he bade the citizens do every man his part in helping
to fortify the city.[645] In November he decided upon taking back into
his own hands the city of Limerick and its cantred, being, as he said,
advised by his barons of England that this step was necessary for the
security of his domains in Connaught and Cork. It appears that William
de Braose had called in the help of his son-in-law, the lord of Meath,
for the keeping of this important border-post; the king’s orders for
its surrender to the justiciar were addressed to Walter de Lacy and
the bailiffs of William de Braose.[646] Walter seemingly refused to
obey the order; Meiler, however, succeeded in taking possession of the
city, “on account of which there arose a great war” between him and De
Lacy,[647] with the result that John, to end their strife, took away
the custody of Limerick from both of them, and restored it in August
1205 to William de Braose.[648] Nineteen months later Walter de Lacy’s
castle of Ludlow was seized for the Crown, {1207 March} and Walter
was bidden to come and “stand to right” in the English court {1207
April}.[649]
[Sidenote: 1207]
By that time Meiler was at strife with William de Braose again, and
also with another Marcher lord of very different character from any
of those with whom he had as yet had to deal. Meiler Fitz-Henry,
though loyal to the king, was evidently not quite the man for the
post of chief justiciar in Ireland. He was one of the few survivors
of the first band of Norman-Welsh adventurers who had taken part in
the invasion under Robert Fitz-Stephen. The royal blood of England
and of Wales was mingled in his veins; he was in fact, though not
in law, first cousin to Henry II.[650] The two young Lacys, now so
often opposed to him, were cousins of his wife, a niece of the elder
Hugh de Lacy.[651] He was, however, not one of the great barons of
the March; he seems to have held in chief of the Crown nothing except
three cantreds in Desmond granted to him by John in October 1200;[652]
his principal possession was the barony of Leix in Ossory,[653] for
which he owed homage to William the Marshal as lord of Leinster. In
the spring of 1207 William the Marshal asked leave of John to visit
his Irish lands, which he had never yet seen. The leave was given,
though unwillingly; but as William was on the point of setting out
from Striguil, he was overtaken by a message from the king, bidding him
either remain in England, or give his second son as a hostage. William
sent the boy back with the messenger, saying that the king might have
all his children as hostages if he pleased,[654] but as for himself,
he was determined to go to Ireland; and next day he sailed. His coming
was far from welcome to the justiciar, who till then had been without a
superior in the country, and who resented alike the necessity of doing
homage to the Marshal for the land which he held under him, and the
probability of his own importance being overshadowed by the presence of
a man whose territorial and personal weight was so much greater than
his own. Meiler therefore wrote to the king urging him to recall the
Marshal. John did so, but bade Meiler himself come over at the same
time. The Marshal, though feeling that mischief was in prospect, obeyed
the king’s summons with his usual readiness, and returned to England at
Michaelmas, leaving his wife with a band of trusty followers to defend
Leinster in his stead. Meiler also came, after secretly bidding his
kinsmen and friends attack the Marshal’s lands as soon as he was gone,
which they did the very next week. The king gave Meiler a warm welcome,
but treated the Marshal with coldness and displeasure,[655] which
Meiler soon found a way to increase.
At the beginning of the year the justiciar had seized for the Crown
some of the lands, men and goods of William de Braose.[656] His
excuse for this proceeding was probably the fact that De Braose was
in debt to the Crown for the ferm of the city of Limerick, and also
for no less than four thousand two hundred and ninety-eight marks of
the five thousand which he had in January 1201 covenanted to pay, by
instalments of five hundred every year, for the grant of the honour
of Limerick.[657] Meiler, however, had acted without instructions
from the king; and when De Braose complained of the treatment which
he had received, John declared {1207 Feb. 12} that he “found no fault
in him,” and bade Meiler restore everything that had been taken from
him, unless indeed the city of Limerick was included; if that had been
seized for the Crown, Meiler was to retain it till further orders.[658]
The mingled feelings of the king are reflected in his letter. John had
found in William de Braose a useful servant and friend; he knew that
he might find in him a dangerous enemy; he was therefore reluctant to
take any measures which might drive William into opposition. On the
other hand, William’s neglect of his pecuniary obligations to the Crown
had reached such a pass that it could hardly be ignored much longer;
and William was further suspected of being in secret alliance against
the king, both with the Welsh and with the De Lacys.[659] Of this
suspicion the king seems to have known nothing till after the middle of
July, when he reappointed “our beloved and faithful William de Braose”
custodian of Ludlow Castle.[660] It had, however, reached his ears by
the time of Meiler’s coming to England, and Meiler turned it to account
for a double purpose of his own. One day, as the king and his chief
counsellors sat talking together after dinner, something was said about
William the Marshal and his friendly relations with William de Braose.
Meiler wrought upon the king’s jealousy of the one and his suspicions
of the other, till he persuaded him to join in a plot for bringing them
both to ruin.
