Index of Place Names in Charter-Texts

Charter-texts are organised chronologically, on the basis of earliest possible issue (secure dates given without square brackets); in the case of matching chronologies, grants to secular beneficiaries are given precedence. Sources are indicated in the following manner: M (manuscript or archival source); P (Latin texts in printed volumes); T (translated versions); C (calendared versions). Dates of manuscript sources are indicated according to the following convention: s. xvii = seventeenth century; in. = early; ex. = late. As witnesses are indexed separately, information is only provided for those whose attestation has a bearing on dating. Punctuation, spelling and capitalisation are standardised, with the exception of the sole contemporary version (no. 16).

Hugh de Lacy confirms to Geoffrey Faber of Ratoath (Co. Meath), for his homage and service, Lagore (bar. Ratoath) with all its appurtenances, for one carucate of land as divided and perambulated in the time of grantor's father, Hugh (I) de Lacy, and with the same land that increase which grantor himself gave to him (Geoffrey). To hold by Geoffrey's heirs from Hugh and his heirs for the service of one tenth of a knight's fee, freely and quietly (etc.), in all liberties and free customs.

[1189×29 May 1205]

Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Hugo de Laci dedi et concessi et hac presenti carta mea confirmavi Galfrido Fabroa, de Rattoued pro homagio et servitio suo Lochogoue cum omnibus [pertin]ent[iis]b suis pro una carucata terre sicut ei divisa et perambulata fuit tempore patris mei Hugonis de Lacy et cum continenti ejusdem terre illud incrementum quod ego ipse ei dedi, habendum et tenendum heredibus suis de me et heredibus meis in feudo et hereditate per servitium decime partis unius feodi militis pro omni servitio libere et quiete plene et integre in terris et hominibus in bosco et plano in pratis in pascuis in viis et semitis in aquis et molendinis et in moris et mariscis et in omnibus libertatibus et liberis consuetudinibus. Hiis testibus: Rob[erto] de Laci, Rob[erto] Flandrensi, Baldwino de Kair[merdin], Elia de Sei, Stephano Pilate, Will[elmo] de Warewic, Willelmo Delmans et multis aliis. c

According to the Manx chronicle, it was only the timely intervention of Walter de Lacy and the barons of Meath which prevented the nascent earldom of Ulster from meeting with an early disaster:

One of the most serious threats faced by new lords was the ‘hovering presence’ of the men they had replaced. If, on this occasion, de Courcy was forced to abandon his bid for restoration ‘without obtaining power’, but while he remained at large under the protection of Manx and Irish allies he would continue to represent an alternative focus of fidelity for the barons of Ulster. Royal endorsement could only go so far in recommending Hugh de Lacy to his new tenants, many of whom had arrayed against him during the conflict of 1204–05. The earl may well have been conscious of the warning from history provided by his English consanguineus, Ibert II de Lacy, who assumed control of the honor of Pontefract in 1135 after tenants loyal to Ibert's father, Robert, took advantage of the death of King Henry I to murder the lord imposed on them by the crown. Many of Ulster's churchmen also had strong ties to the previous regime, having either been transplanted to Ulster by de Courcy or having benefited from his energetic patronage. The quality of de Lacy's dominical lordship may have been especially impaired by the sentence of excommunication likely to have been pronounced against him by the primate of Ireland and partisan of John de Courcy, Archbishop Eugenius of Armagh.

In his study of William Marshal's lordship in England and Ireland, David Crouch outlined two broad types of strategy utilised by lords consolidating themselves in new acquisitions.

On 29 May 1205 some of the greatest among the Angevin clergy and nobility gathered at Winchester cathedral to celebrate the feast of Whitsun (Pentecost). This was not only a religious festival but a coronatio, an occasion on which the king was liturgically elevated and his majesty displayed by the public wearing of his crown. The cruciform cathedral space became a realm in microcosm, where social standing depended on one's nearness or distance from the rex coronatus. After the ecclesiastical dignitaries, the spaces closest to the king during the solemn procession into the church, or at the banquet table following the conclusion of the ceremony, were reserved for the first rank of nobility – the earls. This small elite welcomed its newest member on Whitsunday when, in a public ceremony apart from the royal coronatio, King John tied a sword around Hugh de Lacy's waist, symbolising his investiture as earl of Ulster.

With the sole exception of William Marshal (†1219), earl of Pembroke and lord of Leinster, Hugh now notionally outranked every other member of the settler community in Ireland, including his elder brother, Walter. Earls did not wear crowns, but dignitas could still be conveyed in other ways. An unmistakable ostentation is detected in one of Hugh's earliest comital charters, ‘given by our own hand at Rathbeggan (bar. Ratoath, Co. Meath) on the thirteenth of January in the second year of our earldom (1207)’. Those close to the earl could also lay claim to the honour bound up in his comital title. Around 1270, almost three decades after Hugh's death, his second wife was still styling herself ‘Emelina de Lacy, countess of Ulster’ in charters to her chantry chapel in Wiltshire. Emelina had since remarried to a grandson of Henry II, but for her a connection to the comital title superseded even a link to Plantagenet royal blood.

