Cylchgronau Cymru

first being that of the gathering of the Marshal's armed supporters at Wycombe, not noticed by the chroniclers and first identified from the evidence of the Close Rolls by Powicke.3 The date of this intended demonstration in force is nowhere mentioned, but it must have taken place in late July 1233 and certainly before 3 August. It was clearly a complete fiasco and many potential supporters drew back on the brink of civil war. Henry III evidently had intelligence of those present or thought to have been present and ordered the seizure of their lands. In late August and September the rolls record the submissions of many of these men, the guarantees they gave of future loyalty and the restoration of their lands. It must have seemed to Henry III and his advisers that the danger had passed and that rebellion had been successfully averted. Otherwise the king would hardly have given Richard Marshal permission to go to Wales on 3 August,4 or continued with his preparations for a royal expedition to Ireland to settle accounts with Richard de Burgh, changing on that same day the final rendezvous of the royal fleet from Ilfracombe to, of all places, Milford Haven.s About 16 August the king became aware that all was not well, that rebels were continuing their defiance and that the Marshal and his followers were rallying in the lordship of Netherwent. That Richard Marshal, intent on further resistance, should have chosen to make his stand in the Welsh Marches is entirely understandable. His support in England had already been seriously eroded; the great honors of Long Crendon and Striguil might contain eighty or more knights' fees stretching across England from Bedfordshire to Gloucestershire, but they were not compact honors like those of the north. The Northerners of 1215 might have been comparatively weak in terms of knights' fees, but they were strong in possessing many stout castles.6 This was what the Marshal lacked in England. At the demesne manor of Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire three attempts had been made to build a motte and bailey castle. None was of any strength7 and could not have played the role of a Bytham or a Bedford. In Herefordshire Richard's brother Walter held Goodrich, already powerful before the additions of the later thirteenth century, but it stood isolated from the Marshal's main source of strength, Netherwent. This was a compact lordship with both strong natural defences and three powerful castles, 3 F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward (Oxford, 1947), I, 129. 4 Calendar of Patent Rolls [C.P.R.], 1232-47, p. 22. 5 Close Rolls [Close R.) 1231-34, pp. 318-19. 6 Holt, op. cit., p. 20. 7 D. J. C. King, Castellarium Anglicanum (New York, 1983), I, 11. « Ibid., p. 206.