Hugh De Lacy, First Earl of Ulster: Rising and Falling in Angevin Ireland, by Daniel Brown (Woodbridge: the Boydell P., 2016; Pp
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1582 BOOK REVIEWS Antioch after 1130 (this issue is addressed on pp. 71–4). Moreover, while Buck has rightly avoided duplicating developments covered by Asbridge, perhaps a slightly fuller summary of the circumstances of the foundation and the early history of the principality down to 1130 may have provided a greater level of contextualisation for those readers with only a limited familiarity with the history of the Latin states in the Near East. Nevertheless, the book makes an important contribution to historical writing on those states by advocating the insights which may be gained from expanding the scope of enquiry beyond the kingdom of Jerusalem. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/133/565/1582/5106184 by guest on 01 October 2021 SIMON JOHN doi:10.1093/ehr/cey286 Swansea University Hugh de Lacy, First Earl of Ulster: Rising and Falling in Angevin Ireland, by Daniel Brown (Woodbridge: The Boydell P., 2016; pp. xviii + 309. £70). For many decades after the publication of G.H. Orpen’s pioneering four- volume Ireland under the Normans, 1169−1333 (1911−20), thirteenth-century Ireland received little attention from historians. The period lacked the obvious narrative shape of the initial conquests, dramatised by Gerald of Wales; and a story of intensifying English domination was unlikely to appeal to readers in the fledgling Irish Free State. Since the 1990s, this scholarly wasteland has begun to be cultivated, and the colonising aristocracy given their due, notably in the work of David Crouch and others on the Marshals, and in Colin Veach’s study of the de Lacy lords of Meath, father and elder brother of the subject of the present book (2014; rev. ante, cxxx [2015], 1524−5). Hugh I de Lacy (d. 1186), like John de Courcy and others of the first generation, was given a human face by Gerald of Wales; he lingered in the imagination of colonial and native writers into the sixteenth century. Hugh II, earl of Ulster (d. 1242), by contrast, figured, if at all, as the unscrupulous agent of de Courcy’s fall. Yet, as Daniel Brown shows, in a closely argued and penetrating study, Hugh’s career was remarkable. Lacking lands in England or Wales that could be distrained, he was, for Angevin rulers, something of a loose cannon. He received limited endowments in Ireland from Walter, his elder brother, but essentially made his way through an unstable mixture of royal patronage and ruthless self- help. Before 1199, a marriage with the sister of Thomas de Verdon brought him lands in Uriel (Co. Louth), with the promise of equal shares in future conquests. In the early 1200s, he displaced de Courcy in Antrim and Down, and in 1205 at Winchester was belted earl of Ulster by John, becoming the first earl with an Irish territorial designation. He fell foul of the king (whose chancery rapidly ceased addressing him as ‘earl of Ulster’ just as his own charters were placarding his comital status) and was driven out of Ireland by John’s whirlwind campaign of 1210. Fleeing by way of Scotland to France, he exploited an existing connection with Simon de Montfort, and joined in the Albigensian crusade, service rewarded with lands and castles in Languedoc. He returned to the British Isles around 1221, and spent several years trying to regain Ulster by force and through eclectic alliances stretching from Wales and EHR, CXXXIII. 565 (December 2018) BOOK REVIEWS 1583 Chester to the Hebrides and Orkney. Eventually restored by Henry III in 1227, he remained active for a further fifteen years, consolidating his grip on his earldom through castle-building and religious patronage, and by campaigning beyond its frontiers. A satisfying study of such a figure must blend two things: a grasp of the multiple, overlapping cultural and political contexts within which he moved; and a command of the patchy and laconic evidence through which he may be glimpsed. Daniel Brown succeeds on both counts. He follows de Lacy sure- footedly through many worlds, each with its specialist historiography. While Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/133/565/1582/5106184 by guest on 01 October 2021 he nods towards the ‘identity’ industry—describing Hugh as operating ‘to his own advantage, … in the spaces between selves’ (p. 208)—his approach is empirical and his style mostly jargon-free. He draws upon literary evidence to explore aristocratic codes of behaviour, and has interesting things to say about the differences (not insurmountable) between the ‘parlances of power’ (p. 59) in Anglo-French society and the marks of authority in Gaelic Ireland. His forays into the various political spheres in which de Lacy moved are thought- provoking. For example, Hugh’s decade of ‘exile’, when he abandoned his comital style and the Angevin allegiance, saw him occupy a lordship to the north and west of Carcassonne, in an environment that had some similarities to his Irish habitat. Brown argues that it was only the collapse of the Montfortian regime in Toulouse that led him to turn again to Ireland. The core of the book is a close study of what can be recovered of the texts of Hugh’s charters: thirty deeds and notices of ten further lost acts are printed and analysed in lengthy appendices. Together with the English royal records and the Gaelic annals, the charters are used to reconstruct key episodes of his career. The analysis inevitably involves minutely detailed arguments, involving such matters as the dating of documents and the identification of obscure place-names. Perhaps aware of the demands he is placing on his readers, Brown signposts his text with frequent pithy sub-headings (I liked ‘Regime change in Ulster’). Additional maps and genealogical tables might have made parts of the discussion, such as those involving the lordship of Bréifne and relations with the competing branches of the Ua Conchobair dynasty of Connacht, more approachable for readers unversed in Irish topography and royal pedigrees. Inevitably, interpretations of such fragmentary evidence are often speculative; Brown advances his arguments with caution as well as ingenuity, and is courteous towards those with whom he disagrees. One effect of his close scrutiny is to knock away inherited assumptions and open up fresh possibilities. For instance, he rejects the familiar view that King John plotted the downfall of John de Courcy, using Hugh de Lacy as his instrument and rewarding him with an earldom. The undermining of de Courcy was, he argues, Hugh’s own project, while the grant of the earldom arose from the specific political situation in May 1205: John’s need for support after the military collapse in France and for a balance to the power in Ireland of William Marshal, whose allegiance seemed uncertain. Brown is comfortable with the contingent and the accidental; his book opens with the rota Fortunae. He has produced an absorbing study of a knight who rode his luck boldly at a time when Fortune’s wheel revolved with dizzying velocity amid the political turmoil of John’s reign and its protracted aftermath. ROBIN FRAME doi:10.1093/ehr/cey281 University of Durham EHR, CXXXIII. 565 (December 2018).