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of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that "he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels." Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; "the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock." The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf's shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit's cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the "Finches-haugh," strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit's ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric's life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.

In strictness, we must except the years 1043-1066, when the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him--patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been--to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Baeda's death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between AElfred's birth in 848 and Florence's own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden. Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs's preface to Roger of Howden, vol. i. ; Mr. Arnold's prefaces to Simeon, vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon ; and Mr. Hodgson Hinde's preface to Simeon .

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror's death, in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English. They early destined their son to a literary career; "My father," he says, "impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined." It is plain that submission to the father's wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, "Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years." His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore's school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor's reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: "Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!" William's boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school. The bent of the lad's mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. "Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;--and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil." Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey's darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. "Methinks I have a right to speak of this work," he tells us with pardonable pride, "for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot's own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!"

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot, it was natural that his first endeavour should be to "collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign nations." As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become his home, the question arose--could nothing be found among our own people worthy of the remembrance of posterity? He had but to look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To Ealdhelm's own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint's relics in 1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of his miraculous powers, and--as generally happened in such cases--of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days' intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William's childhood. In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately form. Among the older literary treasures which served as a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his consecration. The muniment-chest was full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, AElfred and Eadward, AEthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as AEthelstan's gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower. On the left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm's shrine, stood a tomb which in William's day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself--John Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established a school under AElfred's protection at Malmesbury, and to have been there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence. The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits, and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern home.

"In historicis nos narrationibus occupatos detorsit a proposito tua, Rodberte, voluntas. Nuper enim cum in bibliothec? nostr? sederemus, et quisque pro suo studio libros evolveret, impegisti in Amalarium de Ecclesiasticis Officiis. Cujus cum materiam ex prim? statim tituli fronte cognosceris, amplexus es occasionem qu? rudimenta novae professionis animares. Sed quia confestim animi tui alacritatem turbavit testimoniorum perplexitas et sermonum asperitas, rogasti ut eum abbreviarem. Ego autem ... munus injunctum non aspernanter accepi." ... Mr. Birch takes this Robert to be the earl. But does not the phrase about "nova professio" rather suggest a new-made monk of the house?

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, "the good peace" that Henry, like his father, "made in this land." The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray--the brightest period of Henry's prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bell?me in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a "Saxon" bishop to the see of St. David's were doing their work; and though in Henry's later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry's dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.

Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

Flor. Worc. , vol. ii. p. 68.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU.

The cradle-land of our Angevin kings, the original county of Anjou, was a small territory in central Gaul, lying about the lower course of the river Loire and that of its affluent the Mayenne or Maine. Its chief portion consisted of a wedge-shaped tract hemmed in between the right bank of the Loire, which bounded it on the south, and the streams of Loir, Sarthe and Mayenne, which flowed round it on the north and west; along its southern border stretched a belt of alluvial soil which in winter and in rainy seasons became a vast flood-drowned fen, swallowed up by the overflowing waters of the Loire; to the northward, the country consisted chiefly of level uplands broken here and there by patches of forest and tiny river-valleys, and rising in the west into a range of low hills, which again died down into a fringe of swampy meadow-land along the eastern bank of the Mayenne. A narrow strip of ground on the southern bank of the Loire, with a somewhat wider strip of hilly and wooded country beyond the Mayenne, completed the district to which its earliest known inhabitants, a Gallic tribe called Andes or Andegavi, have left their name. A few miles above the angle formed by the confluence of the two rivers, a lofty mass of black slate rock thrown out from the upland furnished a ready-made fortress important alike by its natural strength and by its geographical position, commanding the main lines of communication with central, northern and southern Gaul through the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. Under the Roman conquerors of Gaul the place was called Juliomagus; the hill was crowned by a lofty citadel, and strengthened by a circuit of rampart walls; while from its crest a road struck eastward along Loire-side into the heart of central Gaul, another followed the westward course of the river to its junction with the sea, and others struck southward and northward into Aquitania and across the upland into the basin of the Seine. In the middle of the fourth century a Christian bishop, probably one of a band of mission-preachers who shared with the famous S. Martin of Tours the work of evangelizing central Gaul, laid beside the citadel of Juliomagus the foundations of a church, which in after-time grew into the cathedral of S. Maurice; and it is from the extent of the diocese over which his successors ruled that we learn the extent of the civil jurisdiction of Juliomagus. A later bishop, Albinus, left his name to the great abbey of S. Aubin, founded in Merovingian days on the slope of the hill just outside the city wall; a monastery dedicated to S. Sergius grew up to the north, in a low-lying marshy meadow by the river-side; while the place of the Roman prefects was taken by a succession of Frankish counts, the delegates first of the Merovingian kings of Neustria and then of the Karolingian emperors; and the Roman name of Juliomagus itself gave way to a native appellation cognate with that of the district of which it was the head--"Andegavis," Angers.

