General Notes

ARNOLD DE MONTGOMERY who in the reign of William II with a party of knights invaded Pembrokeshire and conquered it; seems to have been created Earl of Pembroke; in the reign of Henry I erected a slender fortress at Penbrock, "the head of the estuary or brook adjoining the territory of Ros, and which is separated from it by an arm of the sea," and which, upon returning to England, he consigned to the care of Geraldus de Windsor, his Constable and Lieutenant-General, a worthy and discreet man and the ancestor of the Geraldines of Ireland; granted much land in Pembrokeshire to the mother church at St. Martin's at Seez; gave to St. Martin's the church of St. Nicholas, within the walls of the castle at Pembroke, in 1098, which was afterwards erected into a priory by William Mareschal; married Lapracoth, daughter of Murrough, King of Leinster (ped. 161), and appears to have played an important part in the wars between the Norwegians and the Irish; for a long time resided with Robert de Belesme but, having lost the whole of his estates through joining in his rebellion, he appears to have quarreled with him and to have gone over to the party of the Duke of Normandy, to whom he ceded the Castle of Almeneches, which he had taken by surprise, and collected about him many of his brother's partisans; the following year, notwithstanding his supposed forfeiture, he seems to have still been in possession of his Welsh estates, for it is asserted that the Irish, terrified at the power of the Norwegian King, called in the aid of the Normans and that Arnold and the men of Pembroke hastened to bring them succor; at this time, apparently, Governor of Pembroke Castle in Milford Haven. The Irish entrapped the Norwegian King Magnus and killed him through treachery and even attempted to massacre the Normans, resolving to kill Arnold as the reward of his allegiance, and the King actually carried off Arnold's wife, his own daughter, and married her to one of his own relations. Arnold discovered in time the treachery of the Irish and made his escape from the country and Ordericus relates that for twenty years afterwards he wandered abroad a homeless man. We hear again of Arnold in Normandy in 1118, when Stephen, Earl of Moreton, who held the Castle of Alencon for King Henry, so offended the inhabitants that they implored the aid of Fulk, Earl of Anjou. Arnold was their envoy on this occasion. Ordericus relates that, true to his early love, he rashly returned to ireland some twenty years after he was so badly treated there and became reconciled with the King, according to appearances, and married the princess of his love, from which it would seem that on the former occasion she had only been betrothed to him. "On the morrow of his nuptials he fell asleep after a banquet and, shortly expiring, left the guests to listen to funeral dirges instead of an epithalamium."

(*)Yeatman's History of the House of Arundel, pp. 8, 56.