[Sidenote: 1207–08]
At the justiciar’s instigation John secretly despatched letters to all
those of the Marshal’s followers in Ireland who held lands in England,
bidding them, on pain of forfeiting these, to be at his court within a
fortnight. At the same time Meiler, with the king’s licence, returned
to Ireland. The Marshal asked permission to do the same; but this
was refused. Meiler on his arrival found that hitherto his men had,
on the whole, been worsted in their strife with those of Leinster. He
now summoned the Marshal’s men to a “parliament,” at which the king’s
messenger read out the secret letters. The men to whom these letters
were addressed saw but too plainly what would be the result of their
obedience: the Marshal’s lands would be left without defence against
Meiler. They unanimously resolved to sacrifice their own English
estates, disobey the king for their lord’s sake, and resist Meiler to
the uttermost; and with the help of two powerful neighbours whom they
called to their aid, Ralph Fitz-Payne and Hugh de Lacy, they succeeded,
as one of them says, in doing to Meiler as much mischief as he had
thought to do to their lord.[661] The Marshal, meanwhile, was compelled
to remain at court, but so discountenanced by the king that hardly
any one dared to speak to him. At last, one winter day, as they rode
out from Guildford,[662] John called to him: “Marshal, have you had
any news from Ireland that pleases you?” “No, sire.” “I can tell you
some news,” said the king, laughing; and he told him that his wife,
the Countess Isabel, had been besieged in Kilkenny by Meiler, who had
indeed been at length worsted and even captured by her people, but with
very heavy losses on her side, three of the Marshal’s chief friends
being among the slain. The story was a sheer invention of John’s; in
reality he had received no news from Ireland at all. The Marshal,
though perplexed and troubled, retained his outward composure; and
early in the spring he himself received from Ireland a very different
account of what had happened there. The justiciar had not only been
captured, but had made submission to the countess and given his son as
a hostage till he himself should stand to right in her husband’s court
for the wrong which he had done to him as his lord.
[Sidenote: 1208–09]
These tidings were sent at the same time to the king, who was by no
means pleased with them, but characteristically changed his policy
at once to meet the turn of the tide. He called the Marshal to his
presence, greeted him with unusual courtesy, and asked him if he had
heard anything from Ireland. “No, sire; I have no news from thence.”
“Then I will tell you some good news, of which I wish you joy”--and
thereupon John related the truth, which William knew already, though he
had not chosen to say so. From that time forth “the king made him as
good cheer as he had made him evil cheer before”; and when the Marshal
soon afterwards again asked leave to go to Ireland, it was granted at
once.[663] On March 7 Meiler was ordered to refrain from interfering
with the lands of the Marshal, who had instructed his men to keep the
peace towards Meiler in return;[664] on March 20 John informed the
justiciar that “the Marshal has done our will,” and despatched to
Ireland four commissioners by whose instructions Meiler was to act, and
who, if he failed to do so, were empowered to act in his stead.[665] On
the 28th, a new grant of Leinster, on the terms of the original grant
to Richard de Clare, was made by the king to the Marshal.[666] A month
later Meath was in like manner granted afresh to Walter de Lacy;[667]
and at the end of the next year, 1209, Meiler was removed from his
office of justiciar, and replaced by the bishop of Norwich, John de
Grey.[668]
[Sidenote: 1208]
On one point, however, Meiler was justified by the king. In the spring
of 1208 John made up his mind to bear with William de Braose no
longer, and ordered a distraint upon his Welsh lands. William’s wife,
Maud of Saint-Valery,[669] his nephew, Earl William of Ferrars, and
his sister’s husband, Adam de Port, met the king at Gloucester and
persuaded him to grant an interview to William himself at Hereford.
William promised to pay his debts to the treasury within a certain
time, pledged some of his castles for the payment, and gave three
of his grandsons and four other persons as hostages.[670] Roger of
Wendover relates that when the king’s officers went to fetch the
hostages, Maud refused to deliver up her grandchildren to the king,
“because,” said she, “he has murdered his captive nephew”; that her
husband reproved her, and declared himself willing to answer according
to law for anything in which he had offended the king; and that John,
on hearing what Maud had said, was “greatly perturbed,” and ordered
the whole family of De Braose to be arrested.[671] John himself, in a
public statement attested by the chief justiciar of England and twelve
other men of high position, among whom were De Braose’s own nephew and
brother-in-law, asserted that shortly after the meeting at Hereford
De Braose and his sons attempted to regain the pledged castles by
force, and when they had failed in this attempt, attacked and burned
Leominster.[672] Thereupon it seems that William was proclaimed a
traitor; on September 21 John empowered Gerald of Athies to make an
agreement with all who were or had been homagers of William de Braose,
so that they should “come to the king’s service and not return to the
service of William.”[673]
[Illustration:
V.
IRELAND
_A.D. 1210_
{No key included, the North West is shaded green, the rest red.}
_Stanford’s Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. London._
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.]
[Sidenote: 1209–10]
De Braose was chased by the king’s officers,[674] till in the following
year, 1209, he escaped, with his wife and two of their sons, from
some Welsh seaport, intending to go to Ireland. A violent storm kept
them tossing on the sea for three days and three nights; at last
they landed at Wicklow. William the Marshal chanced to be there; he
received them kindly and sheltered them for three weeks. Then their
presence was discovered by the new justiciar, Bishop John de Grey,
who at once taxed the Marshal with harbouring “the king’s traitors,”
and bade him give them up to justice. The Marshal refused, saying he
had only received “his lord,”[675] as he was bound to do, and without
knowing that De Braose had incurred the king’s displeasure; and he
added that he himself would not act like a traitor towards De Braose
at the justiciar’s bidding. Thereupon he sent the refugees safely on
to their destination, the home of De Braose’s son-in-law, Walter de
Lacy. The justiciar complained to the king, who summoned his host for
an expedition to Ireland;[676] both the Marshal and the Lacys having
positively refused to give up De Braose, though they offered to be
answerable for his going to England to satisfy the king within a fixed
time, and promised that, if he failed to do so, they would then harbour
him no more. At last--seemingly in the spring of 1210--De Braose was
allowed to go on these conditions back to Wales. John had apparently
consented to meet him at Hereford; but when De Braose reached Hereford,
“he,” says the king, “regarded us not,” but began to collect all the
forces he could muster against the Crown. His nephew, the earl of
Ferrars, however, managed to bring him to a meeting with the king at
Pembroke. He offered a fine of forty thousand marks. “We,” says John,
“told him we knew well that he was not in his own power at all, but in
that of his wife, who was in Ireland; and we proposed that he should
go to Ireland with us, and the matter should be settled there; but he
chose rather to remain in Wales,”[677] and was suffered to do so--John
being determined now to settle matters not only with Maud de Braose,
but with all the barons of the Irish March, according to his own will
and pleasure.
