in the charter as ‘aldermanus mercatorum Alemaniæ in Angliam venientium’ (ib. Urkunden, p. 13). This then seems to have been the office recently restored to him by the king. It is often thought he was also the regular alderman of a ward, though which ward is unknown. Immediately afterwards the grant of fresh privileges to the Germans in London, on the petition of Richard, king of the Romans, seems to have followed (17 June 1260).
Arnold next distinguished himself by his strong hostility to the democratic mayor, Thomas Fitzthomas. He and his friends only escaped a plot for their destruction by the arrival of the news of the battle of Evesham (4 Aug.), in the middle of the folk-moot at which the attack was to have been made. This was on Thursday, 6 Aug. 1265. Arnold's loyalty did not, however, save him from paying a heavy share in the fines imposed by the victorious king on the rebellious city. At last he got royal letters which protected him from further exactions. Many years later the city of Bremen complained that even one of Arnold's servants, Hermann, a Bremen citizen, had been severely fined on the same account, and that his resistance had caused a feud between London and Bremen (Fœdera, i. 534). In 1270 the chest containing the city archives (scrinium civium) was under Arnold's care, while three other citizens held the keys of it. In 1274 Arnold was among those who resisted the validity of the charters granted by the mayor, Walter Hervey, without the consent of the aldermen and ‘discretiores’ of the city. They gained their point, and got Hervey removed from his aldermanship.
Nearly all our knowledge of Arnold's acts comes from the ‘Chronica Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum,’ contained in the so-called ‘Liber de Antiquis Legibus’ in the Guildhall, and edited by Mr. Stapleton for the Camden Society in 1846. The special particularity with which his birth, family, and adventures are recorded, the scrupulous absence of comment on him, yet the apologetic tone of the references to his acts, have given rise to the conjecture that he is himself its author. The full references to his patron, Richard, king of the Romans, increase the probability. The entrusting of the city archives to him just before the time that the chronicle, which contains a large number of official documents, closes, makes this as near a certainty as can be gathered from merely indirect internal evidence. The chronicle breaks off in August 1274 with the preparations for Edward I's coronation. He must have died before 10 Feb. 1275, on which date his will was read and enrolled in the Hustings court (Riley, Introduction to Chronicle of the Mayors, &c., p. ix). He left part of his property in the city to the monks of Bermondsey, and to his kinsman, Stephen Eswy, for his own use and for that of Arnold's wife. The latter's name was probably Dionysia, who married Adam the Taylor after Arnold's death, and was alive in 1292. Another ‘alderman of the Germans’ appears as holding office in 1282. Dr. Lappenberg's conjecture (p. 16) that he was alive in 1292, and even (p. 156) in 1302, is sufficiently disproved by the date of his birth. There is no reference in the chronicle to Arnold's wife or children, but a John Thedmar appears as a witness in 1286 (Placita de quo warranto 14 Ed. I), and again acts as an executor in 1309.
[Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Camden Soc.), pp. 34, 37, 43, 115, 165, 238–42, 253; Riley's Chronicles of the Mayors and Sheriffs of London, the above translated, with notes and illustrations; Lappenberg's Urkundliche Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhofes zu London, pp. 11, 14–16, 156, and Urkunden, p. 13; Hardy's Descriptive Cat. of Manuscript Materials for Hist. of Great Britain and Ireland, iii. 205.]
FITZTHOMAS, JOHN, first Earl of Kildare and sixth Baron of Offaly (d. 1316), belonged to the great Anglo-Irish family of the Fitzgeralds, though the genealogies are contradictory. The Earl of Kildare (Earls of Kildare, pp. 15–22) makes him grandson of Maurice Fitzgerald II [q. v.], the justiciar, who died in 1257, and so far the descent is undoubted. In all probability his father was the justiciar's younger son, Thomas Macmaurice, whose death the Irish ‘Annals’ enter as taking place at Lough Mask Castle, co. Mayo, in 1271 (Loch Cé, p. 469). In 1287 died Gerald Fitzmaurice (Clyn, p. 10), who was this Thomas's grandnephew, and being descended from Thomas's eldest brother Gerald, had come to own Offaly and Maynooth [see Fitzgerald, Maurice, 1194?–1257 ad fin.] On Gerald Fitzmaurice's death (1287) he bequeathed this inheritance to John Fitzthomas, his granduncle's son and his own first cousin once removed.
Besides the inheritance of this cousin, John Fitzthomas seems about the same time to have come in for that of his first cousin, Amabilia, one of the two coheirs of his uncle Maurice Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald [q. v.], the justiciar, who died in 1277 (Sweetman, ib.; Cal. Gen. ib.) He makes his first appearance in the receipt rolls of the Irish exchequer in connection with a payment of 50l. from co. Limerick through his more distant kinsman, Thomas Fitzmaurice, the father of Maurice
