The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  THE PURSUIT OF POWER IN PEMBROKE AND LEINSTER

  Marshal re-orientated his career after 1206. Up to this point, the clear focus of his activities and ambitions had been in England and France, but his life now shifted away from the north-south axis – running from the English realm, through Normandy and the Angevin heartlands to Aquitaine – that had defined his earlier years. From his powerbase at Striguil, on the Welsh March, Marshal began instead to channel his energies westwards into Wales itself, and even further afield into Ireland. These regions, on the fringes of Angevin royal authority, were almost akin to the medieval Wild West. They offered the prospect of fresh conquests and opportunities to forge a semi-autonomous earldom. As William approached his sixtieth year, he became increasingly intent upon the need to secure the future of the Marshal dynasty by constructing a grand lordship that could be bequeathed to his heirs. He also looked to reward his faithful retainers with lands and honours. These were objectives that could be best fulfilled in Wales and Ireland.

  After more than two decades of regular attendance at the Angevin court, in royal service, William withdrew from the front line of politics and war. This was a direct response to his estrangement from King John, but the earl seems to have embraced the prospect of stepping back from the crown, severing his close association with a dangerously unpredictable and predatory monarch. Marshal may well have made a conscious decision to extract himself from the maelstrom of John’s court, judging this detachment to be the safest course and best hope of surviving the capricious king’s reign. William was not the only magnate to pursue this course of action. Though only in his mid-thirties, Marshal’s northern neighbour, Earl Ranulf III of Chester – who ruled over a mighty lordship on the northern March – already had a long track record of faithful service to the Angevin cause. He had fought to recover Normandy alongside Richard the Lionheart in the late 1190s, and supported John on the Continent in the early years of the new century. After the fall of Normandy, however, Ranulf dedicated an increasing amount of his time to the needs of his own earldom, securing Chester’s status as north-west England’s leading port, and a centre of trade and commerce.

  In the course of his own long career, William Marshal had made his fortune as a knight and royal servant, and though he had been a landed baron since the late 1180s, he had never truly dedicated himself to the business of local governance, administration and territorial consolidation within the Marshal lands. He had served the king first, and dealt with the needs of his lordship and then earldom second. But in this new phase of his career, after 1206, William sought to assert himself as a fully fledged Marcher baron in his own right. This brought Marshal face to face with the fresh challenges of direct rule – forcing him to rely to an even greater extent upon the support of his household and his wife, Countess Isabel – and meant that he had to grapple with issues of military confrontation and conquest as a leader of men, not merely a follower of the crown. This was a critical transformation: Earl William, the lord and master, stepped forward in the early thirteenth century. He would not enjoy an untrammelled record of success and, though he sought to escape the shadow of John’s regime, Marshal’s interest in Ireland would once again bring him into direct and deadly conflict with the king.

  Medieval Wales and Ireland

  Before 1066 and the advent of the Normans, Wales had been the domain of some of the earliest settlers of the British Isles – the Britons or Celts – who are generally thought to have migrated from Continental Europe some three centuries before the birth of Christ. Anglo-Saxon conquerors had pushed these communities westwards out of England from the fifth century AD onwards, and they became known as the ‘Wallenses’ (literally the ‘borderers’). Early medieval Wales consisted of a complex patchwork of determinedly independent, rival provinces and realms, with three major principalities – Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth – coming to prominence. In the view of many ‘cultured’ Anglo-Normans, the Welsh (and their Celtic neighbours in Ireland) did not adhere to the norms of society. They were regarded as ‘barbarians’: people who thought nothing of adultery and incest, and had a marked propensity for violence and extreme brutality. According to one mid-twelfth century Anglo-Norman chronicler, they would ‘fight against each other like animals’, murder their prisoners and make routine use of blinding and castration to eliminate their enemies. In short, the native Welsh and Irish were not to be trusted, but ironically this jaded perception meant that the Anglo-Normans and Angevins often employed far more vicious and merciless tactics when dealing with the Celts than they ever would among themselves, arguing that atrocities such as mass execution and torture were either necessary or justified against this ‘alien’ enemy.

