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See alsoAdomnán; Anglo-Norman Invasion;
Brigit; Céle Dé; Cogitosus; Colum Cille;
Devotional and Liturgical Literature;
Glendalough, Book of; Leinster,
Book of; Patrick
HEIRS AND HEIRESSES
SeeMarriage; Society, Functioning of
HENRY II
The accession of Henry II as king of England in 1154
resulted in not only a change of dynasty from Norman
to Angevin, but also a greatly expanded assemblage of
lordships and lands. To the cross-channel kingdom of
England and Normandy that had resulted from the
Norman conquest of England in 1066, was now added
the county of Anjou (whence the dynastic name
Angevin), where Henry succeeded his father; at the
same time, in right of his wife, Eleanor, whom he had
married in 1151, he also ruled Aquitaine and its asso-
ciated lands. Henry’s dominions thus stretched from
the Scottish border on its most northerly frontier to the
Pyrenees on its southernmost frontier, and his kingdom
had a more obviously European dimension and
encompassed a greater diversity of customary laws and
practices than the more-narrowly integrated Anglo-
Norman state that had been fashioned between 1066
and 1154.
Shortly after Henry’s accession as king, a royal
council at Winchester, attended by the ecclesiastical
and lay magnates of England, debated a prospective
conquest of Ireland, following which papal endorse-
ment was sought from the English-born pope, Adrian
IV, who in 1155 issued a papal privilege known as
Laudabiliter(“Laudably,” from the first word of the
text) which authorized Henry to enter Ireland in order
to advance the Christian faith among a people “still
untaught and barbarous.” The envoy sent to the papal
court was John of Salisbury, secretary to Theobald,
archbishop of Canterbury, and a personal friend of
Pope Adrian. In his Memoirs of the papal court, John
recounted how he secured the papal privilege from
Adrian and how, while in Rome, he had taken the
opportunity to inspect the papal archives for informa-
tion on the status of the Irish church. He also inciden-
tally revealed his animosity towards the Roman papal
legate, Cardinal John Paparo, who in 1152 had pre-
sided over a church synod at Kells and given papal
endorsement to an island-wide diocesan framework for
the Irish church under the primacy of the archbishop
of Armagh. A number of other contemporary English
and Norman chroniclers also commented adversely on
this decree of the Synod of Kells. Their dissatisfaction
derived from the circumstance that from the late elev-
enth century onwards archbishops of Canterbury had
consecrated a series of bishops for the Hiberno-Norse
towns of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick. The pri-
macy of Armagh endorsed by Paparo at the Synod of
Kells however precluded any further such consecra-
tions. It may be inferred—both from the emphasis on
Christian reformation and the circumstance that it was
John of Salisbury who traveled to Rome to petition the
pope—that a conquest of Ireland was mooted by the
church of Canterbury in 1154 and probably as a pos-
sible means of recovering its former influence in the
Hiberno-Norse towns. Henry may at first have been
prepared to countenance the proposal but, in the event,
he chose not to act on Laudabiliter. Pope Adrian was
not willing to reverse the decision on the independence
of the Irish church, while the justification offered for
papal authorization of a conquest of Ireland was a
claim to jurisdiction over islands, which the king may
not have found particularly palatable—Britain, after
all, was also an island. In any case, circumstances in
1155 were not particularly favorable for an overseas
military enterprise. Henry had succeeded to a kingdom
war-weary after nineteen years of civil strife, a faction-
alized aristocracy, and a greatly depleted exchequer;HAGIOGRAPHY AND MARTYROLOGIES