Hugh II., his son, surnamed Cyvelioc, succeeded him, and continued in the earldom twenty-eight years. He died at Leek, in Staffordshire, and was buried at Chester.
Hugh was succeeded by his son Ranulph, surnamed Blundeville, who, for his benevolence, was styled Ranulph the Good. He served in the holy wars, and was as celebrated as any of the Seven Champions of Christendom. After his return, he built Beeston Castle, in Cheshire, a noble and imposing fortress, which, before the use of fire-arms, might have been deemed impregnable. It is built on an insulated rock, and its summit is one hundred yards above the level of the brook that runs at its base. It endured three sieges during the civil wars. The middle part of the slope is surrounded by towers, which time, however, has dismantled; the well in the upper part was cut through the rock to the depth of one hundred yards; in the course of time it became nearly filled up with rubbish, but within the last few years was cleared, built round, and enclosed, by J. Tollemache, Esq., M.P., to whom the castle belongs. It is ten miles distant from Chester, on the London and North-Western Railway.
This Earl Ranulph was besieged by the Welsh in the castle of Rhuddlan, and was relieved by Ralph Dutton, son-in-law of Roger Lacy, Constable of Chester, at the head of a large body of fiddlers, minstrels, &c., who were then assembled at the fair of Hugh Lupus. A remarkable privilege of this fair was, that no thief or malefactor that attended it should be attached or punished, except for offences then and there committed. With this motley crew Dutton marched into Wales, and raised the siege; for which Ranulph rewarded him with full power over all the instruments of his preservation, and the privilege of licensing the minstrels. The anniversary of this achievement was formerly celebrated on the festival of St. John the Baptist, by a regular procession of the minstrels to the church of their tutelar saint, St. Werburgh, in honour of whom Hugh Lupus granted to the minstrels, &c., the above-mentioned privilege, which is recognized in all subsequent vagrant acts, by a special exception in favour of the minstrel jurisdiction of the Duttons, of Dutton, in Cheshire. The last Earl Ranulph died in 1232, and was buried at Chester.
John Scott succeeded Ranulph, who died without issue; not without suspicion, Leycester says, of being poisoned by the contrivance of Helene his wife.
The Earls of Chester continued to exercise their local sovereignty for about one hundred and sixty years. They held that sovereignty, it is true, as the representatives of the paramount sovereignty of the King of England, and as owing allegiance to him in all things; but so far as the government of the Palatinate was concerned, their rule, though nominally mediate, was actually absolute, for the King does not appear to have thwarted their jurisdiction, or in any way to have exerted his supreme authority, beyond retaining a mint at Chester.
After the death of the seventh Earl, in 1237, Henry the Third united the Earldom to the Crown; he afterwards conferred it upon his eldest son, Prince Edward, about A.D. 1245, who, two years after this, received the homage of his military tenants at Chester. From that period to the present the title of Earl of Chester has been vested in the eldest son of the reigning sovereign, and is now held by His Royal Highness Albert, Prince of Wales.
In 1255 Llewellyn ap Gryffid, Prince of Wales, provoked by the cruel injuries his subjects had received from Geffrey Langley, Lieutenant of the County under Prince Edward, carried fire and sword to the gates of Chester. In 1257 Henry the Third summoned his nobility and bishops to attend, with their vassals, at Chester, in order to invade Wales; and in 1275 Edward the First appointed the city as the place for Llewellyn to do him homage, whose refusal ended with the ruin of himself and his principality; for in 1300 Edward of Carnarvon here received the final acknowledgment of the Welsh to the sovereignty of England; and in a few years afterwards, Llewellyn was brought hither a prisoner from Flint Castle. Richard the Second visited this his favourite city in 1397, and in 1399 he was brought a prisoner from Flint Castle to the castle of Chester, which Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry the Fourth, had seized.
In Owen Glendower’s wars this city was a place d’armes for the English troops in the expeditions against the Welsh, who, ever tenacious of their independence, were as unwilling to submit to the Norman as the Saxon yoke.
In 1459 Henry the Sixth, with Queen Margaret and her son Edward, visited Chester, and bestowed little silver swans on the Cheshire gentlemen who espoused her cause.
It appears that Henry the Seventh and his Queen also visited Chester in 1493. In 1554 George Marsh, the pious martyr was publicly burnt at Boughton, for his steadfast adherence to the Protestant faith. In the year 1617 the city was honoured with the presence of James the First, when Edward Button, the then Mayor, presented the King with a gilt cup containing one hundred jacobuses of gold.