At some date between June 16 and 20 John crossed from Pembroke to
Crook, near Waterford. Thence he proceeded by way of Newbridge and
Thomastown to Kilkenny, where he and all his host were received and
entertained for two days (June 23 and 24) by William the Marshal.[678]
On June 28 the king reached Dublin; thence he led his host into
Meath.[679] Walter de Lacy and the De Braoses fled, evidently into
Ulster; thither John marched in pursuit of them, but before he could
overtake them they had escaped over sea into Galloway.[680] Hugh
de Lacy had retired into the stronghold of Carrickfergus; at the
king’s approach, however, he, too, slipped away in a little boat to
Scotland.[681] Carrickfergus was provisioned for a siege, but its
garrison was soon frightened into surrender.[682] While John was at
Carrickfergus, his “friend and cousin,” Duncan of Carrick, sent him
word that he had captured Maud de Braose, one of her daughters, her
eldest son, his wife and their two children; her younger son, Reginald,
had escaped, and so had the Lacys. The king despatched John de Courcy
(whom he had taken back into favour, and brought with him to Ireland,
as likely to be a willing and useful helper against the De Lacys) to
fetch the captives from Galloway. When they were brought before him,
Maud offered the surrender of all her husband’s lands and a fine of
forty thousand marks, which John accepted; but three days later she
repudiated her agreement.[683] Taking his prisoners with him, the king
turned southward again, and soon completed the subjugation of the
Lacys’ territories. Most of the lesser barons fled before him as their
lords had done, “fearing to fall into his hands.”[684] A week’s stay
in Dublin (August 18 to 24) brought his expedition to a close.[685]
[Sidenote: 1210]
It was probably during this second stay of John’s at Dublin that, as
Roger of Wendover says, “there came to him there more than twenty
kinglets[686] of that country, who all, terrified with a very great
fear, did him homage and fealty; yet a few kinglets neglected to come,
who scorned to do so, because they dwelt in impregnable places. Also
he caused to be set up there English laws and customs, establishing
sheriffs and other officers who should judge the people of that realm
according to English laws.”[687] This latter statement of Roger’s may
have given rise to the later belief that it was John who organized
the administration of the March in Ireland after the English model,
by dividing the whole of the conquered territory into counties, each
under its own sheriff.[688] It appears, however, that there were
sheriffs in Ireland in the days of Henry II.[689] The earliest known
mention of a sheriff’s district there occurs in 1205, when we hear of
the “county of Waterford.”[690] Ten years later the same county is
mentioned again, and also that of Cork;[691] and before the end of
the century ten counties, at least, were recognized by the English
government in Ireland.[692] The names of the earliest Irish counties
thus known to us and the circumstances of John’s visit to Ireland in
1210 may suggest a clue to the rise and growth of the shire-system in
that country. The district which forms the present county of Waterford
had never been enfeoffed either by Henry II. or by John, but remained
directly in the hands of the supreme ruler of the March. Of the present
county Cork, the eastern half, at least, escheated together with the
rest of Raymond FitzGerald’s share of the “kingdom of Cork” on his
death about 1185. No notice of a new enfeoffment of any of the lands
which had been his occurs till 1208, and then they were not granted
as a whole; so far as we know, only a portion of them was enfeoffed,
and that portion was distributed among several feoffees.[693] It seems
probable that the system of county administration may have been first
established in Ireland in those districts which were under the direct
rule of the English Crown (or, to speak more exactly, of the “English,”
or Angevin, “Lord of Ireland”), and of which the continuous extent was
too great for them to be left, like the single cantreds attached to the
other seaport towns, under the control of a mere military governor or
constable, and that it was only by degrees introduced into the great
fiefs. If this were so, the events of 1210 would furnish an excellent
opportunity for its extension. Of the four great fiefs which, together
with the royal domains and the lately redistributed honour of Cork,
made up the “English” March in Ireland, Leinster was, when John sailed
from Dublin for England at the end of August,[694] practically the only
one left. Meath, Ulster, and Limerick were all forfeit to the Crown;
and the Crown kept the greater part of them for many years after. Meath
was not restored to Walter de Lacy till 1215;[695] Walter’s brother,
the earl of Ulster, did not return from exile till after John’s
death;[696] and the honour of Limerick was never again bestowed as
a whole upon a single grantee. Under these circumstances a system of
administrative division into counties placed under sheriffs appointed
by the king, or by the justiciar in his name, might be established
without difficulty in territories where its introduction in earlier
years, if ever attempted, would probably have been rendered ineffectual
by the power of the great barons. The one great baron who in the autumn
of 1210 still held his ground in the March--Earl William the Marshal,
the lord of Leinster--had no hesitation in withstanding the king to
his face in the cause of honour and justice; but he was not a man to
throw obstacles in the way of the royal authority when it was exercised
within the sphere of its rights and in the interest of public order.
