6 - Restoration: Comes and Colony, 1227–42

Summary

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.