at any future time acquire from our Welsh enemies, to the increase of his barony of Radnor.”[614] As the king was at the same time in diplomatic relations with several of the “enemies” whom William was thus authorized to despoil, this grant was of doubtful value. The same may be said of the grant of Thomond; this, however, was a speculation on both sides; William covenanted to pay the king five thousand marks for it at the rate of five hundred marks a year.[615] [Sidenote: 1201–1204] De Braose immediately went to Ireland;[616] and in process of time he succeeded in obtaining possession of the greater part of his new fief, though the difficulties with which he had to contend were many and great. The other persons who had previously received from John grants of land in Thomond[617] no doubt resented and resisted the change in their position from tenants-in-chief of the king to under-tenants of William de Braose. It seems that they were upheld in their resistance by the justiciar, Meiler Fitz-Henry, and that John in consequence summoned Meiler to his court, suspended him from his office, and put it into commission in December 1201. In August 1202 John issued further orders for enforcing the claims of De Braose in Thomond; in September he forgave him all the debts which he owed to King Henry and King Richard; in October he granted the entire custody of the lands and castles of Glamorgan, Gwenllwg and Gower to “William de Braose, whose service we greatly approve.”[618] In the winter William was with the king in Normandy, and had the custody of the captive Arthur. This he resigned, seemingly at the end of the year,[619] and in January 1203 he was in charge of some matters connected with the fleet.[620] [Sidenote: 1204–1206] Meanwhile the governor of Limerick city, William de Burgh, had escaped from the vengeance of the Irish allies whom he had betrayed, only to fall under that of the English justiciar whom he had set at defiance. Meiler Fitz-Henry had been restored to his post; in 1203 he and Walter de Lacy joined with the Irish of Connaught in expelling De Burgh from Limerick,[621] and on July 8 William de Braose was appointed by the king to succeed De Burgh as constable of the city.[622] Meiler and De Burgh had already appealed against each other to the king;[623] in March 1204 a commission was appointed to hear their reciprocal complaints;[624] in September all De Burgh’s Irish estates except those in Connaught were restored to him on his promise of “standing to right in the King’s Court of Ireland.”[625] There is no record of the trial, which may have been prevented by his death, for at the end of the year or in 1205 he died;[626] and on April 3, 1206 the justiciar was ordered to take all his Munster estates into the king’s hand.[627]