Lordship in four realms: The Lacy family, 1166–1241

By Colin Veach

This book examines the rise and fall of the aristocratic Lacy family in England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy. This involves a unique analysis of medieval lordship in action, as well as a re-imagining of the role of English kingship in the western British Isles and a rewriting of seventy-five years of Anglo-Irish history. By viewing the political landscape of Britain and Ireland from the perspective of one aristocratic family, this book produces one of the first truly transnational studies of individual medieval aristocrats. This results in an in-depth investigation of aristocratic and English royal power over five reigns, including during the tumultuous period of King John and Magna Carta. By investigating how the Lacys sought to rule their lands in four distinct realms, this book also makes a major contribution to current debates on lordship and the foundations of medieval European society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526103086

Colin Veach

Colin Veach is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Hull

Book preview

Introduction

Transnational aristocracy

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a complex network of lordship transcended traditional national boundaries. The cross-border connections of the men involved were invaluable to those at the top, such as the king of England, who could thus harness their service across several provinces. The aristocratic communities of north-western Europe were knit together in this way. The forces involved were not all to the king’s advantage, however. Bonds of allegiance could often lose focus for those holding lands in several realms. For those whose lands included significant frontier components, profiles could be raised, fortunes made and rebellion contemplated.

The field of medieval British history is currently led by historians who, eschewing to a greater or lesser extent traditional national boundaries, situate their studies within the interconnected histories of north-western Europe. Most full-length works of this genre tend to have rather broad scope, charting general themes over centuries of interaction. For instance, Rees Davies’s Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990) and The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000) are unrivalled in their adroit handling of the complex history of the British Isles. Likewise, his final book Lords & Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2009), though dealing with a later period, has a pertinence which transcends its chronological bookends. Robin Frame’s The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford, 1995) perfectly complements Davies’s oeuvre by bringing the Irish dimension into sharper focus. David Carpenter’s The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 (London, 2003) is a detailed and unified narrative of the medieval British Isles over two centuries.¹

In addition, studies of frontier regions are becoming increasingly popular, owing to the intensity of research they afford their authors. For instance, Max Lieberman’s The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge, 2010) and Brock Holden’s Lords of the Central Marches: English Aristocracy and Frontier Society 1087–1265 (Oxford, 2008) use individual border counties, Shropshire and Herefordshire respectively, to examine the intricate interrelationships of those living on the militarised border between England and Wales. Daniel Power’s The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 2004) is a painstaking assessment of the Norman frontier, and Brendan Smith’s Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland. The English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999) adroitly highlights the political imperatives facing the colonial community north of Dublin. Such case studies are important, because, in addition to providing painstaking analyses of their particular bailiwicks, their authors’ depth of inquiry allows them to offer great insight into the general texture of medieval political society.

Yet the focus can be narrowed further, and on to the way individuals exploited the potential of this complex world. David Crouch’s The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1986) offered a groundbreaking analysis of transnational lordship as it pertained to two brothers, Count Waleran of Meulan and Earl Robert of Leicester, in England, Normandy and Capetian France. It is perhaps banal to state that the only way to understand a society is by also studying the individuals of whom it was comprised, yet, apart from Crouch’s work, the intense study of individuals in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries has been relatively neglected in favour of broader examinations. When these focus on particular arenas such as the Welsh marches, the Irish Sea region or even the British Isles, their authors place their own artificial restrictions on their assessments of the men and women under investigation. This risks misinterpreting the actions of those whose interests may have stretched far beyond the arenas in question. So for instance, Crouch’s assessment of the career of William Marshal, original though it is, suffers by its focus on the Marshal as courtier, so missing the nuances of the relationship of Marshal with King John generated out of their mutual rivalry in Ireland.

It is essential that these individuals – and their particular interests, outlooks and ambitions – do not become subsumed within the groups into which historians sort them. For instance, Hugh and Walter de Lacy were recognised by their contemporaries as Welsh marchers, but they were also English and Norman magnates whose efforts often went to extending their position in Ireland. To lose sight of all these factors is to take them out of context. As Sidney Painter observed in his biography of the (decidedly atypical) ‘feudal baron’, William Marshal: ‘to know a typical feudal baron is to have a fuller comprehension of feudal society as a whole’.² A view from below often uncovers characteristics not immediately apparent from above. Consequently, the Middle Ages can be better understood through studies of the interplay between individuals, regions and the kingdom. This book aims to achieve greater familiarity with the nature of transnational lordship and the interaction between king and magnate through a focused study of the fortunes of the Lacy family from 1166 to 1241. It may not answer all the questions raised within, but it is a case-study of individuals who consciously acted in a far wider landscape than one court and one kingdom, and who happily exploited the unparalleled opportunities their situation presented.