The work of the northmen in West-Frankland was a work both of union and disunion. There, as in England, the need for organization and defence against their attacks produced a new upgrowth of national life; but while in England this life was moulded by the consolidation of the earlier Engle and Saxon realms into a single state under the leadership of the West-Saxon kings, in Frankland it was created through the forcible breaking-up of an outward unity already threatened with the doom which never fails sooner or later to overtake a kingdom divided against itself. The West-Frankish king was not, like the king of Wessex, the leader, the natural exponent, the impersonation almost, of the dawning national consciousness; it was not he who led and organized the struggle for existence against the northern foe; the nation had to fight for itself, with but little help from its sovereign. This difference was caused partly by the political circumstances of the Karolingian realms, partly by geographical conditions. The brunt of the battle necessarily fell, not upon the royal domains lying far from the sea around the inland fortress of Laon, but on the coast, and especially on the districts around the great river-inlets by which the pirates made their entrance into the country. Of these, the estuary of the Seine lay nearest to them, and was their first point of attack. Between it and the other great inlet, the mouth of the Loire, lay the Breton peninsula; once round that, and the broad lands of Aquitania, rich with the natural wealth of a southern soil and with the remains of a luxury and splendour in which its cities had almost outdone Rome herself, would tempt the northmen with a fairer harvest of spoil than they could find on the shores of the Channel. The desolate rocky coast and barren moorlands of the intervening peninsula offered little chance of booty; but if the pirates could secure the alliance or even the neutrality of the Bretons, they had but to force an entrance into the Loire, and not only Aquitaine, but the inmost heart of the West-Frankish realm would be laid open to their attacks. Two barriers, however, would have to be overcome before such an entrance could be gained. The first was the city of Nantes, which stood on the northern bank of the Loire, some thirty miles above its mouth. Politically, Nantes was the extreme western outpost of the Karolingian power, for its count held his fief directly of the king at Laon, not of the nearer Breton under-king at Rennes; but by its geographical position and the character of its people it was far more Breton than Frankish. The true corner-stone of the West-Frankish realm lay on the other side of the Mayenne. The county of Anjou or "Angevin march," the border-land of Neustria and Aquitaine, was for all practical purposes the border-land also of Neustria and of Britanny. Angers, with its Roman citadel and its Roman walls, perched on the crest of its black slate-rock, at once guarding and guarded by the two rivers which flowed round its foot, was a far mightier fortress than Nantes; Angers, rather than Nantes, was the true key of the Loire valley, and the stronghold of the Neustrian border against all attacks from the west, whether by land or by sea.

