Hugh de Lacy (d. 1186) was born into the Hereford branch of the Lacy family, powerful landholders on the Welsh marches. He succeeded his father as Fourth Baron Lacy some time in the early 1160s, and campaigned in north Wales in the late 1160s. In October 1171, Hugh accompanied King Henry II to Ireland and was granted the former kingdom of Mide (for fifty knights’ service), as well as custody of Dublin city and castle; it was intended that his authority would balance the growing power of Richard de Clare (Strongbow) and probably also curb the capacity of the high king, Ruaidrf Ua Conchobair, to resist English settlement.
Following Henry’s return to England, Hugh set about consolidating his new lordship. At a meeting with Tigernan Ua Ruairc, king of Breifne, at the Hill of Ward in Co. Meath a violent quarrel broke out in which Ua Ruairc was slain. Each side accused the other of bad faith over the incident, but the removal of Ua Ruairc could not have hurt Hugh’s position in Meath. He returned to England before Christmas, and the following year was on campaign in Normandy in defense of King Henry during the rebellions of his sons in alliance with the king of France.
On his return to Ireland he was very active in securing his lands, building fortifications, and bringing in settlers from his English and Welsh estates. Such was his energy and ability that in 1177 he was appointed justiciar of Ireland. He chose Trim as his chief manor in Meath, where an earthen ringwork castle was soon succeeded by a stone keep. The "Song of Dermot and the Earl" gives a list of the chief men who settled as Hugh’s vassals. One of them, Gilbert de Nugent, married Hugh’s sister Roesia. Hugh also acquired a reputation for fair dealing with the native Irish, and encouraged them to remain as tenants under his lordship.
Hugh’s first wife, Rose de Monmouth, had died by 1180, and in this year he married a daughter of Ruaidrf Ua Conchobair. But this marriage (undertaken without King Henry’s permission) to the daughter of the last high king gave some the impression that Hugh had regal ambitions of his own. Such accusations were no doubt exaggerated, but Hugh was deprived of Dublin and recalled to England in 1181. He managed to reassure Henry of his loyalty, but when he was reinstated as justiciar the following year a royal clerk, Robert of Shrewsbury, was appointed to oversee his activities. When Henry’s young son John came to Ireland as the colony’s new lord, some commentators blamed Hugh for sabotaging the expedition, claiming he would not let the Irish pay tribute to John. Again the rumors against Hugh were probably overstated, but his power in Ireland by this time was unrivalled and he may well have felt reluctant to hand over his hard-won authority to a young and untested lord.
Hugh was beheaded in 1186 at Durrow by an agent of An tSionnach Ua Catharnaig; English chroniclers recorded that the English king was overjoyed at his death. But although it aroused royal jealousy, Hugh’s success was instrumental in firmly establishing the new colony. His chief heirs from his first marriage were Walter, who succeeded him as lord of Meath, and Hugh, who subsequently overthrew John de Courcy and was belted earl of Ulster by King John. From his marriage to Ua Conchobair’s daughter he had a son, William Gorm de Lacy. A postmortem dispute over the burial rights to Hugh’s body (not recovered from the Irish until 1195) led to his head being buried in Thomas’s abbey, Dublin, beside his wife, and his decapitated corpse being solemnly interred in Bective abbey, Co. Meath, a dispute only resolved in 1205, in favor of St. Thomas’s, where all of the remains were then reunited.