The case of the Lacys is an interesting one, ideally suited to close examination. Because their rise to prominence from the late twelfth century was to last only two generations, the study of the family at the height of its power may be focused more intensely upon the political careers of Hugh de Lacy (d. 1186) and his son, Walter (d. 1241), in England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy. What is more, because of their pertinence to certain aspects of British and (especially) Irish history, an assumption of familiarity has grown up around these men (about whom we in fact know comparatively little), which seems to have deflected any previous in-depth analyses of their careers. The 1966 study of the Lacy family by W. E. Wightman is chiefly concerned with the formation and management of the Lacys’ English and (to a lesser extent) Norman honors. It says very little about Hugh, and almost nothing about Walter.³ It fails to unpick the complexity of the Norman evidence and also ignores Ireland, a decision which, though clear in the title, is questionable given Ireland’s importance to the family from 1177 (if not 1172). In shorter studies, Robert Bartlett situates Hugh de Lacy within the general aristocratic diaspora of the twelfth century by comparing his career in Ireland to those of his contemporaries on the German frontier,⁴ and Joe Hillaby provides a brief narrative of Walter’s political career in Ireland to 1224, and an insightful analysis of his debt thereafter.⁵

The Lacys feature as one of five baronial families in Brock Holden’s study of Herefordshire and the central Welsh march, providing a welcome glimpse of the family’s network within that region. However, the limitations of a regionalised approach are apparent in that the Lacys’ Norman and Irish interests are dealt with only cursorily by Holden. What is more, his focus on Herefordshire means that the family’s other English interests (which included important components in Shropshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire) are all but ignored. This approach led Holden to misinterpret several of the Lacys’ actions, which were taken for reasons weightier than the concerns of the local marcher community. In similar vein, Holden’s fellow border historian, Max Lieberman, chose not to include the Lacys among the Shropshire barons of his own study. Hugh and Walter de Lacy make several appearances in Lieberman’s work, but they are always identified as ‘lords of Weobley and of Meath’ and presented in terms of their Herefordshire holdings.⁶ Like Holden, Lieberman provides a case-study based on a handful of baronial families. He may have left the Lacys out to avoid encroaching upon Holden’s work, but, by failing to acknowledge the Lacys’ major Shropshire interests centred on Stanton Lacy and Ludlow (which, as will be seen, was the administrative centre of Walter’s English stewards),⁷ Lieberman also misses important local connections.

This highlights a very real problem for the study of the Lacy family in this period. In order to give due attention to their activities in England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy, a familiarity with the histories of each region is required. English historians have become adept at incorporating Normandy into their studies, but Ireland remains surprisingly foreign to the large majority. Irish historians traditionally have been much better at incorporating English history (as it pertained to Ireland) into their work, but few would presume actually to write English history itself.⁸ This study of the Lacy family has been obliged to span several historiographical traditions. Such breadth of research is an asset in producing a more focused conclusion. By involving the histories of several realms, this book is able to provide an enticing glimpse of the bonds that stretched between them. Differences in the nature of lordship, and the demands of allegiance, were very real considerations for cross-border aristocrats. So too were local conditions, which could vary widely between, for instance, Calvados and Bréifne. The degree to which these ‘were taken in their stride’⁹ was a major determinant of a magnate’s success or failure. In Ireland and the Welsh march, private warfare was often a way of life. Hugh de Lacy was established in Meath with the understanding that he would conquer the territory himself. Likewise, his son Walter could intrude into native Irish succession disputes, using military force to ensure that his preferred candidate was the victor. Such tactics could not be contemplated in England or Normandy by this period, where conflict was acted out at court or within judicial tribunals. The theme of regional adaptability is therefore central to this study.

