APPENDIX 2 LAUDABILITER J. H. Round called the debate over Laudabiliter “one of the hottest historical controversies that this generation has known.”1 The bull would today be a non-issue was it not for Henry II’s eventual con- quest of Ireland sixteen years later in 1171. Since Henry’s expedi- tion constituted the first foray of the English crown into Ireland, the legitimacy of Laudabiliter has gained considerable attention in the last century. Some have argued that the bull was a medieval forgery, born out of hearsay, or perhaps penned by someone other than Hadrian IV. Because no copy of the bull itself survives, what is essen- tially at issue is the credibility of those authors who recorded its text Laudabiliter in their works.2 Laudabiliter granted Henry reforming privileges over the Irish Church in order to “expound the truth of the Christian faith to ignorant and barbarous peoples.”3 Attempts to Christianize ‘barbaric’ areas were common in the period after the First Crusade, with reforming efforts of both a religious and a military nature directed at other fringe areas such as the Baltic region.4 Henry thought at first to pre- sent Ireland to his brother William as a fief but never made the trip. The core argument for Hadrian’s approval of an Irish invasion is given in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, the lynchpin for the legal- ity of Henry’s conquest in 1171: It was in acquiescence to my petitions that Adrian granted and entrusted Ireland to the illustrious king of the English, Henry II, to be possessed by him and his heirs, as the papal letters still give evidence. This was by virtue of the fact that all islands are said to belong to the Roman Church, by an ancient right, based on the Donation of Constantine, 1 Round, Commune of London, 171. 2 See M. Richter, “The First Century of Anglo-Irish Relations,” History 59 (1974): 195–210. 3 EHD, 776. 4 E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: the Baltic Frontier and the Catholic Frontier, 1100–1525 (Minneapolis, 1980), 48–57. 238 appendix 2 who established and conceded this privilege. By me [Pope] Adrian dis- patched a golden ring, set with a magnificent emerald, whereby he invested [our] Henry II with the authority to rule Ireland.5 It is clear that John of Salisbury did indeed travel to Rome as part of Henry’s first embassy to Pope Hadrian.6 John’s familiarity with papal procedures is evident in his Historia Pontificalis, and a letter from John to Peter, abbot of Celle, states that John returned from Rome before 1156.7 The suggestion has been made that John per- haps traveled to represent the concerns of Canterbury, which fought to maintain its primacy over the four Irish archbishoprics, and therein lays the suspicion of tampering.8 Perhaps Henry also sought to cap- italize on his common ground with the only English pope, someone likely to accommodate his ambitions. Hadrian and Henry both took their positions in 1154, and the idea of two powerful contemporaries negotiating ecclesiastical reform is not so shocking; that the promi- nent John of Salisbury should broker the agreement and record it in writing is even less so. Metalogicon was published in 1159, soon after John’s disgrace before Henry in 1156–1157, and one wonders why he would have been so generous to the king if his claim were not true.9 There is also no evidence of palaeological interpolation of the passage into the surviving manuscripts of the Metalogicon.10 Despite having much to commend his trustworthiness, John of Salisbury ultimately neglected to copy the text of Laudabiliter itself. The copies of the bull at our disposal are found in Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica and Ralph Diceto’s Ymagines Historiarum, both com- posed several decades later.11 Giraldus goes a step further than Diceto and corroborates John of Salisbury’s story exactly. The bull com- 5 Metalogicon, 274–5. 6 Other notable members of the embassy were the bishops of Evreux, Lisieux and Le Mans, and the abbot of St. Albans; see E. A. D’Alton, History of Ireland, I: 236. 7 The Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume One, no. 31. 8 Bartlett, Norman and Angevin Kings, 100. 9 Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume One, 257–8. 10 Watt, Church in Medieval Ireland, 29–32; Orpen concurs in Ireland under the Normans, I: 291. 11 Expugnatio, 315–19; Ymagines Historiarum, I: 300–1. On Gerald’s account, see J. Gillingham, “The English Invasion of Ireland,” in The English in the Twelfth Century, 145–60..