England under the Angevin Kings, Volume IINorgate, Kate
History
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II
Norgate, Kate
Anjou, House of; England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period, 1154-1216
Hurried, however, as was the king’s visit to England, it did its work
in bracing up the energies and determining the action of the vassals
who were faithful to him there. In personal and territorial importance
indeed these were very unequally matched with the rebels. The fidelity
of the Welsh princes, David Ap-Owen and Rees Ap-Griffith,[694] could
not balance the hostility of the King of Scots. Among the loyal English
barons, the most conspicuous were a group of the king’s immediate
kinsmen, none of whom however ranked high among the descendants of the
ducal house of Normandy:--his half-brother Earl Hameline of Warren,
his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, his cousin William of Gloucester;[695]
besides Earl William of Arundel the husband of his grandfather’s widow
Queen Adeliza, his son William, and his kinsman Richard of Aubigny. The
earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, was a son of that Geoffrey de
Mandeville who had accepted the earldom of Essex from both Stephen and
Matilda, and who had been one of the worst evil-doers in the civil war;
but the son was as loyal as the father was faithless; he seems indeed
to have been a close personal friend of the king, and to have well
deserved his friendship.[696] The loyalty of Earl Simon of Northampton
may have been quickened by his rivalry with David of Scotland for the
earldom of Huntingdon. That of William of Salisbury was an inheritance
from his father, Earl Patrick, who had earned his title by his services
to the Empress, and had fallen honourably at his post of governor of
Aquitaine in the rising of 1168. The loyal barons of lesser degree are
chiefly representatives of the class which half a century before had
been known as the “new men”--men who had risen by virtue of their
services in the work of the administration, either under Henry himself
or under his grandfather. Such were the justiciar Richard de Lucy
and the constable Humfrey de Bohun; William de Vesci, son of Eustace
Fitz-John, and like his father a mighty man in the north; his nephew
John, constable of Chester;--the whole house of Stuteville, with Robert
de Stuteville the sheriff of Yorkshire at its head;[697]--and Ralf
de Glanville,[698] sheriff of Lancashire, custodian of the honour of
Richmond,[699] and destined in a few years to wider fame as the worthy
successor of Richard de Lucy. The Glanvilles, the Stutevilles and the
de Vescis now wielded in Yorkshire as the king’s representatives the
influence which had been usurped there by William of Aumale before his
expulsion from Holderness; while in Northumberland a considerable share
of the power formerly exercised by the rebellious house of Mowbray had
passed to servants of the Crown such as Odelin de Umfraville[700] and
Bernard de Bailleul,[701] whose name in its English form of Balliol
became in after-times closely associated with that borne by two other
loyal northern barons--Robert and Adam de Bruce.[702] To the same class
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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