Hugh and Walter de Lacy were not alone in transcending national and regional boundaries. The English king’s hegemony was so far-reaching that several aristocratic families were able to cultivate interests spanning his several realms, and sometimes even step outside them, into France, Flanders and Scotland. Aristocratic and royal interests interacted in different theatres of operation. Consequently, disputes might flare up in one, only to be played out in another. A magnate might overstep his bounds in Ireland, only to see the king take retributory action on his more accessible English lands. Similarly, political disaffection in Normandy might ignite rebellion in the Welsh marches as happened in Stephen’s reign. This mobility of conflicts has obscured a full understanding of some of the more significant events examined in this book, and it is hoped that they have benefited from a transnational approach.

While focusing on the aristocracy, this book also has much also to say about English kingship. The political fortunes of Hugh and Walter de Lacy were inextricably linked to their relationship with the king of England, their ultimate overlord in Normandy, Wales and Ireland. Throughout this book, the bestowal and removal of royal favour are charted and analysed, hopefully allowing a better understanding of the political and diplomatic forces at work on events. This process involves the examination of royal practice during four reigns, which proves all the more revealing because the aristocratic family involved remains constant. Kings were themselves individuals. King Henry II and King John could relate to their greatest barons in ways which are loosely comparable, but at others they might differ in their tactics. When assessing their rule, it is a matter of some significance when one can show that the two kings treated the same family in different ways. In this instance, for example, both kings were forced to confront a growing intractability on the part of the lord of Meath in Ireland. Their reactions were quite dissimilar and say much about the nature of their rule. Of particular interest is the degree to which the nature of Crown–magnate relations changed during the minority of Henry III. The extent to which those who ruled in Henry III’s name retained or departed from the practices of the preceding three reigns is an important indicator not only of their own interests (which could be transformed into royal initiatives) but also of whether and how their policies were shaped by the royal authority they were briefly handed.

This study of transnational aristocracy in action has resulted in a ‘thickened’ narrative in which sections of concentrated analysis are held together by a narrative account of the Lacys’ careers. In this way, the temporal contexts of the Lacys’ actions are retained and the two sub-themes of royal power and transnational lordship can be addressed where appropriate. To use David Carpenter’s metaphor, ‘a more analytical approach to the period would bring familiarity with the individual bricks but give little idea of their place in the construction of the building’.¹⁰ The book closes with a thematic chapter on lordship, which provides an anatomy of the Lacys’ aristocratic enterprise across four realms.

Lordship

‘Lordship’ is complicated. Being derived from the medieval concept of dominium (or seigneurie) it carries considerable historiographical baggage. In the Middle Ages, dominium could describe a multitude of relationships, including those between lord and vassal, husband and wife, and God and humanity. Dominium was a theoretical concept as well as a social reality, meditated upon in intellectual treatises, celebrated in chansons de geste, documented in charters and judged in local courts. A word so ubiquitous does not lend itself to precision in definition, and ‘lordship’ (or seigneurie, Herrschaft) has acquired a plurality of meanings in modern studies. To the influential German sociologist Max Weber (d. 1920), Herrschaft was a subset of power. ‘Power (Macht) is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis upon which this probability rests. Herrschaft is the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.’ He later elaborates:

Herrschaft will thus mean the situation in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of the commend the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake. Looked upon from the other end, this situation will be called ‘obedience’ (Gehorsam).¹¹

Weber also described three types of legitimate Herrshaft: (1) legal Herrschaft derived from known principles and applied administratively or judicially; (2) traditional Herrschaft, which was inherited; and (3) charismatic Herrschaft based upon the unique qualities of the lord which drew personal devotion to him.¹² Weber devised this definition to provide a neutral, scientific concept of Herrschaft to be used in his own work, divorced from its previously negative portrayals born of Enlightenment ideals.¹³