On the king’s return to Dublin William the Marshal came to the court.
John at once accused him of having “harboured a traitor” in the person
of William de Braose. The Marshal answered the king as he had answered
the justiciar, and added that if any other man dared to utter such a
charge against him, he was ready to disprove it there and then. As
usual, no one would take up his challenge; nevertheless, John again
required hostages and pledges for the Marshal’s fidelity, and again
they were given at once.[697] Meanwhile, the sheriff of Hereford sent
word that William de Braose was stirring up trouble in Wales, and
urged that he should be outlawed; but the king ordered that the matter
should await his own return to England. When he was about to sail, Maud
de Braose offered to fine with him for forty thousand marks, and ten
thousand in addition, as amends for having withdrawn from her former
agreement. John accepted these terms; the fine was signed and sealed,
and it was agreed that Maud, and also, it seems, the other members of
her family who had been captured with her, should remain in custody
till it was paid. John carried his prisoners back with him to England,
put Maud in prison at Bristol, and at her request gave an audience
to her husband, who ratified the fine which she had made, but fled
secretly just before the day fixed for paying the first instalment.
The king asked Maud what she now proposed to do, and she answered
plainly that she had no intention, and no means, of paying. Then it was
ordered that “the judgement of our realm should be carried out against
William,” and he was outlawed.[698] Thus far the king tells his own
story, and there is no reason to doubt its truth. What he does not
tell is the end of the story. He sent Maud and her son to a dungeon at
Windsor, and there starved them to death.[699]
FOOTNOTES:
[502] July 15–20, 1205, _Itin._ a. 7.
[503] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 98. Cf. _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 60, 60 b.
[504] Cf. Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. viii. No. 161, and Gerv. Cant. _l.c._
[505] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 183. Cf. Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 99.
[506] Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. viii. No. 161.
[507] R. Wendover, vol. iii. pp. 184, 185.
[508] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 56 b.
[509] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 185; _Rot. Pat._ _l.c._
[510] Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. ix. Nos. 34, 35, 36.
[511] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 65 b, 67.
[512] _Ib._ p. 64.
[513] M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. p. 111; _Chron. Maj._ vol. ii.
p. 514. Cf. W. Coventry, vol. ii. pp. 197, 198.
[514] Cf. Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. ix. No. 206; R. Wendover, vol. iii. pp.
212, 213; M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. pp. 111, 112; W. Coventry,
vol. ii. p. 198; _Ann. Burton_, a. 1211.
[515] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 188; R. Coggeshall, p. 156.
[516] Chancellor’s Roll, 3 John (1201), _passim_.
[517] _Ib._ p. 18.
[518] A summary of the scutages was drawn up, from the Pipe Rolls, by
Alexander Swereford, in the time of Henry III., and is printed in the
Rolls edition of the _Red Book of the Exchequer_. The marginal dates
added in that edition are wrong throughout John’s reign. The true dates
are as follows:--
First scutage of John, “in rotulo primo” (1198–1199), 2 marks.
Second scutage, “in rotulo tertio” (1200–1201), 2 marks.
Third scutage, “in rotulo quarto” (1201–1202), 2 marks.
Fourth scutage, “in rotulo quinto” (1202–1203), 2 marks.
Fifth scutage, “in rotulo sexto” (1203–1204), 2 marks.
Sixth scutage, “in rotulo septimo” (1204–1205), 2 marks.
Seventh scutage, “in rotulo octavo” (1205–1206), 20 s.
Eighth scutage, “in rotulo duodecimo” (1209–1210), 2 marks.
{Ninth scutage (for }
{ Wales), } “in rotulo decimo tertio” (1210–1211), 2 marks.
{Tenth scutage (for }
{ Scotland), } “in rotulo decimo tertio” (1210–1211), 20 s.
Eleventh scutage, “in rotulo decimo sexto” (1213–1214), 3 marks.
_Red Book of the Exchequer_, vol. i. pp. 11, 12.
[519] R. Coggeshall, p. 100. See above, p. 73.
[520] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 173. See above, p. 101.
[521] Chancellor’s Roll, 3 John, _passim_.
[522] _Ib._ p. 249.
[523] _Ib._ p. 228.
[524] _Ib._ p. 300.
[525] _E.g._ in 1201 William de Stuteville gave £1000 to be sheriff of
Yorkshire; _ib._ p. 299.
[526] See the printed _Rotuli Cartarum_.
[527] _Red Book_, vol. i. p. 11.
[528] _Ann. Waverley_, a. 1207.
[529] _Ann. Waverley_, a. 1207.
[530] R. Howden, vol. iii. pp. 222, 223.
[531] On January 25, at Worcester. _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 58 b.
[532] _Ann. Waverl._ a. 1207. R. Wendover (iii. 210) represents the
thirteenth as exacted from both laity and clergy; the Waverley Annals
say merely “omnis homo de cujuscunque feodo.” But the writ for the
assessment, issued from Oxford on February 17, says “concessum est quod
quilibet _laicus_ homo totius Angliae, de cujusque feodo sit,” etc.
(_Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 72 b). This would, of course, include laymen
holding lands of ecclesiastical superiors (cf. _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p.
84 b). Geoffrey’s protest must therefore be interpreted accordingly.