  The famous churchman, courtier and historian, Gerald of Wales – who was born of mixed Anglo-Norman and native Welsh parentage, and grew up in south-west Wales – offered a far more nuanced appraisal of the country’s indigenous inhabitants. He acknowledged that they could be hot tempered, quarrelsome and ‘fierce’, but also noted that ‘the Welsh are very sharp and intelligent’. Theirs was a land of ‘generosity and hospitality’, he contended, where ‘no one begs’; rich in culture, and filled with the sounds of harmonious singing and the music of the harp, pipe and ‘crowder’ (an early stringed instrument). Gerald also maintained that the Welsh were marked out by their distinct physical appearance, noting that both men and women cut their hair short and ‘shape it round their ears and eyes’, men shave their beards, but keep moustaches and ‘both sexes take great care of their teeth, more than I have seen in any country . . . constantly cleaning them with green hazel-shoots and then rubbing them with woollen cloths until they shine like ivory’.

  Few Anglo-Normans shared Gerald’s interest in, or respect for, the customs of the Welsh. Most simply saw Wales as a valuable prize – a region replete with abundant natural resources, ‘a land of wood and pasture, abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds’, and thus a natural target of conquest. Under the thin pretext of bringing peace and law to the supposedly savage Welsh, territory along the Welsh March, including Striguil itself, was forcibly settled after 1066. The rugged inland terrain of Wales, especially in the mountainous north, proved virtually impossible to suppress, so most Anglo-Norman settlements beyond the supposed ‘border of the March (at the River Wye in the south and along the Dee in the north) were either on the coast – at sites like Pembroke and the new town of Cardiff – or accessible via easily navigable rivers, such as at Brecon. Many of these sites were essentially isolated outposts of ‘foreign’ rule, connected only by water-borne communication links, with much of the surrounding inland territory still under the control of the indigenous Welsh.

  During the twelfth century, this frontier environment gave birth to a number of powerful, independent-minded dynasties, including the Clare family into which William Marshal married. It also led to a degree of social and cultural interaction, and intermarriage, between the Anglo-Norman settlers and the native population. By the second or third generation, many of the great ‘Anglo-Norman’ colonising dynasties of this area had native Welsh ancestors in their bloodlines, and thus viewed themselves as a breed apart – hence Gerald of Wales’ own mixed heritage.

  This process of intermingling was further complicated by the Anglo-Norman/Angevin conquest of Ireland. One of the first colonisers was Countess Isabel’s father, Richard Strongbow, a member of the Clare dynasty who sought new territories across the Irish Sea and joined forces with King Henry II in the early 1170s when the Angevin monarch descended on Ireland with a massive fleet of 400 ships. At the same moment that a youthful William Marshal was serving the recently crowned Henry the Young King in England, Strongbow was busy conquering eastern Ireland.

  Most of these invaders held deeply disparaging views of the supposedly ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ native Irish; a people who showed little interest in building towns or engaging in trade (though in reality, parts of Ireland enjoyed long-established links with regions such as Brittany). Gerald of Wales v
isited Ireland, and wrote detailed accounts of its topography, natural history and conquest, but he proved far less cautious or sympathetic in his appraisal of its inhabitants, branding them as treacherous and claiming that they were ‘the most jealous people on earth’. In terms of military technology, the mail-clad, mounted knights of Henry II and his followers were light years ahead of the Irish, many of whom still rode bareback and un-armoured. As a result, the conquerors easily achieved dominance over a swathe of territory. Henry II proclaimed himself ruler of Ireland, taking the major ports of Wexford, Waterford and Dublin for the crown. His youngest son, John, was designated as ‘lord of Ireland’ in 1177, and the future king led his own, largely ineffective expedition to the region in 1185.

