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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]