John, it seems, had not yet abandoned all hope of getting something
from the beneficed clergy; on May 26 he asked those of the southern
province for something very like a “benevolence.” _Rot. Pat._ vol. i.
p. 72.
[533] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 210.
[534] _Ib._ Cf. _Ann. Waverl._ a 1207.
[535] Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. x. No. 219; R. Wendover, vol. iii. pp.
215–217.
[536] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 213.
[537] W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 199; R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 214. The
writ for seizure of the estates was issued July 11, _Rot. Pat._ vol. i.
p. 74; and executed July 15, Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 100.
[538] W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 199.
[539] Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. x. No. 113.
[540] _Ib._ Nos. 159, 160; _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 78, 80; R. Wendover,
vol. iii. pp. 220, 221.
[541] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 101, and the Annals of Waverley,
Worcester, Bermondsey and Tewkesbury, a. 1207, date the publication
of the interdict March the _Ann. Winton._ date it “Monday in Passion
Week,” _i.e._ March 24 also. The Annals of Margan and of Dunstable
make it Passion Sunday, _i.e._ March 23, which is the date given by
R. Wendover (iii. 222), W. Coventry (ii. 199) and T. Wykes (a. 1207).
Roger of Wendover, however, adds that it was the Monday in Passion
Week, so his dates are self-contradictory.
[542] R. Coggeshall, p. 163, says the general confiscation of clerical
property took place on March 24; and the king’s orders (issued March 17
and 18) for the seizure of the sees of Bath and Ely are to take effect
from that day (_Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 80, 80 b), which looks as if the
confiscation was meant to be an immediate retort to the interdict. But
the see of Norwich--though its bishop was the king’s favourite John de
Grey--was evidently seized before March 23 (_ib._ p. 81); while the
sheriffs of Derbyshire and Warwickshire were already holding for the
king “all the manors of the bishop of Chester within their bailiwicks,
and everything in them, and all the lands and goods of abbots, priors,
religious, and clerks, within their bailiwicks,” as early as March
21, for on that day they were ordered to hand them over to another
custodian. _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 107.
[543] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. pp. 107, 110.
[544] R. Coggeshall, p. 163; R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 223. The _Ann.
Margan._, a. 1207, give a curious and not very intelligible account
of the state of public feeling on the question between John and the
Pope: “Electus est Magister S. de Langetone ad archiepiscopatum
Cantuariensem.... Pro cujus electione, quia facta fuit contra profanas
illas consuetudines quas vocant avitas leges et regias libertates,
orta est statim discordia inter Papam Innocentium et Johannem
tyrannum Angliae, faventibus _ei_” (Stephen, Innocent, or John?) “et
consentientibus omnibus laicis et clericis fere universis, sed et viris
cujuslibet professionis multis.”
[545] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 111.
[546] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. pp. 108–13 b.
[547] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 226.
[548] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 108 b.
[549] John proposed, instead of himself giving Langton the regalia of
the see, to place them in the Pope’s hands and let him confer them
on the archbishop, inasmuch as John “could not yet bring himself to
receive Stephen as a friend.” The Pope, though he did not like the
scheme, yet authorized the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester to
receive the regalia as his representatives and to confer them as the
king desired; but whenever the bishops sought an interview with the
king on the subject, he put them off. At last, in September (1208), he
gave Langton himself a safe-conduct for a week’s visit to England, but
addressed it to “S. de Langton, Cardinal,” thus showing that he did not
yet intend to recognize him as archbishop. Langton of course declined
to come on such terms. See Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. xi. Nos. 89, 90; _Rot.
Pat._ vol. i. pp. 82, 85, 86; _Ann. Waverl._ a. 1208.
[550] Innoc. III. _Epp._ l. xi. No. 211.
[551] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 89, 90; R. Wendover, vol. iii. pp. 222,
228, 229; Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. pp. 100, 103, 104; _Ann. Waverl._ and
_Dunst._ a. 1208. All the chroniclers have confused the dates, which
have to be rectified by the help of the Pope’s letters, the Patent
and Close Rolls (both of which, however, unluckily fail in 1209), and
Bishop Stubbs’s notes to Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. pp. 103, 104, appendix
to preface, _ib._ pp. xci.–cviii., and W. Coventry, vol. ii. preface,
pp. lv., lvi. The sees of Chichester, Exeter, Lincoln and Durham were
vacant; before June 21, 1209, Hugh of Wells was elected to Lincoln
by desire of the king, who sent him to Normandy to be consecrated by
the archbishop of Rouen, but he went to the archbishop of Canterbury
instead, and was consecrated by him on December 20 (R. Wendover, vol.
iii. p. 231; date from M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. p. 120, note
4). Carlisle had been administered since 1203 by Bernard, the exiled
archbishop of Ragusa. Coventry (or Chester) was vacated in October 1208
by the death of Geoffrey Muschamp, who is mentioned by Gervase among
the bishops who went over sea.
[552] _Hist. des Ducs de Normandie_, p. 109.
[553] The two best known instances indeed are of doubtful authenticity;
see Note II. at end. But the general charge against John rests upon
authorities which there is no reason to question; _Hist. des Ducs_,
pp. 105, 200, and R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 240. The list of John’s
children given by Pauli, _Gesch. von England_, vol. iii. p. 475, is
neither correct nor complete.
[554] _Hist. des Ducs_, p. 105.
[555] M. Paris records this twice, in 1208 (_Chron. Maj._ vol. ii. p.
524) and 1209 (_Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. p. 118). One of the two dates is
probably wrong, but there is no means of deciding which.
