Ralph was a frequent witness on royal charters, and during the last years of Henry's reign was also responsible for the maintenance of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was incarcerated in house arrest by the king.
[3] In 1184, Henry II summoned Ralph as a Serjeant-at-law, one of the first identifiable members of that order in the historical record.
[3] Sometime between 1186 and 1190, Ralph granted a third of a knight's fee at Potterspury in Northamptonshire to Geoffrey fitzPeter, another royal official.
According to the historian Katharine Keats-Rohan, the marriage took place sometime before 1177, as on that date he was given the forestership of Sherwood Forest which had been held by Robert de Calz.
[2] But Julia Boorman in Ralph's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says the marriage occurred around 1184 or 1185.