Courcy, John de

Courcy, John de (d. c.1219), conqueror of Ulster. Though possibly illegitimate, de Courcy was a member of a family who held lands in Somerset and elsewhere in England. We know little of his early life, but almost all of the many religious houses which he founded in Ulster were affiliated to monasteries in the north of England, especially Cumbria, which suggests that his background lay there, and many of his followers hailed from the same region. He came to Ireland with Henry II's deputy William Fitz Audelin in 1176, and became part of the Dublin garrison, where he assembled a force of 300 men and, apparently without royal licence, invaded the kingdom of Ulaid early in 1177. He seized Downpatrick, banished the king of Ulaid, and, in spite of a number of rebuffs, soon brought the province under his sway, helped, no doubt, by his marriage to Affreca, daughter of the king of Man and the Isles. He instituted an elaborate process of colonization, was a munificent patron of the church, and fostered devotion to the Irish saints, particularly Patrick. Though contemporaries styled him ‘prince of Ulster’, and he may have had pretensions to independent rule, he held the post of chief governor of Ireland intermittently between 1185 and 1195. From 1188 onwards he intervened in Connacht and elsewhere in alliance with the de Lacys of Meath, but by 1201 the latter had become his enemies and, after a number of unsuccessful attempts, they overthrew him in 1204. Hugh de Lacy was granted Ulster, and the title of earl which John had never held. De Courcy unsuccessfully invaded Ulster from the Isle of Man in 1205, and although he assisted King John in overthrowing Hugh de Lacy in 1210, he never recovered his Ulster lands and died in obscurity, apparently in 1219, leaving no known legitimate offspring.

Bibliography

Duffy, Seán , ‘The First Ulster Plantation: John de Courcy and the Men of Cumbria’, in T. B. Barry, R. F. Frame, and M. K. Simms (eds.), Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland (1995)

Seán Duffy