  Other territories were either seized or apportioned to Marcher lords. Strongbow asserted his rights to the region of Leinster, in south-east Ireland, and as part of this process married Isabel’s mother, Aoife, princess of Leinster (daughter of Dermot MacMurrough). Other Marcher lords, like Hugh of Lacy in Meath (north of Leinster), followed suit – claiming lands, marrying native Irish heiresses – creating a dizzying web of marital connections and nuanced, hybrid identity. Later, the Lacy family also took hold of Ulster in the far north-east, while the Briouzes gained rights to Limerick in the south-west. During the last decades of the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman conquerors pushed much of the native Irish ruling elite to the fringes of Ireland, while the colonists set about developing new towns, roads and bridges, and built a network of castles (often of the basic timber and earthwork form). Feeling themselves to be largely detached from the direct control of the Angevin crown, these hard-nosed frontier settlers came to expect, and to enjoy, a high degree of autonomy.

  It was these waves of Anglo-Norman conquest that brought William Marshal his claims – through marriage to Richard Strongbow’s half-Irish daughter and heir, Isabel of Clare – to both Pembroke and Leinster. Both were valuable territories, boasting expanses of richly fertile lands and promising opportunities to harness trade. But neither region would be easy to dominate. West Wales was threatened by the rising power of the native Welsh, especially that of Llewellyn ap Iorwerth (later known as Llewellyn the Great), prince of Gywnedd in the north; while Leinster was ruled over by a mixture of first- and second-generation colonists, most of whom were fiercely independent and promised to be little impressed by a soft-born Angevin courtier. Marshal might be regarded as a great tournament champion, warrior and paragon of chivalry in England and France, but that storied reputation would count for little in the Wild West.

  Marshal’s first steps in the west

  William Marshal made some attempt to pursue his claims in west Wales and Ireland at the start of King John’s reign. A brief tour of these territories was conducted at some point between the autumn of 1200 and the spring of 1201, and it was probably no accident that Countess Isabel accompanied her husband during this journey. She was the heiress through whom Marshal’s rights to Pembroke, and particularly Leinster, were derived – the symbol of legitimacy, with a bloodline connection to the Celtic world. William and his wife probably sailed from Striguil itself, hugging the coastline of south Wales to reach the peninsula of Pembrokeshire.

  Here a rugged, majestic coastal landscape shielded rolling, verdant inland terrain. Gerald of Wales painted a vivid picture of this region, his homeland. He considered it to be ‘particularly attractive because of its flat lands and long sea-coast’ and claimed that ‘of all the different parts of Wales [this] is at once the most beautiful and the most productive’, being ‘rich in wheat [and] fish from the sea’. Its capital was the town of Pembroke, ‘built high on an oblong plateau of rock’, above ‘an inlet of the sea which runs down from [the estuary of] Milford Haven’, thus offering a well-sheltered, natural harbour.

  Through his connection to the Clare dynasty and the grant awarded by King John, Marshal could stake a claim to the full extent of this peninsula, but the northern half had been lost to the native Welsh. William took possession of Pembroke itself, and may have initiated work on a major new stone fortification: the great round tower that now lies at the heart of the larger late medieval castle at Pembroke. This is a tremendously impressive structure, rising through four storeys to a height of almost eighty feet, with twenty-foot-thick walls at its base and topped by a domed, stone roof. It was designed to dominate the landscape and send an inescapable message about the earl of Pembroke’s might.

  Given the significant threat of native Welsh attack and invasion, Pembrokeshire was also defended by a network of royal fortresses, such as Haverford and Manorbier. In the early years of the thirteenth century, William Marshal managed to strengthen his hold over the region, gaining custody of the royal fortress at Cardigan in 1202, and retaking the neighbouring castle of Cilgerran (with King John’s permission and military support) two years later. Pembrokeshire was undoubtedly an extremely valuable territory in its own right, but it was also subject to an extensive degree of crown control and exposed to aggression on the part of the indigenous Welsh. On the whole, Earl William seems to have viewed Pembroke as a stepping stone to Ireland, and what he came to regard as the more promising Irish territory of Leinster.

