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The last date which had been fixed for the publication of the papal sentence was October 6;[586] the sentence was still unpublished, and the bishops who should have published it had fled.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.
1191–1200
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