In the first days of Charles the Bald, when the new king was struggling with his brothers, and the pirate ships were beginning again to strike terror into the coasts of Gaul, Lambert, a Breton-born count of the Angevin march, sought from Charles the investiture of the neighbouring and recently-vacated county of Nantes. On the refusal of his demand, he threw off his allegiance, offered his services to the Breton king Nomeno?, and on failing to obtain the coveted prize by his help, called in that of a pirate fleet which was cruising about the shores of Britanny. It was thus at the invitation and under the guidance of a man who had been specially intrusted with its defence that the northmen made their first entrance into the hitherto peaceful estuary of the Loire. Nantes was stormed and sacked; the desolate city was left in the hands of Lambert and the Bretons, and the ravagers sailed away, probably to swell the forces and share the spoil of a fleet which in the following year made its way to the estuary of the Garonne, and pushed inland as far as Toulouse. Nearly ten years passed away before the northmen repeated their dash upon central Gaul. The valley of the Seine and the city of Paris were the victims of their next great expedition, in 845; and a series of plundering raids upon the Aquitanian coast were crowned in 848 by the conquest of Bordeaux. For a moment, in 851, the fury of the pirates' attack seemed to be turning away from Gaul to spend itself on Britain; but a great victory of the West-Saxons under AEthelwulf at Aclea threw them back upon their old field of operations across the Channel, and in the terror of their threatened onset Charles sought to detach the Bretons from their alliance by a formal cession of the counties of Rennes and Nantes and the district west of the Mayenne, which had passed into Breton hands by the treason of Count Lambert. His precautions failed to avert the blow which he dreaded. Next year the pirates made their way back again round the Armorican coast, up the mouth of the Loire, past Nantes, and through the Angevin march--now shrunk to a little corner of territory wedged in between the Mayenne and the Loire--as far inland as Tours, where they sacked and burned the abbey of S. Martin and drove its canons into exile with the hardly-rescued body of their patron saint.

Ann. Bertin. a. 853 .

Ann. Bertin. a. 859 .

Regino a. 861 . Ann. Mettens. a. 861 .

Robert fulfilled his trust gallantly and successfully till he fell in a Scandinavian ambush at Brissarthe in 866. His territories were given to a cousin of the king, Hugh of Burgundy, who was either so incapable or so careless of their defence that before six years had passed he suffered the very corner-stone of his duchy, the most important point in the whole scheme of operations against the northmen in central Gaul, to fall into the enemies' hands. A band of pirates, sailing unopposed up the Loire and the Mayenne after Robert's death, found Angers deserted and defenceless, and settling there with their families, used it as a centre from which they could securely harry all the country round. The bulk of the pirate forces, however, was now concentrated upon a great effort for the conquest of Britain, and while the invaders of Angers lay thus isolated from their brethren across the Channel, Charles the Bald seized his opportunity to attempt the recovery of the city. In concert with the Breton king, Solomon, he gathered his forces for a siege; the Franks encamped on the eastern side of the Mayenne, the Bretons on the opposite shore. Their joint blockade proved unavailing, till one of the Bretons conceived the bold idea of turning the course of the Mayenne, so as to leave the pirate ships stranded and useless. The whole Breton army at once set to work and dug such an enormous trench that the northmen saw their retreat would be hopelessly cut off. In dismay they offered to purchase, at a heavy price, a free withdrawal from Angers and its district; their offer was accepted, and Angers was evacuated accordingly.

Ann. Bertin. a. 866 .

Regino, a. 873 . Ann. Bertin. and Mettens. and Chron. Namnet. a. 873 . Chron. Sigebert. a. 875 . Chron. S. Serg., a. 873. .

