Chapter V: The Angevin Empire (2)

The arrangement by which he endeavoured to make them carry it out is however not very easy to understand or to account for. He had long since abandoned his early scheme of devoting himself entirely to continental politics and making England over to the hands of his eldest son. That scheme, indeed, had been frustrated in the first instance by his quarrel with Thomas; although it seemed to have been revived in 1170, it was as a mere temporary expedient to meet a temporary need; and the revolt of 1173 put an end to it altogether, by proving clearly to Henry that he must never again venture to delegate his kingly power and authority to any one, even for a season. But, on the other hand, it is not easy at once to see why, during the years which followed, he persistently refused to give to his eldest son as much real, though subordinate, power on the continent as he was willing to give to the younger ones--why young Henry was not suffered to govern Anjou and Normandy as Richard was suffered to govern Aquitaine and Geoffrey to govern Britanny, so soon as they were old enough, under the control of their father as overlord. So far as we can venture to guess at the king’s motives, the most probable reason seems to be that he could not part with any share of authority over his ancestral dominions without parting at the same time with his ancestral dignities. From a strictly Angevin or Cenomannian point of view, Aquitaine and Britanny were both simply appendages, diversely acquired, to the hereditary Angevin and Cenomannian dominions. Nay, from a strictly Norman point of view, England itself was but an addition to the heritage of the Norman ducal house. Henry might make over all these to his sons as under-fiefs to govern in subjection to him, and yet retain intact his position as head of the sovereign houses of Normandy and Anjou. But to place his mother’s duchy and his father’s counties in other hands--to reduce them to the rank of under-fiefs, keeping for himself no closer connexion with them than a mere general overlordship--would have been, in principle, to renounce his birthright; while in practice, it would probably have been equivalent to complete abdication, as far as his continental empire was concerned. Henry would have had as little chance of enforcing his claim to overlordship without a territorial basis on which to rest it, as a German Emperor without his hereditary duchy of Saxony or Franconia or Suabia, or a French king without his royal domain. In short, when Henry found it impossible to give England to his eldest son, he had nothing else to give him, unless he gave him all; and Henry Fitz-Empress was no more inclined than William the Conqueror had been to “take off his clothes before he was ready to go to bed.” All his schemes for the distribution of his territories, therefore, from 1175 onwards, were intended solely to insure a fair partition among his sons after his own death; his general aim being that young Henry should step into exactly his own position as king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, and overlord of Britanny, Aquitaine, and all other dependencies of the Angevin and Norman coronets or of the English crown.

None of the holders of these dependencies, however, had as yet entered into full enjoyment of their possessions. At the close of their first revolt, in 1175, the young king was but just entering his twentieth year; Richard was in his eighteenth and Geoffrey in his seventeenth year; and although the one had been titular duke of Aquitaine and the other titular duke of Britanny since 1169, the real government of both duchies, as well as that of Normandy and Anjou, had been until now in the hands of their father. For the purposes of our story there is only one part of these continental possessions of our Angevin king into whose internal concerns we need enter at any great length; a very slight sketch may suffice for the others. The part which lay nearest to England, and which politically was most closely connected with it--the duchy of Normandy--was also associated with it in many of Henry’s legal, constitutional and administrative reforms. A comparison of dates indeed would almost suggest that Henry, when contemplating a great legal or administrative experiment in England, usually tried it first in Normandy in order to test its working there upon a small scale before he ventured on applying it to his island realm. An edict issued at Falaise in the Christmas-tide of 1159–1160, ordaining “that no dean should accuse any man without the evidence of neighbours who bore a good character, and that in the treatment of all causes, the magistrates of the several districts at their monthly courts should determine nothing without the witness of the neighbours, should do injustice to no man and inflict nothing to the prejudice of any, should maintain the peace, and should punish all robbers summarily,”[929] seems to contain a foreshadowing at once of some of the Constitutions of Clarendon which created such excitement in England four years afterwards, and of the Assize which followed two years later still. A commission of inquiry into the administration of the Norman episcopal sees and viscounties in 1162[930] was a sort of forerunner of the great inquest into the conduct of the English sheriffs in 1170. This again was followed next year, as we have seen, by an inquiry into the state of the ducal forests and demesnes,[931] which has its English parallels in the great forest assize of 1176 and in an inquest into the condition of the royal demesnes ordered in the spring of 1177.[932] On the other hand, a roll of the Norman tenants-in-chivalry compiled in 1172 seems to have been modelled upon the English “Black Book” of 1168;[933] and when Henry determined to institute a thorough reform in the whole Norman administration, it was at the English exchequer-table that he found his instrument for the work. In 1176 William de Courcy, the seneschal of Normandy, died. In his stead the king appointed Richard of Ilchester. Richard, to judge by his surname, must have been an Englishman by birth; from the second year of Henry’s reign he was employed as a “writer” in the royal treasury;[934] about 1163 he was made archdeacon of Poitiers, but his archidiaconal functions sat as lightly upon him as upon a contemporary whose name is often associated with his, Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury and vice-chancellor; and throughout the struggle with Archbishop Thomas he was one of the most active agents of Henry’s foreign diplomacy.[935] Unlike his colleagues Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, he contrived, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical disgrace in which he became involved through his dealings with the schismatic Emperor and the antipope, to retain the general respect of all parties among his fellow-countrymen.[936] Throughout the same period, when not absent from England on some diplomatic mission, he frequently appears as an acting justice of the King’s Court and baron of the Exchequer.[937] He continued to fulfil the same duties after his elevation to the see of Winchester in 1174; and the estimation in which he was held is shewn by the fact that on his return from Normandy, where he was replaced at the end of two years by William Fitz-Ralf,[938] a special seat was assigned to him at the exchequer-table between the presiding justiciar and the treasurer, “that he might diligently examine what was written on the roll.”[939] He was evidently invested with far more authority in Normandy than that which usually appertained to a Norman seneschal--authority, in fact, more like that of an English justiciar; indeed, he is actually called justiciar, and not seneschal, by contemporary English writers.[940] His work in the duchy seems to have been moreover specially connected with finance;[941] and we may perhaps venture to see a trace of his hand in the organization of the Norman Court of Exchequer, which first comes distinctly to light in Henry’s latter years, its earliest extant roll being that of the year 1180.[942] The earlier stages of the legal and administrative organization of Normandy are, however, so lost in obscurity that neither constitutional lawyers in Henry’s day nor constitutional historians in our own have been able to determine the exact historical relation of the Norman system to that of England;[943] and the speedy severance of the political connexion between them makes the determination of the question, after all, of little practical moment.

