William de Karlell

[3] They were apparently of fairly humble origins, as is suggested by the later complaint that William was not a fit person to arrest a member of the aristocratic Wellesley family.

[1] He became a prebendary of St Patrick's Cathedral the same year and later acquired numerous other prebends, including Ossory and Killaugy, County Wexford.

[8] Both were dismissed from office and summoned to England to answer before the English Privy Council for charges of "oppression and extortion" made by numerous members of the Anglo-Irish nobility, but no further action was taken against them.

[7] James Graves remarks that since the Catholic Church in the fourteenth century was the only body which could be relied on to produce highly educated men, clerics like the Karlell brothers were as much civil servants as priests.

[11] It may have been his activities on the Crown's behalf which caused his great unpopularity with the Anglo-Irish ruling class, and this, in turn, may explain the later charges of extortion which were made against him, especially in the mid-1370s, when he became identified with the bitterly resented Windsor regime.

In 1372 Sir William de Wellesley, High Sheriff of Kildare and ancestor of the 1st Duke of Wellington, was arrested for disobeying a summons to appear before Karlell, and in the following year, one Richard Bateman was found guilty of contempt of court for saying that Karlell was not fit to arrest one of Wellesley's rank, presumably due to his low social standing.

[5] The flood of complaints made against him in 1376 by numerous Anglo-Irish nobles certainly show him to have been unpopular and high-handed, but it remains unclear how much truth there was in the charges of extortion.