[3] Following his mother's death in March 1220, Richard Marshal came into her considerable Norman lands centered on the castles of Longueville and Orbec.

However, his parents did not take the opportunity in their final dispositions to resolve the problem of the divided Marshal allegiance between the kings of England and France, as Richard was also allotted an English lordship of Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire.

Richard was able to use the marriage to secure control of Gervasia's claims to the manors of Ringwood in Hampshire and Burton Latimer in Northamptonshire.

As it happened, the earl contracted an illness after his return from Brittany in 1231 and died childless on 6 April, leaving the earldom to Richard.

[5] King Henry III was as good as his word to the late earl and readily welcomed Richard Marshal into his court on his arrival in England on 25 July 1231.

It was the new earl's bad fortune that his brother's death helped clear the way for King John's exiled favourite, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, to return to England, and plot the downfall of the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh.

Peter de Maulay, one of Des Roches's foreign followers, demanded a manor back which had passed in the meantime to Basset.

With Welsh support, in mid-October 1233, his army swept across South Wales, besieging and seizing the castles of Usk, Abergavenny, Newport and Cardiff in quick succession.

According to the chronicler Roger of Wendover in his Flores Historiarum (Flowers of History), Marshal and his knights then came to Monmouth to reconnoitre the town before besieging it.

It may have been the stalemate in the war in England that persuaded Earl Richard to sail for Ireland on 2 February 1234, finding his province of Leinster to be loyal and committed.