[929] Contin. Becc. (Delisle, _Rob. Torigni_, vol. ii. p. 180).
Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. pp. 459, 460.

[930] Rob. Torigni, a. 1162.

[931] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171. See above, p. 128.

[932] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 138.

[933] See above, p. 125.

[934] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II., pp. 30, 31; 4 Hen. II., pp. 121,
122 (Hunter); 5 Hen. II., p. 20; 6 Hen. II., p. 57; 7 Hen. II.,
p. 48; 8 Hen. II., p. 21 (Pipe Roll Soc.)

[935] See the Becket correspondence, _passim_.

[936] Except, of course, the immediate personal friends of the
archbishop, to whom he seems to have been even more obnoxious
than the “_archidiabolus_” Geoffrey Ridel--that is, supposing
Mr. Eyton to be right in his theory that Richard of Ilchester
is the person designated in the private letters of Thomas
and his friends as “Luscus.” Canon Robertson, however, took
“Luscus” to mean Richard de Lucy; but the other interpretation
seems on the whole more probable.

[937] Madox, _Formulare Anglic._, p. xix (a. 1165). Eyton,
_Itin. Hen. II._, p. 130 (a. 1168, 1169). He was one of two
custodians of the temporalities of the see of Lincoln during
the vacancy caused by Bishop Robert’s death in 1167; _ib._ p.
99, note 5, from Pipe Roll 12 Hen. II.

[938] See Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 100, and the
editor’s note 3.

[939] _Dialog. de Scacc._, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 178;
cf. _ib._ p. 184.

[940] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 124. “Curiâ sibi totius
Normanniæ deputatâ” says R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 415.

[941] R. Diceto as above.

[942] Edited by Mr. Stapleton for the Society of
Antiquaries--_Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniæ_, vol. i.

[943] _Dial. de Scacc._ as above, p. 176. Stubbs, _Constit.
Hist._, vol. i. p. 438.

Even more obscure than the internal history of Normandy under Henry II. is that of Anjou and of the two dependencies which may now be reckoned as one with it, Touraine and Maine. There is in his time throughout the whole of his dominions, with the marked exception of England, a dearth of historical records. Normandy cannot boast of a single historian such as those of the preceding generation, Orderic or William of Jumièges; the only Norman chronicle of any importance is that of Robert of Torigny, commonly known as “Robert _de Monte_,” from the Mont-St.-Michel of which he was abbot; and even his work is nothing more than a tolerably full and accurate chronicle of the old-fashioned type, arranged on the annalistic plan “according to the years of our Lord” which William of Malmesbury had condemned long ago. The Breton chronicles, always meagre, grow more meagre still as the years pass on; the same may be said of the chronicles of Tours; the “Acts of the bishops of Le Mans,” our sole native authority for the history of Maine, cease to record anything save purely ecclesiastical details. In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland; and indeed the half-blank pages of the few monastic chronicles which still dragged out a lingering existence in one or two of the great Angevin abbeys shew us that under Count Henry Fitz-Empress Anjou was once more, as of old under Count Fulk the Good, happy in having no history.

