Nor was Fitz Aldelin the only royal official to do so: in 1181 two other administrators, John the Constable and Richard del Pec, exchanged Meiler’s custody of the castle of Kildare for the territory of Loígis 4. Fitz Aldelin’s chief concern according to Meiler’s kinsman, Giraldus Cambrensis, was to harass Meiler and his Geraldine relatives.
Following Strongbow’s premature death in April 1176, and the ensuing minority, Henry II dispatched the curial servant, William fitz Aldelin, to Ireland to administer Strongbow’s lordship. Meiler was one of the earliest adventurers to go to Ireland in 1169 and received his first landholdings in the lordship of Leinster from Richard fitz Gilbert, otherwise known as Strongbow, who granted Meiler the cantreds of Cairpre 2 and Conall 3, the latter being one of three cantreds that comprised the pre-Invasion kingdom of Uí Fáeláin in north Leinster. In 1187 the castle was demolishe (.)ĢIn order to appreciate the Irish context, it is necessary first to consider briefly the career of the king’s justiciar, Meiler fitz Henry. The History claimed that Meiler had never ma (.) The post-Invasion cantred equated with the pre-Invasion territor (.) The dispute is relevant to the theme of lordship arguably more important, however, than the circumstance of an intruding successor lord was a conflict between seignorial lordship and regnal lordship, that is, the prerogatives which King John as dominus Hiberniae was attempting to define in the Angevin lordship of Ireland (fig. The dissension between the two only becomes visible in the History of William Marshal when the Marshal crossed to his Irish lordship in 1207 and reliance on its account has obscured the fact that its origins predated the Marshal’s arrival in Ireland and extended beyond Leinster. While in no way gainsaying that successor lords may have faced disaffection from established tenants, an alternative reading of the Marshal’s dispute with Meiler fitz Henry is offered here.
In his excellent biography of William Marshal, David Crouch suggests that the conflict affords an example of an incoming successor lord encountering hostility from long-established tenants of a previous lord, from “old colonials” as Crouch described them 1.
The dispute, which climaxed in 1207–8, generated wide-scale warfare and resulted in the justiciar’s removal from office. This paper focuses on contested rights of lordship, as evidenced by a dispute between William Marshal as lord of Leinster and Meiler fitz Henry, the king’s justiciar in Ireland. 1Ireland, over which Henry II exerted a form of regnal lordship in 1171, was the most westerly limit of the Angevin dominions and it has remained something of a historiographical frontier within the espace Plantagenêt.