The times, however, were not yet ripe for a change of dynasty, and the revolution was followed by a reaction which on Odo's death in 898 again set a Karolingian, Charles the Simple, upon the throne; but though the monarchy of Laon lingered on till the race of Charles the Great became extinct, it was being gradually undermined and supplanted by the dukes of the French, the rulers of the great duchy between Seine and Loire. Paris was now, since the siege of 885, the chief seat of the ducal power; and in the new feudal organization which grew up around this centre, the cradle of the ducal house, the border-stronghold of Angers, sank to a secondary position. The fiefs which the dukes parcelled out among their followers fell to the share of men of the most diverse origin and condition. In some cases, as at Chartres and Tours, the Scandinavian settler was turned into a peaceful lieutenant of the Frankish chief against whom he had fought. In others the reward of valour was justly bestowed on men who had earned it by their prowess against the invaders. It may be that the old alliance of Count Robert the Brave with the Bretons had sowed the seeds of a mighty tree. In the depths of a gloomy forest-belt which ran along the Breton border at the foot of a range of hills that shelter the western side of the valley of the Mayenne, there dwelt in Robert's day--so the story went--a valiant forester, Tortulf. He quitted the hardy, hazardous borderer's life--half hunter, half bandit--to throw himself into the struggle of Charles the Bald and Robert the Brave against the northmen: Charles set him to keep the pirates out of Touraine, and gave him a congenial post as forester of a wooded district known as the "Nid-de-Merle"--the Blackbird's Nest. In its wild fastnesses Tortulf lay in wait for the approach of the marauders, and sprang forth to meet them with a daring and a success which earned him his sovereign's favour and the alliance of the duke of the French. His son, Ingelger, followed in his steps; marriage came to the help of arms, and with the hand of AElendis, niece of the archbishop of Tours, Ingelger acquired her lands at Amboise. The dowry was a valuable one; Amboise stood in the midst of one of the most rich and fertile districts of central France, half way between Tours and Blois, on the south bank of the Loire, which was spanned at this point by a bridge said to have been built by Julius Caesar; two centuries later tradition still pointed out the site of Caesar's palace on the banks of the little river Amasse, at the western end of the town; while opposite the bridge a rocky brow, crowned to-day by the shell of a magnificent castle of the Renascence, probably still kept in Ingelger's days some traces of a fortress built there by a Roman governor in the reign of the Emperor Valens. A mightier stronghold than Amboise, however, was to be the home of Ingelger's race. His son, a ruddy youth named Fulk, early entered the service of Count Odo of Paris and remained firmly attached to him and his house; and one of the earliest acts of Odo's brother Robert, who succeeded him as duke of the French--if indeed it was not rather one of the last acts of King Odo himself--was to intrust the city of Angers to Fulk the Red as viscount. The choice was a wise one; for Fulk was gifted with a sound political instinct which found and kept the clue to guide him through all the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the next forty years. He never swerved from his adherence to the dukes of the French; and by his quiet tenacity he, like them, laid the foundation of his house's greatness. Preferments civil and ecclesiastical--the abbacies of S. Aubin and S. Licinius at Angers, the viscounty of Tours, though this was but a momentary honour--were all so many stepping-stones to his final investiture, shortly before the death of Charles the Simple, as count of the Angevin March.

On the whole story of Tortulf, Ingelger and Fulk, see note A at end of chapter.

This little county of Anjou, of which Fulk thus became the first hereditary count, ended by overshadowing in political importance all the other divisions which made up the duchy of France. In point of territorial extent Anjou, at its present stage, was one of the smallest of the under-fiefs of the duchy. The dominions of Theobald the Trickster, the first count of Blois and Chartres, were far larger than those of Fulk; and so was the county of Maine or Cenomannia, which lay to the north of Anjou on the right bank of the Loire. Yet in a few generations Blois and Maine were both alike outstripped by the little Angevin march. The proud independence of Maine proved her ruin as well as her glory. She too was a border-land; her western frontier marched with that of Britanny, her northern with that of a great Scandinavian settlement which was growing into the duchy of Normandy. But her political status was altogether undefined and insecure. France and Normandy alike claimed the overlordship of Maine; Maine herself acknowledged the claims of neither; and this uncertain condition placed her at the mercy of her neighbours to north and south, and made her a bone of contention between them and a battle-ground for their quarrels till the day when all three were united. Blois and Chartres, on the other hand, with their dependency Touraine, stood like Anjou on a perfectly definite footing as recognised under-fiefs of the duchy of France. In the extent of their territory, and in the natural resources derived from the fertility of its soil and the number and wealth of its towns, the counts of Blois had at starting a very considerable advantage over the Angevins. But this seeming advantage proved in a few years to be a disadvantage. The house of Blois grew too fast, and soon outgrew its strength; its dominions became straggling; and when they straggled out eastward into Champagne, what was gained at one end was lost at the other, and Touraine, the most precious possession of the counts of Blois, was absorbed in the gradual steady advance of the Angevins.