In France, seigneurie is conceived of as an expression of aristocratic privilege, and was for a long time closely related to the concept of the ban. A father of the Annales school of history, Marc Bloch, explained the ban in terms of the exactions a seigneur imposed upon his tenants. The ban was ‘the lord’s acknowledged power to give orders’, ‘the right of coercion’ and the ‘power to give orders and to punish’.¹⁴ The ban was a legitimate power to be delegated by legitimate rulers. In this way, it resembles Weber’s definition of a ‘state’ as an association which ‘successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.¹⁵ According to Bloch, the ban was devolved by legitimate seigneurs on to their officials, ‘petty local potentates’, who used it to impose exactions – termed by him (but not by contemporaries) banalités – upon their tenants. Bloch’s thesis of transformation was reinforced and refined as to chronology by George Duby, who through his study of the medieval Mâconnais region of France posited a transformation in society occurring around the year 1000, a mutation féodale, which included (among other things) the diffusion of the ban amongst seigneurs of lower social standing.¹⁶ This theory, which charted the dissolution of the old Carolingian order and the gradual reformation of public authority in the form of the thirteenth-century French nation-state, served as the dominant meta-narrative of French medieval history from the 1960s until the late 1990s. However, more recent scholarship has undercut the theory of millennial transformation by stressing continuity rather than change. The theory’s main assailant, Dominique Barthélemy, suggests that the transformation apparent in the sources was actually down to a change in the sources themselves – a mutation documentaire.¹⁷ He also criticises historians’ contrasting of ‘private jurisdiction’ and ‘public order’ as anachronistic, based on ‘statist’ assumptions that their medieval subjects did not share. Instead of the privilege of the ban, Barthélemy places the focus on socio-economic domination.¹⁸

The American medievalist Thomas Bisson was a strong proponent of the French mutationist theory in the 1990s, highlighting the horror of violence inflicted upon the medieval European populace by those upon whom the ban descended.¹⁹ He has since cooled on the theory of a firmly datable millennial mutation, but has maintained the mutationists’ focus on the violent and anarchical character of privatised lordship. In 2008, Bisson suggested a twelfth-century revolution, in which private affective lordship was superseded by public lordship (which he terms ‘government’).²⁰ To Bisson, legitimacy of power resided in a concern for the common weal, with strong centralised power almost always preferred over diffused. In the eleventh century, the profusion of knights and castellans pretending to noble powers and status led to a society filled with men whose ambitions outstripped their capacities, and who, consequently, were predisposed to violence to achieve the lifestyle they craved. ‘Men fought for lordship, or for shares in it, and they learned to despise the peasants they felt compelled to exploit. Incipient nobility could be pitiless – and precarious.’²¹

Bisson’s view of the nature of lordship contrasts with that held by Rees Davies. Both Bisson and Davies argue that medieval conceptions of power were tied into the experience of lordship, and, like Barthélemy, regard the historiographical focus on the medieval ‘state’ as anachronistic and unhelpful.²² However, while Bisson posits a mid-twelfth-century crisis of lordship, after which the process of state formation began, Davies recognises no such watershed. Instead, he calls for an end to teleological and Rankean searches for the origins of modern states in medieval Europe. In place of the state, Davies offers lordship, which he uses to legitimise the use of power in the periphery as well as the core throughout the Middle Ages. Davies derives his definition of lordship from the mutationists’ more pragmatic French contemporary, Robert Boutruche, who writes simply that ‘seigneurie [lordship] is a power of command, constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power.’²³ This definition closely resembles the concept of the ban, but, crucially, Davies in his treatment casts aside the idea that the aristocracy obtained their lordship from some ‘legitimate’ centralised authority. ‘[Lordship] is a word which respects the continuum of power, rather than necessarily privileging one particular form of power, and seeing other manifestations of power as derogations from, or aspirations towards this privileged power.’²⁴ To Davies, royal lordship was merely one form of lordship, which, once it had reached a dominant position in medieval society, constructed the theory that it was the only ‘public’ lordship, and that all others were ‘private’ and derivative.²⁵ Davies argues that medieval lordship had social, judicial, economic, ideological and political aspects, and its nature could be distinguished between ‘intensive lordship’, involving a lord in direct control of his tenants, and ‘tributary lordship’, based upon a loose acknowledgement of superior status. He stresses the importance of studying the multifarious structures and substructures of aristocratic lordship, which run counter to the statist view of royal lordship constructed on the surviving products of Crown administration. Being purpose-built for the transnational aristocratic study I follow here, Davies’s conception of mobile lordship is the one most consistent with what I find to be the experiences of Hugh and Walter de Lacy from 1166 to 1241. Consequently, it is the one adhered to in this book.

