Fulk FitzWarin

Fulk FitzWarin, variant spellings (Latinized Fulco filius Garini, Welsh Syr ffwg ap Gwarin), the third (Fulk III), was a prominent representative of a marcher family associated especially with estates in Shropshire (on the English border with Wales) and at Alveston in Gloucestershire. In young life (c. 1200–1203), early in the reign of King John (1199–1216), 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 (1251–1315). 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 (who appears in the Romance of Fouke le Fitz Waryn as "Warin de Meer") 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 (1066-1087). Neither he nor his sons were then tenants-in-chief (i.e. important vassals or feudal barons): their estates were granted by later kings.