Some great men would never possess an earldom, but those created earls were almost always great men. There is no escaping the fact that, before 1205, Hugh de Lacy was not even chief in the Irish colony for wealth, land and influence. For this reason historians have struggled to unravel the ‘complete mystery’ of Hugh's promotion.

Grant by Hugh de Lacy to H. de Say, knight of the diocese of Armagh, of ‘Balimerlongfortan’ in Uriel.1

[1194×1202]

Letter of Pope Innocent III addressing a dispute between the canons of St Mary’s, Louth, and one H. de Say, knight of the diocese of Armagh. On foot from a gift of Hugh de Lacy, de Say had occupied the land of ‘Balimerlongfortan’, previously given to the canons of St Mary's by the king of ‘Eriel’ (Uriel), notwithstanding the admonishment of John of Salerno, then papal legate to Ireland. 6 June 1205.

Grant by Hugh de Lacy to Henry de Audley, of Dunleer (Co. Louth), with appurtenances.

[1194×2 May 1227]

King Henry III confirms to Henry ‘de Aldithele’ (Audley)6 various lands and tenements in England and Ireland, including the town called ‘Dunlir’ (Dunleer, Co. Louth), of the gift of Hugh de Lacy, earl of Ulster. 2 May 1227.

Grant by Hugh de Lacy, earl of Ulster, to Gilbert de Lacy, grantor's brother, of the churches of Rooskey and Carlingford (Co. Louth), and the churches of Cooley (Co. Louth), with tithes and obventions.

[29 May 1205×10]

Charter of Hugh de Lacy, as earl of Ulster, confirming to the church of St Andrew in Scotland and the canons serving there, a grant of churches in Ireland, as well and as fully as Gilbert de Lacy, Hugh's brother, possessed said benefices.

The chronicle of Matthew Paris reports a prodigy at Roche Abbey, Yorkshire, in 1236, whereby a ghostly company of mounted knights was seen to issue from the earth and array themselves as if taking part in a tournament. From the ‘true account’ obtained by Paris from the earl of Gloucester and others, it seems that the vision was seen even ‘more plainly’ across the Irish Sea, where, speaking to the psychology of the settler community in Ireland, the riders appeared, not equipped for sport, but ‘as if coming from battle … severely wounded and bloody’. Beholding this supernatural host the people, seemingly more attuned to war than peace, ‘fled before them in alarm, and betook themselves to the churches and castles, thinking that it was not an illusion, but a real battle’.

By the time Hugh de Lacy was restored to the earldom of Ulster, in 1227, advances had been made by the Dublin administration in regard to communication, justice, finance and defence. But we might doubt Orpen's assertion that the colonial community, for whom bloody violence was still a constant reality, had any sense that pax Normannica now reigned. The 1230s saw the continued flexing of Anglo-Norman military muscle along familiar frontiers. The crown, meanwhile, continued to encourage factionalism as an extension of royal authority. It has been asserted that Henry III, blessed with a ‘great aesthetic sensibility’, had ‘nothing of the cruel streak that was one of his father's many flaws’. The implication of several leading magnates in the murder of Richard Marshal, however, shows that the royal apple had not fallen very far from the tree in regard to the promotion of ‘aristocratic cannibalism’.

In some ways, Hugh de Lacy's brand of power was now more assured than it had been before his exile. For the first time, Ulster's churchmen began to benefit from the earl's patronage, while the impulse towards self-promotion is tempered in Hugh's post-restoration acta, which make much less use of the majesterial plural or explicit dating clauses. Instead, the earl sought to display his prestige in stone instead of parchment, commissioning new fortresses and religious houses.

In the award of a comital title, the most coveted prize available to the Angevin nobility, Hugh II de Lacy had achieved something which none of his colonial peers had managed. Even still, not even possession of Ireland's first earldom was enough to guarantee deference to his memory. While Mageoghagan's book provided glowing obituaries for the earl's brothers, William Gorm (‘the hardiest and strongest hand of any Englishman from the Nicene seas to this place’) and Walter (‘the bountifullest Englishman for horses, cloaths, mony and goold that ever came before his tyme’), the same chronicle passed over the death of Hugh de Lacy entirely. There was perhaps a sense, at least from an Irish perspective, that the earl of Ulster had not managed to surpass the achievements of his celebrated father. ‘Hugo de Laci, earl of Uladh, mortuus est’, is the simple statement in the annals of Loch Cé for 1243, with a telling explanatory note: ‘He was not the first Hugo, whom Gilla-gan-inathair killed at Durmhagh-Choluim-Chille (Durrow), but the last Hugo.’ It was John de Courcy's conquest of Ulster which would burn brighter in the collective memory of the Anglo-Irish community, thanks largely to his very positive portrayal in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, which were widely disseminated among the later colonists. In the sixteenth century Hugh de Lacy (in fact, a loosely historical composite of Hugh I and II) is presented in the Book of Howth as a cypher for an intrusive English administration, purveyor of ‘evil and mischief ‘ and devious conspirator against that ‘alter Ercules’, John de Courcy.