This conception of lordship may be popular, but it has not yet carried all before it. David Crouch, for one, has mounted a vigorous challenge to its portrayal as the sole operating principle behind medieval society. In a review article, Crouch summarises the historiography, attacks a few sacred cows and laments the lack of progress in medieval history.²⁶ One point that Crouch deplores is a tendency towards over-simplification in writing on lordship, and he has a point. Many modern definitions of medieval lordship are structuralist, aiming to articulate the underlying rules that governed medieval behaviour, and almost all are reductionist, distilling complex processes into a simple principle. This combination is dangerous unless it is recognised and allowed for. Reductionism is useful as a conceptual tool, but its conclusions cannot be permitted to replace the phenomena they describe in historical analysis. The present study of the Lacy family uncovers many complexities previously hidden from historiographical scrutiny by over-simplified pronouncements on royal policy or aristocratic behaviour. In some cases, these details have been enough to overturn long-held theories. Synthesis in light of historical models is vitally important to the progress of history, but not more so than detailed analysis. As Martin Aurell declares, ‘C’est la source qui fait l’historien!’²⁷

Medieval people often thought in terms of lordship, or, to put it another way, they often meditated on the relationship with their lord, which was key to their worldly success. This does not mean that lordship was the single organising principle of their society. Historians would be remiss to ignore other social realities (e.g. ethnic identity, gender construction or religious community) simply because they were not clearly appreciated or articulated by medieval writers.²⁸ However, lordship was real. Its ubiquity in medieval life and modern historiography does not preclude its effective use to help explain the (two-way) bonds of dependence that it maintained and described. Its broad contemporary usage is especially useful in this regard, because it provides a means of comparison between otherwise dissimilar local structures. Hugh and Walter de Lacy did not deal with their lands in Herefordshire as they did those in Meath, where they were forced to adapt to pre-existing Celtic conditions, or even Normandy, which had its own unique power structure. Lordship (as used in this book) was present in all three. It can be used to describe to describe the Lacys’ experience as sub-tenants in Normandy, tenants-in-chief in England, marcher lords in Wales and magnate-administrators in Ireland. It even allows the question to be posed of whether they thought of their lordship in Ireland as kingship on the Celtic model. The ability to accommodate these experiences under one blanket is what encourages me to use lordship as the key concept behind this study.

Sources

The materials available for an investigation of the Lacy family are much the same as those for any other magnate family of the period. They were not blessed with contemporary biographies and were not sufficiently high in the royal government for their correspondence to have been preserved. The Lacys’ position as lords of Meath brought them to the attention of the Irish annalists, whose work stands as a most welcome addition to the record of their careers. But this is not a particular disadvantage. In many ways the strength of this study of the Lacys lies in its replicability. There were many other families like them. From the commencement of the great series of chancery enrolments during King John’s reign, there exists a vast body of data, which, when combined with baronial acta and contemporary narratives, provides sufficient raw material upon which to base comprehensive analyses of the careers of specific men and particular families.

Seigniorial acta

A brief thirteenth-century ‘charter roll’ of Lacy deeds exists at the Hereford Cathedral Archives that preserves several deeds regarding the family’s grants in Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Welsh march. The late-fourteenth-century register book of the lords of Gormanston (Co. Meath) also contains a number of useful Lacy charters regarding Ireland.²⁹ Compiled by Sir Christopher Preston from the contents of his family’s muniment chest, the register contains a number of charters for this period, both those granted and those received. These can be supplemented by the contents of several ecclesiastical cartularies, including those of the priories of Llanthony Prima (Gwent) and Secunda (Gloucestershire), the priory of St Guthlac (Hereford), Hereford Cathedral, St Thomas’s Abbey (Dublin), St Mary’s Abbey (Dublin), the hospital of St John the Baptist (Dublin) and Haughmond Abbey (Shropshire).³⁰ Isolated original deeds and later copies of charters now lost are also scattered among the archival collections of England, Ireland and France with little more than chance ensuring their survival.

