ABSTRACT
William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (or ‘the Marshal’ as he wasgenerally known in his own lifetime),1 was born some time around 1147 in Wiltshire, or perhaps Berkshire, in the reign of King Stephen. We do not know precisely when or where because his family was not then important enough for the fact to be thought worth mentioning by anyone. He was the fourth son (the second by his second marriage) of John Marshal, a court officer and minor baron, a man well connected but not overly wealthy. From these small beginnings William rose in his seventy-two or so years of life to be a great earl and marcher lord in Wales and Ireland, a man of European celebrity and, until his final illness, protector of England and the person of its boy-king Henry III.
