Meiler fitz Henry and the 1207 Royal Settlement of Desmond
Previous assessments of Meiler fitz Henry’s tenure as justiciar of Ireland (c.1198-1208) have tended to focus on his role in managing relations between the English Crown and its leading colonial magnates in Ireland. This thesis aims to broaden that narrow perspective and provide fresh insight into Meiler’s career by examining a set of land grants relating to Desmond (South Munster) that were issued by the Crown at the council of Woodstock in November 1207, and whose design owed much to fitz Henry’s influence and initiative. It begins with a brief overview of Meiler’s early career and rise to the office of justiciar, before discussing the policy he pursued in Desmond during the period 1200-08, where he curtailed baronial power and, from 1204, worked to augment royal authority and lay the groundwork for the introduction of shire government. The grants of 1207 marked the culmination of Meiler’s southern project. Each of the grantees ((I) David de la Roche, (II) Richard de Cogan, (III) Henry, Maurice, Eneas, and Audoen fitz Philip, (IV) Philip de Prendergast, and (V) Robert fitz Martin) are examined in turn. These men were all drawn from Meiler’s extended political circle, they and/or their family members often sharing with Meiler and his kinsmen origins in the Pembroke March and intimate links during the early years of the Irish conquest, which were subsequently bolstered by marriage, tenancy (including in Desmond), and service in fitz Henry’s government. As well as his Geraldine kinsmen, the grants reveal the importance of Meiler’s seldom-noted de Ridelesford relatives (the children of his sister, Mabel) in facilitating him to foster these personal and political connections. The deeds also demonstrate how Meiler and the Crown harnessed fitz Henry’s social network to win key supporters for the justiciar in his struggle against the baronial rebellion then ongoing in Ireland. Many of the grantees or their family members held strategic lands within the dissident liberties, not just in William Marshal’s lordship of Leinster, but also in and close to his earldom of Pembroke, and within William de Briouze’s honour of Limerick. Their support would expose the rebel lordships to royalist attack, and help Meiler and the Crown to maintain firm control over supply lines crossing the Irish Sea. Finally, in Desmond the new grants satisfied both the aims of royal policy and Meiler’s personal ambitions. Violating the existing tenurial structure, these enfeoffments were set to create a colonial community which enjoyed a direct relationship with the Crown and whose lands were open to intrusion by royal officials. Its new lords would primarily help to bolster the defences of the existing colony (and most importantly the city of Cork) against attack from the Gaelic Irish of southwest Munster, and, more ambitiously, by expanding into uncolonized territory, could work to unite the two disconnected zones of English Desmond (the settlement around Cork and its counterpart in Kerry) into one coherent territorial unit, crucial if western Desmond was to be adequately served by a single shire. At the same time the grants allowed Meiler to reward kinsmen and followers with land in this part of the Irish colony, and to benefit from its expansion in his attempts to secure and settle his own remote lands there. The issuing of the Woodstock grants, when coupled with the completion of the shiring of Desmond – one of the most important institutional developments in the history of the medieval Irish colony – around the same time, secured the legacy of this southern project, and may be used to recharacterize Meiler’s departure from office in 1208 in a more positive light than has hitherto been allowed.
Medieval Ireland, Irish history, British and Irish history, King John, Meiler fitz Henry, Anglo-Norman Ireland, Colonial government, Political history, Land grants
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