CHAPTER IV KING JOHN 1206 - 1210

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Sed processu temporis mollities illa in tantam crudelitatem versa est, ut nulli praedecessorum suorum coaequari valeret, ut in sequentibus patebit.

Gerv. Cant. ii. 93.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

V.

Ireland A.D. 1210

Stanford’s Geog?. Estab?. London.

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

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]

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]

lang="la">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 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.
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