than 15 July 1204. This further confirms the date of the decisive battle. On 31 Aug. (1204) the justiciar (Meiller FitzHenry) and Walter de Lacy, his assessor, were ordered to insist on his promised surrender under pain of total forfeiture (Pat. 6 John, m. 9), and the next day ‘the barons of Ulster’ were ordered to produce their lord as they valued their sons (his hostages) and their lands (ib.) It may be gathered, however, from the ‘Irish Annals’ (Four Masters; Clonmacnois) that John sought refuge with the Cenel-Eoghain in Tyrone, and that the safe-conduct offered him (Pat. 6 John, m. 7) in the autumn (21 Oct. 1204) failed to procure his surrender, for the De Lacys were duly assigned (13 Nov.) their share of his forfeited lands, and his hostages were still detained.
After lurking, however, for a while in Tyrone he appears to have changed his mind and accepted a safe-conduct (12 Feb. 1205) to the king (ib. m. 4), his submission being rewarded by the restoration of his small English estate (Claus. 7 John, m. 26). But his rival, Hugh de Lacy, followed him to court (March 1205), and obtaining a grant of the whole of Ulster (2 May), together with the title of earl (29 May), returned to Ireland in triumph (ib. mm. 22, 24). John at once flew to arms, and his English estate was again (22 May) seized and delivered to Warine FitzGerald (ib. m. 26). By the help of his brother-in-law, Ragnvald, king of Man (whom he had himself assisted some years before), he was soon at the head of a pirate fleet, recruited from the Norsemen of the isles. Landing at Strangford the allied chieftains feebly besieged the castle of ‘Rath,’ ravaging and plundering the country round till Walter de Lacy, arriving with his forces, scattered their host in utter rout, and John, after intriguing with the native tribes, fled finally from the scene of his triumphs (Annals of Loch Cé; Chronicle of Man). There would seem to be in the English records a solitary and incidental allusion to this attempt (Fin. 9 John, m. 12).
It is not till the close of 1207 that John reappears to view. He was then apparently with his native allies, for he received (14 Nov. 1207) a license (Pat. 9 John, m. 4) to come to England and stay with his friends (‘moretur cum amicis’), the king engaging not to expel him without forty days' notice. After this glimpse of him he again disappears till 1210, when he is found not only in favour with John, but even a pensioned courtier. The ‘Prestita and Liberate Rolls’ now frequently record his name, and he even accompanies John to Ireland (June 1210), where he is employed by him on several matters, and is despatched from Carrickfergus to Galloway to bring back with him the family of William de Braose (Liber Niger, p. 382). John's pension of 100l. a year enables us to trace his name in the records for some time longer, and on 30 Aug. 1213 the justiciar of Ireland is ordered to provide his wife Affreca with some land ‘unde possit sustentari’ (Claus. 15 John, pars 2, m. 7). Of himself we have a glimpse in letters of commendation for ‘John de Courci’ and his comrades, 20 June 1216 (Pat. 18 John, m. 7), and again in a writ to the sheriff of Yorks and Lincoln, to give him seisin of his lands, in November 1217 (Claus. 2 Hen. III, m. 15 dors.) It would seem that this is the last occasion on which he is referred to as alive; but there is in later years an incidental allusion (ib. 35 Hen. III, m. 1) to his having been ‘ever faithful’ to Henry and to his father, which probably implies that in the struggle with the barons he had embraced the royalist side. We may infer that he died shortly before 22 Sept. 1219, for on that day the justiciar of Ireland was ordered to provide his widow with her lawful dower (ib. 3 Hen. III, pars 2, m. 2). She was buried (Chronicle of Man) in her own Grey Abbey (dedicated to St. Mary ‘de Jugo Dei’), where ‘the remains of her effigy, carved in stone, with hands clasped in prayer, were in the last century to be seen in an arch of the wall on the gospel side of the high altar’ (Viceroys, p. 63). The conqueror of Ulster was bountiful to the church. In addition to his Benedictine priory at Ardes, and his benefactions to Down Abbey, he founded the priories of Neddrum and Toberglory, both in Ulster, the former as a cell to St. Bees, the latter to St. Mary of Carlisle, also Innis Abbey on the isle of Innis Courcy (Mon. Angl.)
John de Courci is usually stated to have died in 1210; this, which is taken from his legendary history, is but one of the strange misstatements which disfigure his received history. Another of these is the assertion that he was created earl of Ulster. This is repeated, it would seem, by all, even by the best, authorities, including Mr. Bagwell (Encyc. Brit.), Mr. Gilbert (Viceroys of Ireland), Mr. Walpole (History of Ireland), Mr. O'Connor (History of the Irish People), the ‘Liber Munerum,’ &c. &c., Mr. Lynch adding (Feudal Dignities of Ireland) that ‘the grant made on that occasion does not seem to have been enrolled’ (p. 145). It is, however, certain that this title was the invention of a late chronicler, and that it first appears in the ‘Book of Howth,’ where we read of ‘Sir John Courcey, earl and president [sic] of Ulster.’
So also with John's issue. We have the positive statement of Giraldus himself that