Yet it is there, and there alone, that we can catch a glimpse of one side of his character which, if we saw him only in England or in Normandy, we should hardly have discerned at all. Strange as it seems to us who know him in his northern realms only as the enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous politician, the stern and vigorous ruler, the hard-headed statesman, the uncompromising opponent of the Church’s claims, Henry is yet the one Angevin count who completely reproduced in his Marchland, as a living reality, the ideal which was represented there by the name of the good count-canon of Tours. Fulk the Black and Fulk the Fifth had both tried to reproduce it, each according to his lights, during those few years when the pressure of external politics and warfare left them free to devote their energies for a while to their country’s internal welfare. But Henry’s whole reign was, for his paternal dominions, a reign of peace. If we drew our ideas of him solely from the traces and traditions which he has left behind him there, we could never have guessed that he was a greater warrior than Fulk Nerra; we should rather have taken him for a quiet prince who, like Fulk the Good, “waged no wars.” These traces and traditions lie scattered over the soil of Anjou, Touraine and Maine as thickly as the traces and the traditions of the Black Count himself. Henry is in fact the only one of the later Angevin counts who made upon the imagination of his people an impression even approaching in vividness to that left by Fulk the Black, and of whose material works there remains anything which can be compared with those of the “great builder” of the preceding century. But the memory which Anjou has retained of Henry differs much in character from that which she has kept of Fulk; and it differs more widely still from that which Henry himself has left in his island-realm. In English popular tradition he appears simply as the hero of a foolish and discreditable romance, or as the man who first caused the murder of S. Thomas and then did penance at his grave; and material traces of him there are literally none, for of his English dwelling-places not one stone is left upon another, and not a single surviving monument of public utility, secular or ecclesiastical, is connected with his name. In the valley of the Loire it was far otherwise. There the two great Angevin builders share between them the credit of well-nigh all the more important monuments which give life to the medieval history of the land--except the military constructions, which belong to Fulk alone. It is not in donjons such as that of Loches or Montrichard, but in palaces and hospitals, bridges and embankments, that we see our Angevin king’s handiwork in his own home-lands. Almost every one of his many local capitals was adorned during his reign with a palace of regal dimensions and magnificence, reared by him in place of the lowlier “halls” which had served for the dwelling of the merely local rulers whom he succeeded. The rebuilding of the ducal palace at Rouen was begun in 1161;[944] that of Caen was nearly finished in 1180; its hall, which still exists, is the traditional seat of the Norman Exchequer.[945] At Tours a round tower which still stands in the barrack-yard is the sole surviving fragment of a castle which Henry is said to have built. His favourite abode in Touraine, however, was not at Tours but at Chinon, where the little fortress above the Vienne which had been the last conquest of Fulk Nerra and the lifelong prison of Geoffrey the Bearded grew under Henry’s hands into a royal retreat of exquisite beauty and splendour--a gem, even now in its ruin, worthy of its setting in the lovely valley of the Vienne, with the background of good greenwood which to Henry was probably its greatest charm. Angers, again, almost put on a new face in the course of Henry’s lifetime. In the year before his birth it had been visited by a fire which reduced to almost total ruin its whole south-western quarter, including the palace of the counts,[946] of which nothing but the great hall seems to have remained. The work of reconstruction, begun no doubt by Geoffrey Plantagenet, was completed on a regal scale by his son, and before the close of Henry’s reign a visitor from England, Ralf de Diceto, could gaze in admiration at the “vast palace,” with its “newly-built apartments, adorned with splendour befitting a king,” which rose at the foot of the vine-clad hills above the purple stream of Mayenne.[947]

[944] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

[945] _Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm._ (Stapleton), vol. i. p. 56.
_Ib._ Observ. pp. xxvii–xxviii.

[946] Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p.
144).

[947] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292 (_Hist. Com. Andeg._,
Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. 337).

But the count-king did not build for himself alone. It was, above all, with works of public usefulness that he delighted to adorn his realms. His beneficence indeed took a different shape from that of his predecessors. Church-building and abbey-founding met with little sympathy from him; throughout his whole dominions, only six religious houses, in the strict sense, could claim him as their founder; and even one of these was as much military as religious, for it was a commandery of knights Templars.[948] But no sovereign was ever more munificent in providing for the sick and needy. Not only do the Norman Exchequer-rolls contain frequent mention of sums set apart out of the ducal revenues for the support of lazar-houses and hospitals in the chief towns of the several bailiwicks;[949] nineteen years before the completion of his own palace at Caen, he had founded an hospital for lepers outside the walls of the town;[950] and a park and hunting-lodge which he had made for himself in the same year, 1161, at Quévilly by Rouen[951] were shortly afterwards given up by him to a colony of monks from Grandmont in Aquitaine, to be converted under their care into another great asylum for victims of the same disease.[952] At his own native Le Mans, the great hall of an almshouse or hospital outside the north-eastern boundary of the city, said to have been reared by him for the reception of its poor and sick folk, is still to be seen, though long since perverted to other uses. At Angers, on the other hand, it is only within the last half-century that the sick and disabled poor have exchanged for a more modern dwelling the shelter provided for them by Henry Fitz-Empress. Some time in the quiet years which followed the barons’ revolt, Stephen,[953] the seneschal of Anjou, bought of the abbess and convent of our Lady of Charity at Angers a plot of ground which lay between their abbey and the river, and on which he designed to build an hospice for the poor. In the last days of 1180 or the first days of 1181 the count-king took under his own care the work which his seneschal had begun, granted to the new hospital a rich endowment in lands and revenues, exempted it from secular charges and imposts, and won from Pope Alexander a confirmation of its spiritual independence.[954] Four priests were appointed to minister to the spiritual needs of its inmates; the care of their bodies was undertaken at first, it seems, by some pious laymen bound by no special rule; some years later, however, the hospital became, like most other establishments of the kind, affiliated to the Order of S. Augustine.[955] The pretty little chapel--dedicated to S. John the Baptist, and still standing,--the cloisters and the domestic offices were all finished before Henry’s death;[956] while of the two great pillared halls which now form the chief architectural glory of the suburb, one, the smaller and simpler, is clearly of his building; and the other, more vast and beautiful, is in all probability the last legacy of his sons to the home which was soon to be theirs no longer.[957]

