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Hugh de Lacy, First Earl of Ulster: Rising and Falling in Angevin Ireland, by Daniel Brown

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 133; Issue: 565 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cey281

1477-4534

Robin Frame,

Medieval Literature and History

For many decades after the publication of G.H. Orpen’s pioneering four-volume Ireland under the Normans, 1169−1333 (1911−20), thirteenth-century Ireland received little attention from historians. The period lacked the obvious narrative shape of the initial conquests, dramatised by Gerald of Wales; and a story of intensifying English domination was unlikely to appeal to readers in the fledgling Irish Free State. Since the 1990s, this scholarly wasteland has begun to be cultivated, and the colonising aristocracy given their due, notably in the work of David Crouch and others on the Marshals, and in Colin Veach’s study of the de Lacy lords of Meath, father and elder brother of the subject of the present book (2014; rev. ante, cxxx [2015], 1524−5). Hugh I de Lacy (d. 1186), like John de Courcy and others of the first generation, was given a human face by Gerald of Wales; he lingered in the imagination of colonial and native writers into the sixteenth century. Hugh II, earl of Ulster (d. 1242), by contrast, figured, if at all, as the unscrupulous agent of de Courcy’s fall. Yet, as Daniel Brown shows, in a closely argued and penetrating study, Hugh’s career was remarkable. Lacking lands in England or Wales that could be distrained, he was, for Angevin rulers, something of a loose cannon. He received limited endowments in Ireland from Walter, his elder brother, but essentially made his way through an unstable mixture of royal patronage and ruthless self-help. Before 1199, a marriage with the sister of Thomas de Verdon brought him lands in Uriel (Co. Louth), with the promise of equal shares in future conquests. In the early 1200s, he displaced de Courcy in Antrim and Down, and in 1205 at Winchester was belted earl of Ulster by John, becoming the first earl with an Irish territorial designation. He fell foul of the king (whose chancery rapidly ceased addressing him as ‘earl of Ulster’ just as his own charters were placarding his comital status) and was driven out of Ireland by John’s whirlwind campaign of 1210. Fleeing by way of Scotland to France, he exploited an existing connection with Simon de Montfort, and joined in the Albigensian crusade, service rewarded with lands and castles in Languedoc. He returned to the British Isles around 1221, and spent several years trying to regain Ulster by force and through eclectic alliances stretching from Wales and Chester to the Hebrides and Orkney. Eventually restored by Henry III in 1227, he remained active for a further fifteen years, consolidating his grip on his earldom through castle-building and religious patronage, and by campaigning beyond its frontiers.