Anjou's position as a marchland marked her out for a special career. Forming the extreme south-western corner of France properly so called, divided from Aquitania by the Loire, from Britanny by the Mayenne, she had the advantage of a strong and compact geographical situation to start with. Her political position was equally favourable; she was neither hindered and isolated like Maine by a desperate endeavour to reclaim a lost independence, nor led astray by a multiplicity of scattered interests like Blois. She had simply to take her choice between the two alternatives which lie before every marchland. Such a land must either submit to be swallowed up piecemeal by its neighbours, or it must in sheer self-defence swallow up some of them; to keep what it has got, it must get more. Anjou, as represented by Fulk the Red and his successors, strongly embraced this latter alternative. The growth of the Angevin power during the next two centuries was due chiefly to the character of its rulers, working in a sphere which gave exceptional scope for the exercise of their peculiar gifts. Whoever Fulk's real ancestors may have been, there can be no question that his descendants were a very remarkable race. From first to last there is a strong family likeness among them all. The first thing that strikes one about them is their thoroughness; whatsoever their hands found to do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might. Nearly all of them were men of great and varied natural powers, gifted with a lofty military capacity and a deep political insight, and with a taste and a talent for all kinds of pursuits, into which they threw themselves with the full ardour of their stirring, restless temper. Daring, but not rash; persevering, watchful, tenacious; sometimes seeming utterly unscrupulous, yet with an odd vein of irregular piety running through the characters of many of them, and coming to light in the strangest shapes and at the most unexpected moments; passionate almost as madmen, but with a method in their madness--the Angevin counts were patriots in their way; for their chief aim was aggrandizement, but it was the aggrandizement of Anjou as well as of themselves. They were not to be led away, like their rivals of Blois, by visionary schemes of merely personal promotion involving neglect of their own little home-county; they were proud and fond of their "black Angers" on its steep above the Mayenne, and never forgot that there was the centre whence their power was to spread to the ends of the earth. It is easy to see how exactly such a race as this was fitted for its post in Anjou. Given such men in such a place, we can scarcely wonder at what they made of it.

The Angers in which Fulk came to rule as count, about the time when AEthelstan succeeded Eadward the Elder as king of Wessex, was a town not of dark slate walls as it is chiefly now, but of red flintstone and redder brick, such as the medieval builders long copied from the works of their Roman masters, and such as may still be found embedded in the outer walls of the bishop's palace and half hidden behind the mighty black bastions of the later castle. That castle covers, or rather encloses, the site of a hall which Count Odo, the successor of the traitor Lambert, had built about the year 851 on ground acquired by exchange with Bishop Dodo. For some time after Frankish counts had been substituted for Roman prefects, the spiritual and temporal rulers of Angers had continued to dwell side by side on the hill-top; Odo, however, instead of again occupying the palace which Lambert had deserted, made it over to the bishop in return for a plot of ground lying just outside the south-west corner of the city wall. There he built himself a house, with the river at its feet and a vine-clad hill at its back; and there from that time forth was the dwelling-place of the Angevin counts. Fulk the Red took up his abode there in the early days of a great political transition which was to change the kingdom of the West-Franks into a kingdom of Parisian France. Half a century had yet to elapse before the transition was accomplished; at its present stage indeed few could foresee its ultimate issue. If the ducal house of Paris had many friends, it had also many foes. The old Karolingian nobility was slowly dying out or sinking into the background before the new nobility of the sword; the great house of Vermandois had thrown its weight into the scale with the advancing power; but there were still many who looked with contempt and disgust on the new order of things, on the house of Paris and all its connexions. The count of Anjou was wedged in between powers anything but favourably disposed towards him and his patrons. The princes of Aquitania looked scornfully across the Loire at the upstarts on its northern bank; little as they recked of any authority beyond their river-barrier, the only one which they acknowledged at all was that of the Karolingian king at Laon. The Bretons beyond the Mayenne were as far from being subdued as ever. Within the duchy of France itself, one little corner was equally scornful of the dukes and of their partisans; Maine, although from its geographical position necessarily reckoned part of the duchy "between Seine and Loire," still refused to acknowledge any such reckoning; its ruling house, as well as the great nobles of the South, claimed to have inherited the traditions of the Roman Empire and the blood of its Frankish conquerors. In the eyes of the Cenomannian counts, who traced their pedigree from a nephew of Charles the Great, the heirs of Tortulf the Forester were nothing but upstart barbarians.