[948] Founded in 1173, at Vaubourg in the forest of Roumare--an
old hunting-seat of his Norman grandfather; Stapleton, _Mag.
Rot. Scacc. Norm._, vol. i., Observ., p. cxli. Of the other
houses, three were Austin priories: S. Laurence at Beauvoir
in the forest of Lions, founded while Henry was still only
duke of Normandy (_ib._ p. cxiv); Newstead, in Sherwood
Forest, founded before 1174 (its foundation-charter, dated at
Clarendon, has no mention of day or year, but is witnessed
by “Geoffrey archdeacon of Canterbury,” who in 1174 became a
bishop; Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. p. 474); and
the priory “B. Mariæ Mellinensis,” near La Flèche, founded in
1180 (_Gall. Christ._, vol. xiv. col. 600. I cannot identify
this place). The other two were Carthusian houses, Witham
in the forest of Selwood and Le Liget in that of Loches,
founded respectively in 1174 and 1175. (The date of Le Liget
is traditional; I cannot find any mention of the place in
_Gall. Christ._) Of all these, Witham is the only one of any
consequence; and the importance of even Witham lies chiefly in
its connexion with S. Hugh. (For its history see _Magna Vita
S. Hugonis_, Dimock, pp. 52 _et seq._) The insignificance of
the others is shewn by Gerald’s account of Henry’s religious
foundations, in _De Instr. Princ._, dist. ii. c. 7 (Angl.
Christ. Soc., pp. 27, 28)--an account, however, which is by
no means fair. Henry on his absolution for S. Thomas’s death,
in 1172, promised to go on a crusade of three years’ duration
(Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 37); this undertaking he was
afterwards allowed to exchange for a promise that he would
build three religious houses in his dominions. According to
Gerald, he managed one of these by turning the nuns out of
Amesbury and putting a colony from Fontevraud in their place
(see _Gesta Hen._, Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 134–136, 165), and
another by turning the secular canons out of Waltham and
putting regulars in their place (_ib._ pp. 134, 135, 173, 174,
316, 317. Both these transactions took place in 1177.) “Tertium
vero,” says Gerald (as above) “vel nullum, vel simile prioribus
sibique prorsus inutile fecit; nisi forte domum conventualem
ordinis Cartusiensis de Witham, s. modicis sumptibus et exilem,
ad hoc fecisse dicatur.” No doubt Witham was one of the three.
But the other two are easily found; they were Newstead and
Vaubourg or Le Liget. R. Niger (Anstruther, p. 168) is as
unjust to Henry in this matter as Gerald; but so he is on most
others also.

[949] See Stapleton, _Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm._, vol. i.,
Observ., pp. lix., lxi., lxvii.

[950] _Ib._ p. ci. Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

[951] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161.

[952] See Stapleton as above, pp. cxlvi–cxlvii.

[953] Of Marçay--or Matha--or Turnham; authorities differ so
much as to his identity that I dare not venture upon adopting
either surname.

[954] C. Port, _Cartulaire de l’Hopital St. Jean d’Angers_, pp.
2–10, ii–vi.

[955] _Ib._ pp. 11–13.

[956] _Ib._ p. xiv.

[957] On the hospital-buildings see an article by M. D’Espinay
in _Revue de l’Anjou_, vol. xii. (1874), pp. 264–273.

This Hospice of S. John formed a third with Fulk Nerra’s abbey of S. Nicolas and Hildegard’s nunnery of our Lady of Charity in the group of pious and charitable foundations round which there gathered, on the meadows that bordered the right bank of the Mayenne, the suburb now known as Ronceray or La Doutre,--a suburb which even before the close of Henry’s reign had grown almost as populous as Angers itself, and was actually preferred to it as a residence by Ralf de Diceto.[958] Twice in Henry’s reign the bridge which linked it to the city was destroyed by fire;[959] the present “Grand-Pont” probably owes its erection to him. Fire was, however, by no means the most destructive element in the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. “Well-nigh disappearing in summer, choked within their sandy beds,” these streams were all too apt, as Ralf de Diceto says of the Mayenne, to “rage and swell in winter like the sea;”[960] and the greatest and most lasting of all Henry’s material benefactions to Anjou was the embankment or “_Levée_”--a work which he seems characteristically to have planned and executed in the very midst of his struggle with the Church[961]--which stretches along Loire-side, from Ponts-de-Cé, just above the junction of the Mayenne and the Loire, some thirty miles eastward to Bourgueil. Further south, in the valley of the Vienne, the legend of the “Pont de l’Annonain” illustrates the curious but not altogether unaccountable confusion which grew up in popular imagination between the two great builders of Anjou. The “bridge,” a long viaduct which stretched from Chinon across river and meadow south-westward to the village of Rivière, was in reality built by Henry to secure a safe transit from Chinon into Poitou across the low ground on the south bank of the Vienne, which in rainy seasons was an all but impassable swamp. Later ages, however, connected it with a dim tradition, which still lingered in the district, of the wonderful night-ride across Loire and Vienne whereby Fulk Nerra had won Saumur, and in the belief of the peasantry the Pont de l’Annonain became a “devil’s bridge,” built in a single night by the Black Count’s familiar demon[962]--a demon who is but a popular personification of that spirit of dauntless enterprise and ceaseless activity which, alike in their material and in their political workmanship, was the secret of Henry’s success no less than of Fulk’s.

[958] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292 (_Hist. Com. Andeg._,
Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. 337).

[959] In 1167 and 1177. Chron. S. Serg. a. 1167 and 1177,
Chron. S. Albin. a. 1177 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, pp.
149, 151, 44).