It was perhaps safer to take personal charge of one's legacy. In a Gaelic lament composed for the ‘Red Earl’ of Ulster, Richard Óg de Burgh (†1326), the Irish bard professed regret that he was unable to follow his illustrious patron into death's vale. Others were as effusive with their praise without pay. Friar Clyn's contemporary annals celebrated de Burgh as the very image of the chivalric lord: ‘a prudent and witty knight, wealthy, wise and full of days’ (miles prudens, facetus, dives et sapiens, plenus dierum).

‘Origins’, stated Donnchadh Ó Corráin of the genealogical tradition in medieval Ireland, ‘are not simply origins’. Once ignored or dismissed as antiquarian indulgences, this vast body of royal pedigrees, king-lists and poetic panygyric is now recognised as having served a very real service for its patrons as the proving documents of power. In a society where authority was largely based on dynastic credentials, ‘an origin is the demand the present makes upon the past, not knowledge for its own sake – a much more recent historical pretence’. This function of historical writing, as architect as well as record of the past, was also easily recognisable to the Anglo-Norman world which provided the incomers to Ireland after 1169, in which prestige and property descended in vertical lines, and for whom lignage was an equally pervasive preoccupation. National pseudohistories gave roots to the authority of post-Conquest kings of England by connecting them with a legendary British past. Genealogies of noble families, fusing romance with record, claimed dignity for their sponsors by emphasising contiguity with their progenitors.

If a burden could be placed on memory by the present, however, so too an origin could be a mandate of the past on the here and now. Individual agency in medieval Britain and Ireland was often shaped by a concern with living up to, or living down, one's ancestors. When inherent characteristics of nobility were believed to pass from generation to generation, consanguinity with an illustrious forebear was still the basic qualification of nobility, and ‘no ceremony could make up for the lack of exalted blood-lines’. The inheritance of moral as well as physical qualities was also accepted in Gaelic Ireland. In the first recension of the epic Táin bó Cúailnge (‘The cattle-raid of Cooley’), the antagonist Medb, queen of Connacht, lists Maine ‘Cotageib Uile’ (‘grasp them all’) among her seven sons: is éside tuc cruth a máthar & a athar & a n-ordan díb línaib (‘he it is who has inherited the appearance of his mother and father and the dignity of them both’).

Membership of a noble family was in this way double-edged. Deference or allegiance could be claimed simply by virtue of one's name, and even before his leading role in Anglo-Norman intervention in Ireland, Richard de Clare (Strongbow) was already ‘set apart by his ancestry, born of the noble stock of the Clare family’.

If the waging of war was an expected aspect of governance under the Norman and Angevin kings, says Matthew Strickland, ‘then much of this warfare was directed against rebellious vassals, often themselves leagued with the external enemies of the Anglo-Norman regnum’. The nine weeks spent by King John in Ireland in 1210, during which he expelled the de Lacys from Ulster and Meath, remains a key set-piece in the relationship between crown and colony in the medieval period. Of the countless treatments of John's summer campaign, perhaps none has been more insightful into the king's motivations than the near-contemporary ‘Barnwell’ chronicle, which states the king's foremost concern to have been the suppression and punishment of the earl of Ulster:

Having been elevated to comital rank by King John, the earl of Ulster's involvement in sedition appears on first glance to be ungrateful in the extreme. As Bothwell notes, ‘one of the best ways to incense a king and bring about one's own quick, and often painful, demise was not only to betray the monarch's sacred trust – his realm – but to do so after the king had been foolish enough to show great favour’. It was the withdrawal of royal esteem, however, which seems to have caused Hugh to bite the hand which had so recently nourished him with an earldom. William Marshal's swift restoration into the king's graces in 1205 removed the need for a counterbalance to his power in Ireland. The subsequent exclusion of Hugh de Lacy's comital title in royal correspondence to the Irish colony implies that the king was actively ignoring or suppressing de Lacy's status as comes Ultonie.

It is the slight to his comital dignity which best explains Hugh's enthusiastic resistance to the royal faction during the baronial war of 1207–08, as well as his cultivation of links to opponents of the English crown outside Ireland. By 1209, with his kingdom already under interdict, King John found himself beset by conspirators, rebellious barons and hostile neighbours.