Fulk FitzWarin
Fulk FitzWarin, variant spellings, the third, was a prominent representative of a marcher family associated especially with estates in Shropshire and at Alveston in Gloucestershire. In young life, early in the reign of King John, he won notoriety as the outlawed leader of a roving force striving to recover his familial right to Whittington Castle in Shropshire, which John had granted away to a Welsh claimant. Progressively rehabilitated, and enjoying his lordship, he endured further setbacks in 1215–1217.
Thereafter, his connections with the court of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his usefulness to the English king placed him in the midst of a larger conflict in which he lost Whittington to Llywelyn for a year in 1223–1224, though that prince was said to have married his daughter. During the 1220s Fulk founded Alberbury Priory in Shropshire, which became the smallest and last established of the three English houses dependent upon the Order of Grandmont. Always ready to defend his rights, Fulk lived to a ripe old age and was buried at Alberbury beside his two wives, leaving heirs and daughters and a plentiful posterity among whom the name of Fulk FitzWarin was continuously renewed in later centuries. His grandson was Fulk V FitzWarin, 1st Baron FitzWarin.
After his death, Fulk became the subject of a popular "ancestral romance" in French verse, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, relating his life as an outlaw and his struggle to regain his patrimony from the king. This survives in a prose version, and combines historical material with legendary and fantastical elements which are heroic rather than strictly biographical.
Origins
Although the name Fitz Warin means "son of Warin", it was Fulk's grandfather, Fulk I FitzWarin, whose father's name was Warin, or Guarine, of Metz, in Lorraine. Warin is, however, a "shadowy or mythical figure" about whom little is known. Whatever his origin, the head of this family is generally held to have come to England during the reign of William the Conqueror. Neither he nor his sons were then tenants-in-chief : their estates were granted by later kings.Fulk I was associated with the Peverels: William Peverel the Younger granted him a knight's fee in Tadlow, Cambridgeshire, before 1148 which King Henry II confirmed in 1154. Henry rewarded Fulk I for his support of the Empress Matilda during the civil war by conferring upon him the royal manor of Alveston in Gloucestershire and the manor of Whadborough in Loddington, Leicestershire. His son Fulk II held those properties after the death of his father in 1171. In the time of Robert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford, Fulk II gave land at Tadlow to Shrewsbury Abbey to settle a controversy over the patronage of the church of Alberbury, Shropshire, in his own favour. The FitzWarin land tenure at Alberbury, held from the Fee of Caus, was therefore presumably already in place.
At some time before 1178 Fulk II married Hawise, one of the two daughters and co-heirs of Josce de Dinan and his wife Sybil, widow of Pain fitzJohn. Josce had held Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches for the Empress Matilda during the civil war, but it was not expedient for Henry II to confirm Ludlow to Josce, and in place thereof, he granted to him the large manorial estate of Lambourn in Berkshire, with its appurtenances, amounting to a considerable value. Josce died by 1167, and Lambourn became the inheritance, in two parts, of his daughters Hawise and Sybil. Fulk II and Hawise de Dinan were the parents of Fulk FitzWarin III.
;How John and Fulk came to blows
The FitzWaryn Romance tells that Fulk II and Hawise lived in proximity to the king, and had sons Fulk, William, Philip, John and Alan. It further states that young Fulk was bred with the four sons of King Henry, who all loved him except for Prince John : Fouke le jeouene fust norry ou les iiij. fitz Henré le roy, et mout amé de tous, estre de Johan... The story goes that Fulk and John quarrelled over a game of chess: John struck Fulk over the head with the chessboard, whereat Fulk's foot made a connection with the prince's abdomen, and John fell back, banging his head against the wall. John went off to tell his father, who had him beaten for complaining.
This merry episode reflects a truth, for John was brought up under the tutelage of Ranulf de Glanvill, as were Ranulf's nephews Hubert Walter and Theobald Walter, with whom, Fulk III later became closely connected by marriage. The milieus of the English royal court and the princely courts of Wales are never far distant from Fulk's story.
