Welsh Journals

Richard Strongbow was a scion of the house of Clare, one of the most powerful families of medieval England. He was the son of Gilbert fitzGilbert of Clare, whom king Stephen had made earl of Pembroke in 1138 and who died in 1148, and the great-nephew of Walter fitzRichard of Clare (died 1138). Sometime before 1119 king Henry I had given to Walter a lordship in Nether Gwent2 centred on the castle at Chepstow and it was there that he founded Tintern Abbey in 1131. Also included in the king's grant was a large barony in England that had belonged (like Chepstow and its associated lands) to William d'Eu, who had forfeited his barony in 1096 for treason. Chepstow Castle had been built by William fitzOsbern, earl of Hereford, between 1067 and 1071. fitzOsbern had carried Norman arms into Gwent, to the river Usk and to Caerleon beyond it. Chepstow he gave in fee to Ralph de Limesy and after Ralph lost his lands for joining the unsuccessful rebellion of William fitzOsbern's son, Roger, in 1075 it was given by the king to William d'Eu. Strongbow himself had been earl of Pembroke after the death of his father, but when Henry II came to the throne in 1154 he took the earldom and county of Pembroke from him under the terms of the Westminster treaty of the previous year. He also refused to restore to him the Norman lands at Bienfaite and Orbec his father had inherited from Walter fitzRichard4 and which had been taken from earl Gilbert in 1144 when Henry's own father, count Geoffrey of Anjou, conquered Normandy. He did, however, restore to him the Norman lands his father had had before he inherited Bienfaite and Orbec, but the loss of lands, revenues and title he had already incurred at the king's hands was for a long time a source of friction between the two men, and was one of the reasons why Strongbow responded in 1170 to the request by Dermot MacMurragh, exiled king of Leinster, to restore him to his Irish throne.5 One of the men who went to Ireland with Strongbow was Walter Bluet, and the tradition that Strongbow gave Raglan to him as reward for his services there6 is probably well-founded. Walter's continental origins were at Ivry-la-Bataille (dept. Eure), which lay in the south of Normandy, right on the border with the French king's domain, so they were experienced frontiersmen. He was the grandson or great-grandson of Ralph (I) Bluet, who probably came to England in the military household of William fitzOsbern, a man who had a claim to Ivry through his mother and who was a distant kinsman. Ralph was possibly also a kinsman Robert Bloet or Bluet, chancellor to William the Conqueror and bishop of Lincoln from 1093 until his death in 1123.7 The Conqueror's creation of an earldom based on Hereford for William in 1067 saw Ralph settled in the west of England on lands that belonged to the lords of Chepstow, first fitzOsbern, then Ralph de Limesy and finally William d'Eu. William d'Eu had Chepstow Castle in 1086 and Ralph was then his subtenant on several English manors that owed their feudal services at the castle. These manors were at Daglingworth (Gloucestershire), Silchester (Hampshire), Hinton Blewitt