Record sources

The output of the English royal administration is – as has been said – of great use to the study of medieval individuals. However, it must be kept in mind that these sources provide a one-sided view of the period: the overlord’s view. What is more, the nature of transnational landholding in some ways confounds the royal chancery, which did not or could not always penetrate the great marcher liberties. The existence of multiple administrations (English, Irish and Norman) also complicates matters. Tragically, the records of the medieval Irish administration were lost in the fire that destroyed the Irish Public Record Office in 1922, obscuring one perspective. For England, the great enrolments of the English exchequer, the pipe rolls, survive from the outset of the period under consideration. A number of Norman pipe rolls also survive, as well as two rolls and numerous extracts from Ireland (all in transcription).³¹ From the end of the twelfth century, the study of medieval individuals is greatly aided by further enrolments of the English administration. The Plea Rolls of the king’s justices (1194), Charter Rolls (1199), Oblata and Fine Rolls (1199), Liberate and Close Rolls (1200) and Patent Rolls (1201) were all systematic enrolments of the activities of the English royal government, and provide a new and detailed perspective on the later period of this book.³² From the reign of Henry III, the great corpus of ancient correspondence and petitions (TNA SC 1, TNA SC 8) enters this study. Being an artificial collection of letters once in the Tower of London, the ancient correspondence comprises letters from many different sources. Many letters of note have been published by Shirley,³³ and those concerning Wales calendared by J. G. Edwards,³⁴ but more remain unpublished.

Narrative sources

The grant of Meath brought the Lacys to the attention of contemporary Anglo-Norman writers, and narrative works have been utilised alongside the record sources throughout this book.³⁵ If monastic chroniclers or secular lyricists are not always the most reliable sources for the bare facts of the events they describe, they are at least helpful barometers of opinion and retailers or rumour, which can sometimes be as important as more factual records of events. If, for instance, the Augustinian prior Richard de Morins, author of the Dunstable annals, believed that there was a conspiracy afoot in 1210 to replace King John with Simon de Montfort, a sentiment which would not have found its way into the record sources, then this at least reveals a great deal about the conditions of the time. As it turns out, there may have been something to the rumour, and certain of King John’s actions in 1210 perhaps should be viewed in that light.³⁶ By far the most important commentators on Hugh de Lacy are Gerald of Wales and Roger of Howden.³⁷ On the whole, the testimony of the well-positioned court chronicler Roger of Howden is to be preferred to Gerald or almost any other contemporary narrative source (except when Gerald accompanied John’s court to Ireland in 1185). However, Roger of Howden was not universally attendant upon the English king, and John Gillingham has shown that his presentation of events of which he had no direct knowledge can be flawed.³⁸ Gerald of Wales provides invaluable commentary on the early years of the English colony in Ireland, though his perspective is largely that of his Geraldine cousins and their fellow colonists.³⁹ The St Albans chroniclers, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, are important for the first half of the thirteenth century, though both had their own agendas and have to be treated with caution.

Another source of great utility is the poem often called The Song of Dermot and the Earl.⁴⁰ The Song provides details of the invasion of Ireland, and the subinfeudation of Meath and Leinster, which would not otherwise survive. Probably composed in the last decade of the twelfth century, the poem is contemporary with Gerald’s work, and shares much of its bias. However, while Gerald is willing to chastise those Englishmen who might oppose his family, the Song is almost universally supportive of the invaders and their initial patron, Diarmait Mac Murchada, king of Leinster. The Irish are presented as traitors in so far as they did not support the English. One significant problem with the Song is its chronology. The author never mentions the year in which an event occurred, and events are sometimes grouped thematically rather than chronologically. The obvious risks of using a laudatory poem as a historical source must be kept firmly in mind while utilising the Song’s unique insight.⁴¹ Another such poem, the near contemporary History of William Marshal,⁴² contains important information regarding Walter de Lacy, and is an unparalleled source on noble conduct and the exercise of lordship in this period.

Gaelic sources

King Henry II’s grant of Meath brought the Lacys to the attention of Irish commentators. The annals are the most useful Gaelic sources for this study. The main problems in using the annals concern their chronology and bias.⁴³ The annalists’ method of compilation meant that events that occurred at a distance or were not immediately pertinent for their audience could be placed at the end of a given year, or even in the next. Thus, the most important events in the eyes of the annalist (such as notable deaths or battles) might be grouped at the beginning of a year, while seemingly unimportant or distant events placed at the end. This bias could also have an editorial quality, so that events particularly humiliating to local powers might be ignored (though this was not always the case), and victories made to sound more momentous than they were. For those annals, such as the Annals of the Four Masters, which were later compilations, the danger of chronology is compounded by their conglomerate nature. The obvious additional problem of scribal error is common to almost all of the sources under consideration.