See note B at end of chapter.

A few years before Fulk's investiture as count of Anjou, the relations between the West-Frankish kingdom and its northern foes had entered upon a new phase. In 912 King Charles the Simple and Duke Hugh of Paris, finding themselves unable to wrest back from a pirate leader called Hrolf the Ganger the lands which he had won around the mouth of the Seine, made a virtue of necessity, and by a treaty concluded at St.-Clair-sur-Epte granted to Hrolf a formal investiture of his conquest, on condition of homage to the king and conversion to the Christian faith. Tradition told how a rough Danish soldier, bidden to perform the homage in Hrolf's stead, kissed indeed the foot of Charles the Simple, but upset him and his throne in doing so; and although to the declining Karolingian monarchy the new power thus established at the mouth of the Seine was useful as a counterpoise to that of the Parisian dukes, yet the story is not altogether an inapt parable of the relations between the duchy of Normandy and its royal overlord during several generations. The homage and the conversion of Hrolf and his comrades were alike little more than nominal. His son, William Longsword, strove hard to force upon his people the manners, the tongue, the outward civilization of their French neighbours; but to those neighbours even he was still only a "leader of the pirates." The plundering, burning, slaughtering raids did indeed become less frequent and less horrible under him than they had been in his father's heathen days; but they were far from having ceased. Politically indeed it was William's support alone that enabled Charles the Simple to carry on to his life's end a fairly successful struggle with a rival claimant of his crown, Rudolf of Burgundy, a brother-in-law of Hugh, duke of the French. No sooner was Charles dead and Rudolf seated on his throne than the hostility of the northmen to the new king broke out afresh in a pirate-raid which swept across the Norman border, past Orl?ans and through the G?tinais, into the very heart of the kingdom, to the abbey of S. Benedict at Fleury on the Loire. It was not the first time the monastery had been ravaged by pirates; the abbot was now evidently expecting their attack, for he had called to his aid Count Gilbald of Auxerre and Ingelger of Anjou, Fulk's eldest son, who, young as he was, had already made himself a name in battle with the northmen. The fight was a stubborn one; the defenders of Fleury had resolved to maintain it to their last gasp, and when at length all was over there was scarcely a man of them left to tell the tale. The young heir of Anjou, taken prisoner by the pirates, was slaughtered beneath the shadow of S. Benet's abbey as Count Robert the Brave had been slaughtered long ago at the bridge of Sarthe. Fortunately, however, the future of the Angevin house did not depend solely on the life thus cut off in its promise. Two sons yet remained to Fulk. The duty of stepping into Ingelger's place fell upon the youngest, for the second, Guy, was already in holy orders. Eight years later, in 937, Duke Hugh of Paris, the great maker of kings and bishops, who had just restored Louis From-over-sea to the throne of his father Charles the Simple, procured Guy's elevation to the see of Soissons. The son's promotion was doubtless owed to the long and steady service of the father; but the young bishop soon shewed himself worthy of consideration on his own account. He played a conspicuous part in the politics of his time, both ecclesiastical and secular; he adhered firmly to the party of Duke Hugh and his brother-in-law Herbert of Vermandois, and even carried his devotion to them so far as to consecrate Herbert's little son Hugh, a child six years old, to the archbishopric of Reims in 940; and through all the scandals and censures which naturally resulted from this glaringly uncanonical appointment Guy stuck to his boy-archbishop with a courage worthy of a better cause. He could, however, shew zeal for the Karolingian king as well as for the Parisian duke. When in 945 Louis From-beyond-sea fell a prisoner into the hands of the Normans, they demanded as the condition of his release that his two sons should be given them as hostages. On Queen Gerberga's refusal to trust them with her eldest boy, the bishop of Soissons offered himself in the child's stead, and the Normans, well knowing his importance in the realm, willingly accepted the substitution. The dauntless Angevin was possibly more at home in the custody of valiant enemies than amid the ecclesiastical censures which fell thick upon him for his proceedings in connexion with Hugh of Reims, and from which he was only absolved in 948 by the synod of Trier. His father was then no longer count of Anjou. A year after Hugh's consecration, in the winter of 941 or the early spring of 942, Fulk the Red died "in a good old age," leaving the marchland which his sword had won and guarded so well to his youngest son, Fulk the Good.