[556] Christmas 1208, R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 225.
[557] June 28, 1209; _ib._ p. 227; M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. p.
119. Cf. _Hist. des Ducs_, p. 109.
[558] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 80, 81 b, 83 b–86.
[559] Cf. Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 102, and _Ann. Dunst._ a. 1208.
[560] _Hist. des Ducs_, p. 105.
[561] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 224.
[562] M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii. p. 118.
[563] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 227.
[564] Cf. _ib._, Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 104 (who makes the age fifteen
years), and W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 200.
[565] Gerv. Cant. _l.c._ The day must have been either the 13th or the
30th, _Itin._ a. 11.
[566] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 90(Aug. 1207); _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 76
(Oct. 1207); _ib._ p. 91 (April 1209).
[567] _Chron. Mailros_, a. 1209.
[568] The _Ann. Dunst._, a. 1208, say the bishops of Salisbury and
Rochester went to Scotland “cum Regis Angliae gratia”; but cf. Gerv.
Cant. vol. ii. p. 100, and R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 226. Langton’s
father had taken refuge at St. Andrews in 1207. Gerv. Cant. vol. ii.,
appendix to preface, pp. lxii., lxiii.
[569] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 102.
[570] _Ib._ pp. 102–3. Cf. appendix to preface, _ib._ pp. c–ciii.
[571] _Itin._ a. 11.
[572] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 103.
[573] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 103. The Scottish authorities,
_Chron. Mailros_ and _Chron. Lanercost_, a. 1209, make the sum thirteen
thousand pounds. R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 227, says twelve thousand
marks, and M. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ vol. ii. p. 525, eleven thousand
marks; the document in _Foedera_ is the best authority, although its
original is lost and it is obviously not altogether an accurate copy,
its date, “_Northampton_, 7th August,” being of course a transcriber’s
mistake for “Norham.”
[574] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 103.
[575] The first child of John and Isabel of Angoulême--the future Henry
III.--was born October 1, 1207; R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 219. The
second, Richard, was born January 6, 1209; _Ann. Winton._ _ad ann._
Both the Scot king’s daughters were born before the end of 1195, when
one of them was betrothed to Otto of Saxony, R. Howden, vol. iii. pp.
299, 308.
[576] _Chron. Mailros_ and _Chron. Lanercost_, a. 1209.
[577] See above, pp. 26, 32, 45.
[578] _Ann. Cambriae_ and _Brut y Tywysogion_, a. 1197–1209.
[579] _Rot. Chart._ vol. i. pp. 23, 44, 63, 100 b, 103, 103 b, 104;
_Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 39, 40, 44 b, 51 b, 88, 89 b, 91; _Rot. Claus._
vol. i. pp. 23 b, 24. _Brut_, a. 1207, 1209.
[580] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 8 b.
[581] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 12.
[582] _Ann. Wigorn._ a. 1206.
[583] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 101.
[584] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 227; M. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ vol. ii.
p. 119. The event was not really so unprecedented as these writers
imagined; the princes of both North and South Wales had done homage to
Henry II. at Oxford in 1177. The chroniclers’ expressions about this
Welsh homage to John, however, show the impression which it made and
the importance which was attached to it.
[585] _Itin._ a. 11.
[586] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. appendix to preface, p. cvi.
[587] _Ann. Dunst._ a. 1209.
[588] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 231.
[589] _Ib._ p. 229.
[590] R. Wendover, vol. ii. pp. 223, 224.
[591] _Ib._ p. 232.
[592] _Ann. Waverl._ a. 1210.
[593] Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. p. 100.
[594] _Ib._
[595] Ware, _Antiq._ p. 102, makes William Petit and William the
Marshal justiciars in 1191; but no authority is given. R. Diceto,
vol. ii. p. 99, says that Roger de Planes was “in tota terra comitis
[Johannis] justiciarius” when he was slain in October 1191; see above,
p. 29. Peter Pippard was justiciar in Ireland in 1194, according to
Henry of Marlborough as quoted in Butler’s _History of Trim Castle_, p.
3; and Hamo de Valognes held the office c. 1196–1197; cf. Gir. Cambr.
vol. v. p. 342, and Ware, _l.c._
[596] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 55; Gilbert, _Hist. Documents of
Ireland_, pp. 51–55. Other Irish Charters of John before his accession
to the crown--all dateless--are in _Rot. Canc. Hibern. Cal._ vol. i.
pt. i. pp. 2, 4, 5, and _Hist. MSS. Comm._ 4th Report, pp. 574, 581.
[597] Four Masters, a. 1195.
[598] He certainly was not killed in 1182 as the Four Masters say;
but he disappears after 1183. See _Dic. Nat. Biogr._ “Fitz-Gerald
(Raymond).”
[599] Gir. Cambr. vol. v. pp. 345, 409.
[600] In 1207 John confirmed to William de Barri a sub-enfeoffment made
by Fitz-Stephen to Philip de Barri, William’s father and Fitz-Stephen’s
nephew. _Rot. Chart._ p. 172.
[601] Four Masters, a. 1196, note.
[602] Cf. Gir. Cambr. vol. v. p. 342, and Four Masters, a. 1196.
[603] _Rot. Chart._ p. 98.
[604] _Ib._ p. 19 b. John made at the same time several other grants
of land within the honour, or kingdom, of Limerick, _ib._ All these
grants, however, except the grant to William de Burgh, seem to have
been cancelled by the later one to William de Braose; see below, p.