Orthography and terminology

This book has sought to use a uniform orthography and terminology across several historiographical traditions and seventy-five years of history, challenging ambition though that is. Regarding toponyms, I follow John le Patourel’s sound practice:

‘Surnames’ that are identifiable place-names are given as other place-names, with the particle in the appropriate language – thus, ‘Henry of Winchester’ but ‘William de Rouen’. This cannot be done wholly consistently, since to speak of ‘William de Varenne’ rather than ‘William de Warenne’ for example, would only introduce obscurity.⁴⁴

So, for instance, ‘Hugh de Lacy’ is preferred to ‘Hugh de Lassy’, or any of its antiquarian variant forms. In difficult cases such as Briouze/ Braose (where ‘Briouze’ represents the modern place-name and ‘Braose’ is favoured in Irish historiography), the form used in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been followed (so, ‘Briouze’).

The period 1172 to 1241 witnessed a formalisation of Irish spelling from Middle to Classical Irish. Assuming that it is preferable to be somewhat traditional rather than anachronistic, Irish names have been rendered in Middle Irish. Scottish names are in their generally recognised (largely anglicised) forms, while Manxmen and Islesmen have been given their Norse names (following the practice in A New History of the Isle of Man)⁴⁵ with their Gaelic forms in parentheses where pertinent.

After a period of myriad hyphenated alternatives, the current consensus among historians of medieval Britain and Ireland is that the men who inhabited England, and who then invaded Ireland, ought to be called English. This is a sensible approach, which reflects both the contemporary state of acculturation within England⁴⁶ and the way in which the invaders thought of themselves in Ireland.⁴⁷ Indeed, before they reverted to the general term gall (foreigner), the Irish annals referred to the first invaders from the English king’s dominions as Sasanach (Saxon).⁴⁸ That having been said, calling Hugh and Walter de Lacy ‘English’ would have run counter to the aims of this study by begging the question of their negotiable identities. Before 1204, the Lacys seem to have been as much Norman as they were English, and as likely to have been in Normandy as England. These international aristocrats were English Normans who devoted much time and energy to their lands in Ireland and Wales.

Finally, the use of ‘realms’ in the title, and throughout the course of this book, to indicate England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy, should perhaps be justified. ‘Realm’ is used as a translation of the Latin ‘regnum’ and Middle French ‘realme’ or ‘reame’, which was commonly used to denote a political unit, not necessarily a kingdom. England and Ireland were quite clearly regna, as royal lordships. Each had a king (or high king in the case of Ireland), and they were frequently referred to as regna in contemporary sources. For instance, in 1177, King Henry II considered appointing his youngest son John ‘king of Ireland’, and in the coming years secured a crown fashioned in the shape of peacock feathers from the pope.⁴⁹ What is more, in a letter written just before King John’s Irish expedition of 1210, Gerald of Wales urged John to conquer Ireland so that he might elevate his two sons to royal status in two regna: England and Ireland.⁵⁰ Indeed, three years later, in 1213, King John surrendered ‘the entire regnum of England and the entire regnum of Ireland’ to Pope Innocent III.⁵¹

Wales was also a regnum.⁵² The monarchia Britonum (i.e. kingship of the Welsh) is mentioned in the narration of Bishop Herwald of Llandaff’s election in 1059 as being then held by Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, which may come ultimately from a contemporary Llandaff chronicle copied in the 1120s.⁵³ Gruffudd is also called rex Britonum in the Annales Cambriae under 1063.⁵⁴ The Welsh lawyers who put together the Laws of Hywel Dda in the late twelfth century perceived him as ruling a regnum.⁵⁵ Peter of Blois in a letter to Archbishop Walter of Palermo refers to Henry II acquiring the ducatūs of Normandy, Brittany and Aquitaine, and the regna of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. This shows a twelfth-century perception of the French regions as principalities under a king, but that the British nations were regna worthy of their own king.⁵⁶ The regnum of the Welsh was a contemporary ideal even if it was not a geographical reality. It was on the back of that ideal that the dynasty of Gwynedd exalted itself in the thirteenth century to a principality of Wales.