Career
The lordship of Whittington
Fulk II encountered many problems in receiving his capital patrimony and other claimed lands. Among the latter was Whittington Castle, a site north-east of Oswestry which had been fortified by William Peverel the younger in 1138 in support of Empress Matilda. Fulk I, it is supposed, had held this from the Honour of Peverel. The Castle stands on the English side of Offa's Dyke, the ancient boundary between England and Wales. During the late 1140s the lordship of Whittington, as with Oswestry and Overton, was ceded from English authority and became a Welsh marcher lordship within the Kingdom of Powys.In 1165 Henry II granted the castle of Whittington to Roger de Powys, a Welsh leader, and in about 1173 gave him funds for its repair. Fulk II successfully claimed for the restitution of Whittington, a judgement mentioned in the Pipe Roll for 1195 when he owed a Fine of 40 marks to have seisin: but he never paid this, and was dead by 1197. It, therefore, remained in Welsh hands. Fulk III then renewed his father's claim, and in 1197 offered relief of £100 for it as his inheritance. However, on 11 April 1200 King John granted it to Meurig, son of Roger of Powis, who had offered half that sum. Again, after Maurice's death in August 1200, King John granted it to Maurice's son Werennoc.
Rebellion and outlawry
Whether John's refusal to honour Fulk's hereditary claim to Whittington was personal or political, it was this which by April 1201 drove Fulk openly into armed defiance of the king. He was accompanied by approximately fifty-two followers including his brothers William, Phillip and John, by his cousins, and by the family's many tenants and allies in the Marches. Although it is an important element in the Romance of Fouke, the uprising is not described in detail by more formal chroniclers.It was sufficiently troublesome, however, that when in the spring of 1201 King John crossed into Normandy and Poitou to suppress a revolt by the Lusignans, he assigned 100 knights to Hubert de Burgh with instructions for him to put down the activities of Fulk and his band, and those of a renegade in Devon. The Annales Cestrienses tell that in 1202 Fulk was obliged to make his escape by sea, and, having got away with a few of his followers, took refuge in Stanley Abbey near Chippenham, Wiltshire. There he was besieged by the king's forces, after which Archbishop Hubert Walter with a number of the clergy got him away and kept him for some time in his court. Then Fulk set off quietly with many armed men to join the king of France.
Pardons were granted during that year for Eustace de Kivilly and Gilbert de Duure, for having been associated with him. Fulk himself seems to have had difficulty coming to terms with the king, for in 1203 there are three separate safe-conducts for him and his company to attend and leave the royal presence. In November 1203 he was pardoned together with over thirty of his followers. In October 1204, by a fine of 200 marks, Fulk at last received "right and inheritance" in Whittington. The castle thereafter descended in the FitzWarin family, all subsequent holders being named Fulk, until the death of Fulk, the 7th Baron FitzWarin, in 1420.
The first marriage
By 1207 Fulk III married Maud, daughter and heir of Robert le Vavasour, and widow of Theobald Walter, 1st Chief Butler of Ireland, who died late in 1205 in Ireland. Theobald, who was granted his Irish office in 1185 in service to Prince John's Lordship of Ireland, assisted his brother Hubert Walter in receiving the surrender of John's supporters in Lancaster in 1194. John, after his accession to the throne in 1199, in 1200 deprived Theobald of his lands and offices and did not restore them to him until 1202. His children included the second Theobald.Maud's dower included one-third of the lands Theobald had held from the king in Ireland, as well as of those in Norfolk and Lancashire: which were released immediately, but a dower from Theobald's lands in Amounderness was in the king's hand in 1215. For the huge fine of 1,200 marks levied upon Fulk for this marriage he secured pledges from his brother William and from Maud's father, a tenant of the feudal barony of Skipton in Yorkshire. The high regard in which Fulk was then held is shown by the names of his sureties, which included the Peverels, Alan Basset, William de Braose, a de Lacy, William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury and Henry de Bohun, 1st Earl of Hereford. In 1210 he accompanied the king to Ireland, and was at Dublin and Carrickfergus. In 1213 the king granted timbers from Leicester Forest to Fulk for his dwelling at the Vavasour hereditament of Narborough, Leicestershire, and for the construction of a chamber there.
On 9 February 1214, when King John again set sail for Poitou, Fulk was among the barons who accompanied him. He is believed to have been a vassal of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Gloucester at that time. In September of that year Fulk, Walter de Lacy and many others were with King John at Parthenay, to witness John's 5-year peace treaty with King Philip Augustus of France. Over the months immediately following he is found among the malcontent barons who, between their meetings at Bury St Edmunds in November and at the New Temple in January, sought to bring John to a realization of their grievances. By December 1215 Fulk's name appears in the list of English barons excommunicated by Pope Innocent III's bull, for his part in their opposition to the king.