  Pembrokeshire was the main point of embarkation for the journey across the Irish Sea. Gerald of Wales described how one could look out from the peninsula’s south coast and see a stream of passing traffic, as ‘boats [made] their way to Ireland from almost any part of Britain’. He also claimed (rightly) that ‘in clear weather the mountains of Ireland can be seen from St David’s’, on Pembrokeshire’s northwestern coast. From Pembroke itself, the crossing could usually be made ‘in one short day’, but the waters were ‘nearly always tempestuous’ according to Gerald, because they were ‘surging with currents’.

  Though the History made no record of the journey, it seems certain from other contemporary evidence that William and Isabel sailed from Pembroke to Ireland, probably in the first months of 1201. Marshal had made a half-hearted attempt to assert rights to Leinster soon after his marriage in 1189, but it was not until the early thirteenth century that William began to take a more direct and active interest in Ireland. His first crossing of the Irish Sea was a desperately unpleasant experience – caught in a severe storm, Marshal seems to have feared for his life – but safe landfall was eventually made, probably at the royal port of Wexford.

  The lordship of Leinster lay to the south of Dublin (which was held by the English crown) and extended in an arc inland, seventy miles deep at its apex, to enclose the regions of Ossory and Offaly, the fortresses of Kildare and Carlow, and the major castle at Kilkenny. In comparison to the surrounding territories, such as Meath, Leinster was relatively mountainous, rising beyond the rolling lowlands along the coast to the Blackstair range and the broken hill country beyond, and enclosed to the north by the looming Wicklow Mountains.

  Gerald of Wales described Ireland as the ‘the most temperate of countries’, where ‘you will seldom see snow’ and ‘the grass is green in the fields in winter, just the same as in summer’. He wrote that ‘the land is fruitful and rich in its fertile soil and plentiful harvests. Crops abound in the fields, flocks on the mountains and wild animals in the woods’, and boasted that the province was replete with lush ‘pastures and meadows, honey and milk’. He was particularly enamoured of its ‘healthy’ and ‘sweet-smelling’ air – which, he asserted, imbued residents with almost miraculous physical well-being – but less impressed by the ‘ever-present over hanging of clouds and fog’ and frequent ‘storms of wind and rain’, complaining that ‘you will scarcely see even in summer three consecutive days of really fine weather’ in Ireland.

  William Marshal seems to have received a rather frosty reception upon his arrival in 1201. The long-established Anglo-Norman/Irish nobles of Leinster were proud, hard-bitten warlords, accustomed to self-governance. William made some limited progress in asserting his authority: the local landholder Adam of Hereford appears to have recognised his overlordship; friendly re
lations were also established with the Anglo-Norman bishop of Ossory. It was probably also at this point that the first steps were taken to establish a new settlement and port on the River Barrow – the main waterway that wound its way inland through Leinster – that was christened Newtown (almost certainly on the site of modern New Ross). This would be a major development, designed to offer Leinster its own centre of communication and trade, independent of the local crown-held ports of Wexford and Waterford.

  Marshal also set in motion plans to establish two new Cistercian monasteries in Leinster: one, a colony of Tintern (on the Welsh March) named Tintern Parva, was founded in thanks to God for surviving the recent crossing from Wales; and another was initiated at Duiske. All in all, it was hardly a disastrous first venture on to Irish soil, but in the main William’s appearance was greeted with grudging acknowledgement, not open welcome. During the spring of 1201, the bulk of the Marshal party returned to the mainland. William’s well-established household knight Geoffrey FitzRobert was left behind to oversee his lord’s interests in Leinster, serving as seneschal (or steward). Geoffrey’s marriage to Strongbow’s illegitimate daughter Basilia may have enhanced the legitimacy of his position in the eyes of the established colonists. William took the further step of sending his nephew John Marshal to assist in the governance of Leinster in 1204, probably for the term of one year.

  In reality, all of these measures represented somewhat desultory or intermittent attempts to engage with affairs in his western lands, at a time when the main focus of Marshal’s energy and ambition remained in England and France. Even so, these forays must have opened William’s eyes both to the rich potential of a region like Leinster and to the significant commitment of time and resources required to bring the province to heel. After the fall of Normandy and his withdrawal from court, Marshal was at last willing to make that determined effort.