Conclusion

Summary

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).