The fullest account of the quarrel of King John and William de Braose is contained in a document printed in Foedera, vol. i. pt. i. pp. 107, 108. This is a letter or manifesto addressed by John, after the fall of De Braose, “to all who may read it,” witnessed by the justiciar (Geoffrey Fitz-Peter), the earls of Salisbury, Winchester, Clare, Hertford, and Ferrars, Robert Fitz-Walter, William Brewer, Hugh de Neville, William d’Aubigny, Adam de Port, Hugh de Gournay, William de Mowbray “and others,” and evidently intended as a public defence of the king’s conduct towards William. Coming from John, and under such circumstances, its truthfulness is necessarily open to suspicion; but it is hardly conceivable that so many witnesses of such rank and character as those enumerated should have set their hands to it if it contained any gross misrepresentations of matters which must have been well known to most of them; one of these witnesses, indeed, the earl of Ferrars, is stated in the letter itself to have been De Braose’s own nephew, and another, Adam de Port, his brother-in-law. The only point on which the letter seems to be at variance with any other contemporary authority is the amount of the debt owed by De Braose to the king at the end of 1207 or beginning of 1208. John says (l.c. p. 107), that William then owed him the whole of the 5000 marks due for the honour of Limerick, and had only paid him one sum of 100 marks for the ferm of the city “which he had held for five years” (strictly speaking, it was, at the utmost, four years and a half). The Pipe Rolls of 1206, 1207, 1208, 1209, and 1210 (8–12 John), however, all state the sum still owed by William for the honour of Limerick as £2865: 6: 8 (= 4298 marks), thus implying that £468, or 702 marks, had been paid before Michaelmas 1206. In the Roll of that year the city of Limerick is not mentioned; but in each of the later Rolls William is said to owe £80 for its tallage, and 100 marks for its ferm for one year (Sweetman, Calendar, vol. i. pp. 46, 55, 58, 68). This does not necessarily imply that the ferm for the other years had not been paid; for the original grant of the custody of the city of Limerick to De Braose in July 1203 and the writ ordering its restoration to him in August 1205 both specify that he is to pay its ferm “to our exchequer in Dublin” (Rot. Chart. p. 107 b; Rot. Claus. vol. i. p. 47). As there are no remaining records of the Dublin Exchequer of so early a date, we cannot certainly know what was or was not paid in there. The strange thing is not that the English Exchequer should claim only one year’s ferm for Limerick, but that it should have any claim at all in the matter. The restoration of the city to De Braose in August 1205 was ordered to be conditional on his finding security, within forty days, for the payment of the arrears of the ferm. That the restoration was actually made, and therefore that he gave the security, is plain; but there is nothing to show that he ever redeemed his pledge, or that he paid the ferm for the succeeding years.

The story of John’s vengeance on the family of De Braose appears, in slightly varied forms, in almost every chronicle of the period. Ralph of Coggeshall (p. 164), Roger of Wendover (vol. iii. p. 235) and the Brut y Tywysogion (a. 1209) say the victims were “slain in Windsor castle”; the Annals of Dunstable and of Oseney (a. 1210), that they “died in prison,” without specifying where or how. The Barnwell Annalist (W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 202) and the Annals of Margan, Tewkesbury, Waverley, Winchester, and Worcester (a. 1210) say they were starved to death. The Hist. des Ducs de Normandie (pp. 114–115) says they were imprisoned “el castiel del Corf,” with no food save “une garbe d’avoine e i bacon cru,” and describes with gruesome minuteness the attitudes in which, on the eleventh day, they were found dead. Ralph of Coggeshall makes the victims William de Braose’s wife and “sons” (filii); Roger of Wendover, his wife, eldest son, and that son’s wife; the Ann. Winton., wife and “younger” son; the Ann. Tewkesb., wife and “children” (liberi); while the Ann. Dunst. say: “Cepit [rex] Willelmum de Lacy, et Willelmum de Brause juniorem, et sororem ejus, et Matildem matrem ejus; qui in carcere post modum perierunt.” All the other writers speak only of the wife and one son, whom the Ann. Osen. call “Willelmus primogenitus ejus,” and the Ann. Wigorn. “haeres.” This latter version is undoubtedly the correct one as to the last point; of De Braose’s three sons, the eldest, William, alone was in John’s power; Giles, the second, was bishop of Hereford and safe beyond the sea, while the third, Reginald, had escaped capture, and lived to recover the greater part of the family heritage. One of the daughters—the wife of Hugh Mortimer—had been taken prisoner with her mother and eldest brother (Foedera, vol. i. pt. i. p. 107); but she did not share their fate, for she was set free in 1214 (Rot. Pat. vol. i. p. 122); and Roger of Wendover is certainly wrong about the younger William’s wife, who was still living in July 1220 (Royal Letters, ed. Shirley, vol. i. p. 136). The elder William died, an exile in France, about a year after this tragedy (R. Wend. vol. iii. p. 237).