[960] R. Diceto as above.

[961] It was certainly made before 1169; see Rob. Torigni _ad
ann._

[962] See Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, note civ., pp. 429, 430.

One portion, however, of Henry’s continental dominions has during these years a political and military history of its own, which is not without a bearing upon that of our own land. Geographically remote as it was from England, still more remote in the character of both country and people, Aquitaine yet concerns us more than any other part of Henry’s Gaulish possessions. For not only was it a chief source of the political complications which filled the closing years of his life; it was the only one of those possessions whose connexion with England survived the fall of the Angevin house. The heritages of Geoffrey and Matilda were lost by their grandson; the heritage of Eleanor remained, in part at least, in the hands of her descendants for more than two hundred years.

It was in truth a dower at once valuable and burdensome that Henry had received with his Aquitanian wife. She had made him master of a territory whose extent surpassed that of all his Norman and Angevin dominions put together, and was scarcely equalled by that of England--a territory containing every variety of soil and of natural characteristics, from the flat, rich pastures of Berry and the vineyards of Poitou and Saintonge to the rugged volcanic rocks and dark chestnut-woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes, barren heaths and gloomy pine-forests of the Gascon coast, and the fertile valleys which open between the feet of the Pyrenees:--a territory whose population differed in blood and speech from their fellow-subjects north of Loire almost as widely as Normans and Angevins differed from Englishmen; while in temper and modes of thought and life they stood so apart from the northern world that in contradistinction to them Angevins and Normans and English might almost be counted, and indeed were almost ready to count themselves, as one people. It was a territory, too, whose political relations varied as much as its physical character, and were full of dangers which all Henry’s vigilance and wisdom were powerless to guard against or overcome. Setting aside, for the moment, the internal difficulties of Aquitaine, its whole eastern frontier, from the banks of the Cher to the Pyrenees, was more or less in dispute throughout his reign. The question of Toulouse, indeed, was settled in 1173; thenceforth the county of Toulouse, with its northern dependencies Rouergue and Alby, became a recognized underfief of the Poitevin duchy of Aquitaine, to which its western dependency, Quercy or the county of Cahors, had been already annexed after the war of 1160. The north-eastern portions of the older Aquitania, Berry and Auvergne, were sources of more lasting trouble. Berry had long ago been split into two unequal portions, of which the larger had remained subject to the dukes of Aquitaine, while the smaller northern division formed the viscounty of Bourges, and was an immediate fief of the French Crown. Naturally, the king was disposed to use every opportunity of thwarting the duke in the exercise of his authority over southern Berry; and Henry was equally desirous to lose no chance of re-asserting his ducal rights over Bourges.[963] The feudal position of Auvergne was a standing puzzle which king and duke, count, clergy and people, all in vain endeavoured to solve. During the struggle for supremacy in southern Gaul between the houses of Poitiers and Toulouse, Auvergne, after fluctuating for nearly a hundred years between the rival dukedoms, had virtually succeeded in freeing itself from the control of both, and in the reign of Louis VI. it seems to have been regarded as an immediate fief of the French Crown, to which however it proved a most unruly and troublesome possession. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never relinquished their claim to its overlordship; and when a quarrel broke out between two rival claimants of the county, it was naturally followed by a quarrel between Henry and Louis VII. as to their respective rights, as overlord and as lord paramount, to act as arbiters in the strife.[964] During five-and-twenty years it was a favourite device of Louis and of his successor, at every adverse crisis in Henry’s fortune, to despatch a body of troops into Auvergne to occupy that country and threaten Aquitaine through its eastern marches,[965] just as they habitually threatened Normandy through the marches of the Vexin.

[963] His first attempt to do so was made in 1170, when a
pretext was given him by the declaration said--whether truly
or falsely--to have been made by the dying archbishop Peter of
Bourges, that his see belonged of right to Aquitaine. Nothing,
however, came of the attempt. See _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol.
i. pp. 10, 11.

[964] See Rob. Torigni, a. 1167.

[965] _E.g._ in 1164 (Ep. lx., Robertson. _Becket_, vol. v.
p. 115), 1167 (above, p. 58; Rob. Torigni _ad ann._), 1170
(Will. Fitz-Steph., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii. p. 116; Ep.
dccxxii., _ib._ vol. vii. p. 400), and again in 1188.