139. Half a cantred of land at “Tilra’ct in Kelsela” had been granted
by John to De Burgh before King Henry’s death, _Hist. MSS. Comm._, 3rd
Report, p. 231.
[605] Four Masters, a. 1198.
[606] Four Masters and _Ann. Loch Cé_, a. 1199–1202.
[607] _Rot. Chart._ p. 84 b.
[608] Dugdale, _Baronage_, pt. i. p. 414; who, however, has confused
father and son. See _Genealogist_, vol. iv. pp. 133–141, and _Dic. Nat.
Biog._ “Braose, William de.”
[609] His father was living in that year; _Monasticon_, vol. vi. pt. i.
p. 457.
[610] _Ann. Camb._ a. 1189, 1192, 1195, 1196; _Brut y Tywysogion_, a.
1196, 1197. Maud died in 1209, _Brut_, _ad ann._
[611] _Rot. Chart._ p. 80. Walter was the eldest son of Hugh de Lacy
who was killed in 1186.
[612] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 107.
[613] _Ann. Margan._ a. 1199.
[614] _Rot. Chart._ p. 66 b.
[615] _Rot. Oblat._ p. 99, “ad quodlibet scaccarium quingentas marcas
argenti.”
[616] _Rot. Chart._ p. 100 b.
[617] Carte’s _Life of Ormonde_, ed. 1851, vol. i. pp. xliv., xlv.;
_Rot. Chart._ pp. 19 b, 28.
[618] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. pp. 4, 7, 16 b, 18 b, 19 b.
[619] W. Armor. _Philipp._ l. vi. vv. 478–492. The poet asserts that
William resigned his charge because he suspected John’s intentions
towards his prisoner. This would be shortly before the attempt to blind
Arthur, who was then in the custody of Hubert de Burgh.
[620] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 24 b.
[621] _Ann. Loch Cé_, a. 1203.
[622] _Rot. Chart._ p. 107 b.
[623] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 31 b.
[624] _Ib._ p. 39 b. On 29th April the commissioners are informed that
De Burgh is respited, and Meiler is bidden to give him seisin of his
lands again; _ib._ p. 41 b.
[625] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 46.
[626] _Ann. Loch Cé_, a. 1205; Four Masters, a. 1204.
[627] _Rot. Pat._ p. 60 b. They seem to have been restored to his son
Richard before July 11, 1214; _ib._ pp. 118 b, 119.
[628] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 91. Cf. _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 6 b.
[629] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 62.
[630] _Rot. Chart._ p. 68 b (a. 1200); _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 40(a.
1205). I am indebted to Mr. G. H. Orpen for the information that the
districts held by the English crown in Ireland were not known as “the
Pale” till after Poynings’s Act (1494), when the colonists were ordered
to maintain a ditch “six feet high on the side which neared next to the
Irishmen” (Joyce, _Hist. of Ireland_, p. 351).
[631] _Rot. Oblat._ p. 74.
[632] Eyton, _Hist. of Shropshire_, vol. v. pp. 257, 258.
[633] _Rot. Chart._ p. 133 b.
[634] _Rot. Pat._ p. 15.
[635] Four Masters, a. 1203.
[636] _Rot. Pat._ p. 34 b.
[637] _Ib._ pp. 45, 45 b.
[638] Four Masters, a. 1204.
[639] _Rot. Pat._ p. 54.
[640] _Rot. Chart._ p. 151--“de qua [_i.e._ Ultonia] ipsum cinximus in
comitem.” Date, May 29, 1205.
[641] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 40.
[642] _Rot. Chart._ pp. 133 b, 134.
[643] _Rot. Pat._ p. 45 b.
[644] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 6 b.
[645] _Rot. Pat._ p. 45 b. John had granted another charter to Dublin
on November 7, 1200; _Rot. Chart._ pp. 78 b, 79.
[646] _Rot. Pat._ p. 47.
[647] The Four Masters, a. 1205, describe the war as “between the
English of Meath and the English of Meiler”; but the only “English of
Meath” who took part in it seem to have been Walter de Lacy and his
personal followers. See _Rot. Pat._ p. 69 (February 21, 1206), where
John commends the barons of Meath and Leinster for not having supported
Walter in his strife with Meiler about Limerick.
[648] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 47 b.
[649] _Rot. Pat._ pp. 69 b, 70 b.
[650] His father was son of Henry I. by Nest, daughter of Rees ap
Griffith, prince of North Wales. Gir. Cambr. vol. i. p. 59.
[651] Gir. Cambr. vol. v. p. 356.
[652] Two cantreds in Kerry--“Akunkerry” and “Hyerba”--and one
“in terra de Corch”--“Yogenacht Lokhelen quae est terra de
Humurierdach”--to be holden by the service of fifteen knights. _Rot.
Chart._ p. 77 b.
[653] Gir. Cambr. vol. v. pp. 355, 356.
[654] He had had the eldest son ever since July 1205; _Hist. G. le
Mar._ vv. 13271–6.
[655] _Ib._ vv. 13311–20, 13350–584.
[656] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 77 b.
[657] See Note I. at end.
[658] _Rot. Claus._ p. 77 b.
[659] W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 202.