Despite Peter of Blois’s classification, there are also numerous references to the regnum of Normandy. The Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie contains eight instances of regnum applied to Normandy (and also one to Aquitaine) from 968 onwards. The most interesting is the preamble of an act of Robert I (dated 1030) which talks of his temporal realm (temporale regnum) of which he is the ‘dux et rector’ and which he rules.⁵⁷ This respects the Isidorean definition found in Book IX of his Etymologia, which offered the medieval writer a rationale for his choice of Latin title to adorn a particular individual and define his power. So a king (rex) got his name from ruling (regere), and if he failed to govern righteously (recte) then he lost his right to rule, as all had long acknowledged.⁵⁸ By this definition anyone ruling (regere) might claim to exert power over a regnum. So in my view, from 1166 to 1241, the Lacys participated in the political lives of, and expressed their lordship in, four distinct ‘realms’: England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy.

Notes

1  See also Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin kings 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000); J. A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997).

2  Sidney Painter, William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England (Baltimore, 1933), p. viii.

3  William E. Wightman, The Lacy Family in England and Normandy 1066–1194 (Oxford, 1966).

4  Robert Bartlett, ‘Colonial aristocracies of the high middle ages’, in Robert Bartlett and A. MacKay (eds), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 23–47.

5  Joe Hillaby, ‘Colonisation, Crisis-Management and Debt: Walter de Lacy and the Lordship of Meath, 1189–1241’, Ríocht Na Mídhe, 8/4 (1992–93), pp. 1–50.

6  Lieberman, The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 83, 85, 87, 98, 191.

7  See Chapter 8.

8  Robin Frame, ‘The Failure of the First English Conquest of Ireland’, in Frame (ed.), Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450 (London and Rio Grande, 1998), pp. 1–13.

9  Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford, 1995), p. 70.

10  David Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), p. 4.

11  Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 53, 946.

12  Ibid., pp. 215–16.

13  For a history of the concept of Herrschaft, see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford, 1995), pp. 58–78.

14  Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1965), i, p. 251.

15  Max Weber, ‘Politics as vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, 1947), pp. 77–128, at p. 78.

16  Published as George Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1953).

17  Dominique Barthélemy, ‘La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu? (Note critique)’, Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 47 (1992), pp. 767–77.

18  Dominique Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian, trans. G. R. Edwards (Ithaca, 2009). The historiography is also discussed in David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 950–1300 (Harlow, 2005), pp. 191–8.

19  Witness the lively debate: Thomas Bisson, ‘The feudal revolution’, Past & Present, 142 (1994), pp. 6–42; Dominique Barthélemy, ‘Debate: the feudal revolution I’, trans. J. Birrell, Past & Present, 152 (1996), pp. 196–205; Stephen White, ‘Debate: the Feudal Revolution II’, ibid., pp. 205–23; Timothy Reuter, ‘Debate: the Feudal Revolution III’, ibid., no. 155 (1997), pp. 177–95; Chris Wickham, ‘Debate: the Feudal Revolution IV’, ibid., pp. 197–208; Thomas Bisson, ‘Debate: the Feudal Revolution Reply’, ibid., pp. 208–34.

20  Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2008).

21  Bisson, Crisis, p. 7.

22  Thomas Bisson, ‘Medieval lordship’, Speculum, 70/4 (Oct. 1995), pp. 743–59, at pp. 744–6; Bisson, Crisis, pp. 12–13; R. R. Davies, ‘The medieval state: the tyranny of a concept?’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16/2 (June 2003), pp. 280–300 (quote at p. 295).

23  Davies, ‘Medieval state’, p. 295; R. R. Davies, Lords & Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Brendan Smith (Oxford, 2009), p. 2 (quoting Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et feodalité, 2 vols, (Paris, 1959–70), ii, p. 80).

24  Davies, ‘Medieval state’, p. 295.

25  Ibid., pp. 295–6.

26  David Crouch, ‘Captives in the head of Montesquieu, some recent work on medieval nobility’, Virtus, 19 (2012), pp. 185–9. My thanks to Professor David Crouch for an advanced copy of his article, and for many informal discussions on the topic.

27  Martin Aurell, L’empire des

Reviews for Lordship in four realms

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A study of the De Lacy Family, a four generation experience of the upper levels of Feudal Nobility. They held lands in Normandy, England, Wales and Ireland between 1160 to 1250. they rose, they fell, they plotted, and they waged private wars, as circumstances permitted. Eventually their lands were in the gift of two female heiresses and that particular strain of political, military and legal power was dissipated. A very useful book for understanding the medieval ethos of power.