Such a threat implied a far more serious danger in the south than in the north. The Aquitanian border was guarded by no such chain of strongly-fortified, stoutly-manned ducal castles as girt in the Norman duchy from Gisors to Tillières; and Henry’s hold over his wife’s dominions was very different from his grasp of the heritage of his mother. Twenty years of Angevin rule, which for political purposes had well-nigh bridged over the channel that parted England from Gaul, seem to have done nothing towards bridging over the gulf that parted Aquitaine from France and Anjou. If our Angevin king sometimes looks like a stranger amongst us, he was never anything but a stranger among the fellow-countrymen of his wife. Nowhere throughout his whole dominions was a spirit of revolt and insubordination so rife as among the nobles of Poitou and its dependencies; but it was a spirit utterly unlike the feudal pride of the Norman baronage. The endless strife of the Aquitanian nobles with their foreign duke and with each other sprang less from political motives than from a love of strife for its own sake; and their love of strife was only one phase of the passion for adventure and excitement which ran through every fibre of their nature and coloured every aspect of their social life. The men of the south lived in a world where the most delicate poetry and the fiercest savagery, the wildest moral and political disorder, and the most refined intellectual culture, mingled together in a confusion as picturesque as it was dangerous. The southern warrior was but half a knight if the sword was his only weapon--if he could not sing his battles as well as fight them. From raid and foray and siege he passed to the “Court of Love,” where the fairest and noblest women of the land, from the duchess herself downwards, presided over contests of subtle wit, skilful rime and melodious song, conducted under rules as stringent and with earnestness as deep as if life and death were at stake upon the issue; and in truth they sometimes were at stake, for song, love and war all mingled together in the troubadour’s life in an inextricable coil which the less subtle intellects of the north would have been powerless to unravel or comprehend. The _sirvente_ or poetical satire with which he stung his enemies into fury or roused the slumbering valour of his friends often wrought more deadly mischief than sharp steel or blazing firebrand. The nature of the men of the south was like that of their country: it was made up of the most opposite characteristics--of the lightest fancies, the stormiest passions, the most versatile capabilities of body and mind, the most indolent love of ease and pleasure, the most restless and daring valour, the highest intellectual refinement and the lowest moral degradation. It was a nature which revolted instinctively from constraint in any direction,--whose impetuosity burst all control of law and order imposed from without upon its restless love of action and adventure, just as it overflowed all conventional bounds of thought and language with its exuberant play of feeling and imagination in speech or song.[966] We may see a type of it in the portrait, drawn by almost contemporary hands, of one who played an important part both in the social and in the political history of Aquitaine throughout the closing years of Henry II. and the reign of his successor. “Bertrand de Born was of the Limousin, lord of a castle in the diocese of Périgueux, by name Hautefort. He had at his command near a thousand men. And all his time he was at war with all his neighbours, with the count of Périgord, and the viscount of Limoges, and with his own brother Constantine--whom he would have liked to disinherit, had it not been for the king of England--and with Richard, while he was count of Poitou. He was a good knight, and a good warrior, and a good servant of ladies, and a good troubadour of _sirventes_; he never made but two songs, and the king of Aragon assigned the songs of Guiraut de Borneil as wives to his _sirventes_; and the man who sang them for him was named Papiol. And he was a pleasant, courteous man, wise and well-spoken, and knew how to deal with good and evil. And whenever he chose, he was master of King Henry and his sons; but he always wanted them to be at war among themselves, the father and the sons and the brothers one with another; and he always wanted the king of France and King Henry to be at war too. And if they made peace or a truce, he immediately set to work to unmake it with his _sirventes_, and to shew how they were all dishonoured in peace. And he gained much good by it, and much harm.”[967]

[966] As John of Salisbury says--“auctor ad opus suum”:--

“De Pictavorum dices te gente creatum,
Nam licet his linguâ liberiore loqui.”

(_Enthet. ad Polycrat._, Giles, vol. iii. p. i.)

[967] From the two old Provençal sketches of the life of
Bertrand de Born, printed and translated into French by M. Léon
Clédat in his monograph _Du rôle historique de Bertrand de
Born_, pp. 99–101.

Until the dukedom of Aquitaine passed to a woman, as were the vassals, so was their sovereign. Eleanor’s grandfather the crusader-duke William VIII. and her father William IX. were simply the boldest knights, the gayest troubadours and the most reckless adventurers in their duchy. There can be no doubt that the submission of Aquitaine to Louis VII., so far as it ever did submit to him, was due to Eleanor’s influence; and it was the same influence which chiefly contributed to preserve its obedience to her second husband during those earlier years of their married life when, at home and abroad, all things had seemed destined to prosper in his hands. But at the first symptom of a turn in the tide of his fortunes, southern Gaul at one rose against its northern master. Eleanor’s tact and firmness, Henry’s wariness and vigour, were all taxed to the uttermost in holding it down throughout the years of his struggle with the Church; and when Eleanor herself turned against him in 1173, the chances of a good understanding between her subjects and her husband became very nearly desperate. Henry himself seems to have long ago perceived that a duke of Aquitaine, to be thoroughly sure of his ground, needed a different apprenticeship from that which might befit a king of England, a duke of Normandy or Britanny, or a count of Anjou. The very first step in his plans for the future of his children--a step taken several years before he seems even to have thought of crowning his eldest son--was the designation of the second as his mother’s destined colleague and ultimate heir. Richard had been trained up ever since he was two years old specially for the office of duke of Aquitaine. After long diplomacy, and at the cost of a betrothal which became the source of endless mischief and trouble, the French king’s sanction to the arrangement had been won; and on Trinity-Sunday 1172 Richard, in his mother’s presence, had been formally enthroned at Poitiers. He was probably intended to govern the duchy under her direction and advice; if so, however, the plan was frustrated by Eleanor’s own conduct and by the suspicions which it aroused in her husband. She was one of the very few captives whom at the restoration of peace in 1175 he still retained in confinement. Richard, on the other hand, had been like his brothers fully and freely forgiven; and while his father and eldest brother went to seal their reconciliation in England, he was sent into Poitou charged with authority to employ its forces at his own discretion, and to take upon himself the suppression of all disturbance and disorder in Aquitaine.[968]

[968] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 81.