[660] _Rot. Pat._ p. 74. Walter de Lacy, on his marriage with Margaret
de Braose, had promised that he would never give, sell, or pledge any
part of his land in England or Normandy without his father-in-law’s
consent; and this engagement had been embodied in a charter and
confirmed by the king. _Rot. Obl._ (a. 2 Joh.), p. 81. One of its
results seems to have been that De Braose took charge of Ludlow Castle;
it was he who on March 5, 1206, was summoned to deliver it up to Philip
d’Aubigné for the king; _Rot. Pat._ p. 69 b. On July 13, 1207, John
transferred its custody from D’Aubigné back to De Braose.
[661] _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 13589–786.
[662] John was at Guildford December 27 to 28, 1207, and January 25 to
27, 1208; _Itin._ a. 9.
[663] _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 13787–936.
[664] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 105.
[665] _Ib._ p. 106 b.
[666] _Rot. Chart._ p. 176.
[667] _Ib._ p. 178. Cf. _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 106.
[668] The bishop of Norwich was in Ireland before January 2, 1210
(_Rot. Misæ_, p. 144); Meiler had ceased to be justiciar before
February 16 of the same year (_ib._ p. 149); and the bishop was in
office as justiciar when the De Braoses arrived in Ireland towards the
end of 1209, as appears from _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 14119–172. The
Four Masters’ account of Bishop John’s appointment and its consequences
is too amusing to be omitted. They say under the year 1208: “John,
bishop of Norwich, was sent by the king of England into Ireland as lord
justice; and the English were excommunicated by the successor of S.
Peter for sending the bishop to carry on war in Ireland.”
[669] The king speaks of her as Maud de la Haye, _Foedera_, vol. i. pt.
i. p. 107. But she witnesses a charter of her husband by the title of
“domina Matiltis de Sancto Walerico,” Round, _Cal. Doc. France_, vol.
i. p. 461. See the curious account of her--“fille fu Bernard de Saint
Waleri,” etc.--in _Hist. des Ducs de Normandie_, pp. 111, 112.
[670] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 107. John was at Gloucester in 1208
April 22 and 23, and at Hereford April 24 to 28; _Itin._ a. 9.
[671] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 225. He brings in this story in
connexion with the general demand for hostages from the barons in 1208;
but his own account of the words used by William de Braose shows that
he was aware there was a special ground for the demand in De Braose’s
case.
[672] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 108.
[673] _Rot. Pat._ p. 86 b.
[674] _Foedera_, _l.c._
[675] “Mès j’ai herbergié mon seignor, Si comme faire le deveie,”
_Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 14214–15. How De Braose was “lord” of the
Marshal, I can find nothing to show.
[676] _Ib._ vv. 14137–52.
[677] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 108. John was at Cross-by-the-Sea,
close to Pembroke, from June 3 to June 16 inclusive, and at Crook on
June 20. _Itin._ a. 12.
[678] Cf. _Itin._ a. 12 and _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 14259–66.
[679] June 30, Greenoge; July 2 and 3, Trim; July 4 and 5, Kells.
_Itin._ a. 12.
[680] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 108.
[681] _Ann. Cambr._ a. 1210, Rolls edition, pp. 66, 67, note.
[682] _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 14270–78. John was at Carrickfergus
July 19 to 28; _Itin._ a. 12.
[683] _Foedera_, _l.c._
[684] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 234.
[685] His itinerary from Carrickfergus is: July 29, Holywood; July
31, Ballymore; August 2, 3, Down; 4, Banbridge; 5, Carlingford; 8, 9,
Drogheda; 9, 10, Duleek; 10, 11, Kells; 11, Fowre; 12, Granard; 14,
Rathwire; 16, Castle Bret; 18–24, Dublin. _Itin._ a. 12.
[686] “_Reguli._” The _Hist. des Ducs de Normandie_, pp. 112, 113,
tells how the king of Connaught came to John’s “service” at Dublin, and
how John while at Carrickfergus tried to catch the king of “Kenelyon”
in a trap, but was outwitted by the Irishman.
[687] R. Wendover, vol. iii. pp. 233, 234.
[688] This assertion, adopted by many modern writers, seems to have
been first definitely made by Sir John Davies, in his _Discoverie of
the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued_, etc. (1612),
p. 121: “King John made xii. shires in Leinster and Mounster; namely,
Dublin, Kildare, Meth, Uriel, Catherlogh, Kilkenny, Wexford, Waterford,
Corke, Limeric, Kerrie, and Tipperary.”
[689] Ware, _Antiq._ c. v. p. 33.
[690] Patent granted by John to the citizens of Waterford, July 3, a.
r. 7 (1205), according to Ware, _l.c._
[691] _Rot. Claus._ vol. i. p. 218.
[692] Writs for a parliament held at some date between 1293 and 1298
were addressed to the _sheriffs_ of Dublin, Louth, Kildare, Waterford,
Tipperary, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, “Connaught,” and Roscommon, and to
the seneschals of the liberties of Meath, Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny and
Ulster. _Irish Archæological Society’s Miscellany_, p. 15.
[693] _Rot. Chart._ pp. 171 b, 172, 172 b. Cf. an inquisition ordered
April 3, 1206 (_Rot. Pat._ p. 60 b), which clearly implies that the
eastern half of the “kingdom of Cork” was then in the king’s hands.
[694] He is last mentioned as being in Dublin on August 24, and he was
at Fishguard on August 26; _Itin._ a. 12.
[695] _Rot. Pat._ pp. 131, 132 b, 151, 181.
[696] _Dict. Nat. Biog._ “Lacy, Hugh de (d. 1242).”
[697] _Hist. de G. le Mar._ vv. 14286–372.
[698] _Foedera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 108.
[699] See Note I. at end.