What had been the precise nature of Richard’s training for his appointed work--what proportion of his seventeen years’ life had been actually spent in Aquitaine, what opportunities he had had of growing familiar with the people over whom he was now set to rule--we have no means of determining. By his own natural temper, however, he was probably of all Eleanor’s sons the one least fitted to gain the goodwill of the south. The “Cœur-de-lion” of tradition, indeed--the adventurous crusader, the mirror of knightly prowess and knightly courtesy, the lavish patron of verse and song, the ideal king of troubadours and knights-errant--looks at first glance like the very incarnation of the spirit of the south. But it was only in the intellectual part of his nature that his southern blood made itself felt; the real groundwork of his character was made of sterner stuff. The love of splendour and elegance, the delight in poetry and music,[969] the lavish generosity, the passion for adventure, which contrasted so vividly with his father’s practical businesslike temper, came to him without doubt from his mother. The moral deficiencies and evil tendencies of his nature he himself charged, somewhat too exclusively, upon the demon-blood of the Angevin counts.[970] But we need not look either to an ancestress so shadowy and so remote as the demon-countess, nor to a land so far distant from us as Poitou, for the source of Richard’s strongest characteristics both of body and of mind. In him alone among Henry’s sons can we see a likeness to the Norman forefathers of the Empress Matilda. His outward aspect, his lofty stature, his gigantic strength--held in check though it was by the constantly-recurring ague which “kept him, fearless, in a tremor as continual as the tremor of fear in which he kept the rest of the world”[971]--his blue eyes and golden hair, all proclaimed him a child of the north. And although he spent the chief part of his life elsewhere, the slender share of local and national sympathies which he possessed seems to have lain in the same direction. The “lion-heart” chose its own last earthly resting-place at Rouen, not at Poitiers;[972] and the intimate friend and comrade whose name is inseparably associated with his by a tradition which, whatever its historical value, is as famous as it is beautiful, was no Poitevin or Provençal troubadour, but a trouvère from northern France.[973] The influence of his northman-blood shewed itself more vividly still when on his voyage to Palestine, having lived to be more than thirty years old without possessing a skiff that he could call his own, or--unless indeed in early childhood he had gone a cruise round his father’s island-realm--ever making a longer or more adventurous voyage than that from Southampton to Barfleur or Wissant, he suddenly developed not only a passionate love of the sea, but a consummate seamanship which he certainly had had no opportunity of acquiring in any way, and which can only have been born in him, as an inheritance from his wiking forefathers. When scarcely more than a boy in years, Richard was already one of the most serious and determined of men. His sternness to those who “withstood his will” matched that of the Conqueror himself; and Richard’s will, even at the age of seventeen, was no mere caprice, but a fixed determination which overrode all obstacles between itself and its object as unhesitatingly as the old wiking-keels overrode the billows of the northern sea. He went down into Aquitaine fully resolved that the country should be at once, and once for all, reduced to submission and order. He set himself “to bring the shapeless into shape, to reduce the irregular to rule, to cast down the things that were mighty and level those that were rugged; to restore the dukedom of Aquitaine to its ancient boundaries and its ancient government.”[974] He did the work with all his might, but he did it with a straightforward ruthlessness untempered by southern craft or Angevin caution and tact. He would not conciliate; he could not wait. “He thought nothing done while anything still remained to do; and he cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with his opponent’s blood. Boiling over with zeal for order and justice, he sought to quell the audacity of this ungovernable people and to secure the safety of the innocent amid these workers of mischief by at once proceeding against the evil-doers with the utmost rigour which his ducal authority could enable him to exercise upon them.”[975] In a word, before Richard had been six months in their midst, the Aquitanians discovered that if their Angevin duke had chastised them with whips, the son of their own duchess was minded to chastise them with scorpions.

[969] See R. Coggeshall’s description of Richard’s love of
church music: “clericos sonorâ voce modulantes donis et
precibus ad cantandum festivius instimulabat, atque per chorum
huc illucque deambulando, voce ac manu ut altius concreparent
excitabat.” R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 97.

[970] Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 27 (Angl.
Christ. Soc., p. 154).

[971] _Ib._ c. 8 (p. 105).

[972] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. p. 84.

[973] That is, if the Blondel of tradition is to be identified
with Blondel of Nesle.

[974] Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl.
Christ. Soc., p. 104).

[975] _Ibid._ (p. 105).

He set off at once upon a furious campaign against the strongholds of the unruly barons. “No mountain-side however steep and rugged, no tower however lofty and impregnable, availed to check his advance, as skilful as it was daring, as steady and persevering as it was impetuous.”[976] By midsummer the castles of Poitou itself were mostly in his hands, and the young conqueror was busy with the siege of Castillonnes-sur-Agen, which surrendered to him in the middle of August.[977] Before the winter was over he was master of Périgueux, and had, in the phrase of a local writer, well-nigh “disinherited” the barons of Périgord, the Quercy and the Limousin. But in the spring their smouldering resentment was kindled into a blaze by the incitements of Bertrand de Born, whose brother Constantine, expelled by him from the castle of Hautefort which the two brothers had inherited in common, had appealed to Richard for succour; the signal for revolt, given by Bertrand in a vigorous _sirvente_, was answered by all the malcontents of the district,[978] and at the opposite end of Poitou by the count of Angoulême; and at Easter Richard found his position so difficult that he went to seek advice and reinforcements from his father in England.[979] Geoffrey of Britanny arrived at the same time on a like errand. Henry bade his eldest son go to the help of the younger ones; the young king complied,[980] somewhat unwillingly, and went to collect forces in France while Richard hurried back into Poitou. The peril was urgent; in his absence Count Vulgrin of Angoulême had invaded Poitou at the head of a host of Brabantines. The invaders were however met and defeated with great slaughter at Barbezieux by Richard’s constable Theobald Chabot and Bishop John of Poitiers.[981] By Whitsuntide Richard had gathered a sufficient force of loyal Poitevins and stipendiaries from the neighbouring lands to march against Vulgrin and his Brabantines and defeat them in a battle near the border of the Angoumois and Saintonge. He then turned upon the viscount of Limoges, besieged and took his castle of Aixe, and thence advanced to Limoges itself, which he captured in like manner. At midsummer he was rejoined at Poitiers by his elder brother, and the two led their combined forces against Vulgrin of Angoulême.[982] A fortnight’s siege had however scarcely made them masters of Châteauneuf on the Charente when the young king--seduced, it was said, by some evil counsellor whom we may probably suspect to have been Bertrand de Born[983]--suddenly abandoned the campaign and withdrew again to France. Richard, undaunted by his brother’s desertion, pushed on to Moulin-Neuf and thence to Angoulême itself, where all the leaders of the rebellion were gathered together. A six days’ siege sufficed to make Vulgrin surrender himself, his fellow-rebels, his city and five of his castles to the mercy of the duke and the English king. Richard sent over all his prisoners to his father in England; Henry, however, sent them back again, and Richard put them in prison to await their sentence till the king should return to Gaul.[984]

[976] Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 8 (Angl.
Christ. Soc., p. 105).

[977] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 101.

[978] See Clédat, _Bertrand de Born_, pp. 29, 30.

[979] _Gesta Hen._ as above, pp. 114, 115.

[980] _Ib._ p. 115. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 93.

[981] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 407. He adds: “Sicque
salus in manu clericorum data satis evidenter ostendit
plerisque non animos deesse sed arma.”

[982] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 120, 121.

[983] See Clédat, _Bertrand de Born_, p. 35.

[984] _Gesta Hen._ as above, p. 121.

Northern Aquitaine, or Guyenne, was now for the moment subdued. As soon as Christmas was over Richard proceeded to the reduction of Gascony. Dax, held against him by its viscount Peter and by the count of Bigorre, and Bayonne, defended by its viscount Ernald Bertram, submitted each after a ten days’ siege; S. Pierre-de-Cize, on the Spanish frontier, fell in one day; the Basques and Navarrese were compelled to promise peace; the plunderings habitually inflicted by the border-folk upon pilgrims to the shrine of S. James at Compostella were suppressed; and from his court at Poitiers on Candlemas-day Richard triumphantly reported to his father that he had pacified the whole country.[985] But the peace did not last long. Trouble was already threatening at the opposite end of the duchy. Ralf of Déols, the wealthiest baron in Berry, had lately died leaving as his heir an infant daughter. She was of course, according to feudal law, a ward of her overlord, King Henry; but her relatives seized both her and her estates, and refused to give up either.[986] Henry, probably feeling that the boy-duke of Aquitaine had already more than enough upon his hands, charged his eldest son with the settlement of this affair, bidding him take possession of all Ralf’s lands without delay, and significantly adding: “While I governed my realms alone, I lost none of my rightful possessions; it will be shame to us all if aught of them be lost now that we are several to rule them.” The young king took the hint, marched with all his Norman and Angevin forces into Berry, and laid siege to Châteauroux;[987] but he seems to have had no success;[988] and there was no chance of help from Richard, for not only was the Limousin again plunged in civil war,[989] but all southern Aquitaine was in danger of a like fate--an attempt of Count Raymond of Toulouse to exert his authority as overlord of Narbonne with greater stringency than its high-spirited viscountess Hermengard was disposed to endure having stirred up against him a league of all the princes of Septimania and the Spanish border, under the leadership of Hermengard herself and of Raymond’s hereditary rivals, the king of Aragon and his brothers.[990] The way in which Raymond prepared to meet their attack supplies a vivid illustration of southern character and manners. He sought an ally in Bertrand de Born, and he appealed to him in his character not of knight but of troubadour. He sent a messenger to Hautefort to state his cause and to ask Bertrand, not to fight for it, but simply to publish it to the world in a _sirvente_. Bertrand answered readily to the appeal; he was only too glad of any excuse for a _sirvente_ which should “cause dints in a thousand shields, and rents in a thousand helms and hauberks.” “I would fain have the great barons ever wroth one with another!” is the characteristic exclamation with which he ends his war-song.[991]

[985] _Ib._ pp. 131, 132.

[986] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 127.

[987] _Ib._ p. 132.

[988] The _Gesta Hen._, as above, say Châteauroux was
surrendered to him at once; but we hear nothing more of it till
the autumn, and then we find that the elder king has to besiege
it himself; so if the younger one ever did win it, he must have
lost it again as quickly.

[989] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. cc. lxix., lxx. (Labbe, _Nova
Biblioth._, vol. ii. pp. 322, 323).

[990] See Vic and Vaissète, _Hist. du Languedoc_ (new ed.),
vol. vi. pp. 69, 70; and the terms of the league, _ib._ vol.
viii. cols. 325, 326.

[991] Clédat, _Bert. de Born_, pp. 38, 39.