Chron. Frodoard, a. 937 .

Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

Chron. Frodoard, a. 948 . Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

The reign of the second Count Fulk is the traditional golden age of Anjou. Under him, she is the proverbially happy land which has no history. While the name of the bishop of Soissons is conspicuous in court and camp, that of his brother the count is never once heard; he waged no wars, he took no share in politics; the annalists of the time find nothing to record of him. But if there is no history, there is plenty of tradition and legend to set before us a charming picture of the Good Count's manner of life. The arts he cultivated were those of peace; his gentle disposition and refined taste led him to pursuits and habits which in those rough days were almost wholly associated with the clerical profession. His favourite place of retirement, the special object of his reverence and care, was the church of S. Martin at Ch?teauneuf by Tours. There were enshrined the relics of the "Apostle of the Gauls"; after many a journey to and fro, many a narrow escape from the sacrilegious hands of the northmen, they had been finally brought back to their home, so local tradition said, under the care of Fulk's grandfather Ingelger. The church was now a collegiate foundation, served by a body of secular canons under the joint control of a dean and--according to an evil usage of the period--a lay-abbot who had only to enjoy his revenues on pretence of watching over the temporal interests of the church. Since the time of Hugh of Burgundy the abbacy of S. Martin's had always been held by the head of the ducal house of France; and it was doubtless their influence which procured a canonry in their church for Fulk of Anjou. His greatest delight was to escape from the cares of government and go to keep the festival of S. Martin with the chapter of Ch?teauneuf; there he would lodge in the house of one or other of the clergy, living in every respect just as they did, and refusing to be called by his worldly title; not till after he was gone did the count take care to make up for whatever little expense his host might have incurred in receiving the honorary canon. While there he diligently fulfilled the duties of his office, never failing to take his part in the sacred services. He was not only a scholar, he was a poet, and had himself composed anthems in honour of S. Martin. One Martinmas eve King Louis From-beyond-sea came to pay his devotions at the shrine of the patron saint of Tours. As he and his suite entered the church at evensong, there they saw Fulk, in his canon's robe, sitting in his usual place next the dean, and chanting the Psalms, book in hand. The courtiers pointed at him mockingly--"See, the count of Anjou has turned clerk!" and the king joined in their mockery. The letter which the "clerk" wrote to Louis, when their jesting came round to his ears, has passed into a proverb: "Know, my lord, that an unlettered king is but a crowned ass." Fulk was indeed a living proof that it is possible to make the contemplative life of the scholar a help and not a hindrance to the active life of the statesman. The poet-canon was no mere dreamer; he was a practical, energetic ruler, who worked hard at the improvement and cultivation, material as well as intellectual, of his little marchland, rebuilding the churches and the towns that had been laid waste by the northmen, and striving to make up for the losses sustained during the long years of war. The struggle was completely over now; a great victory of King Rudolf, in the year after Ingelger's death, had finally driven the pirates from the Loire; and there was nothing to hinder Fulk's work of peace. The soil had grown rich during the years it had lain fallow, and now repaid with an abundant harvest the labours of the husbandman; the report of its fertility and the fame of Fulk's wise government soon spread into the neighbouring districts; and settlers from all the country round came to help in re-peopling and cultivating the marchland. This idyl of peace lasted for twenty years, and ended only with the life of Fulk. In his last years he became involved in the intricacies of Breton politics, and storm-clouds began to gather on his western border; but they never broke over Anjou itself till the Good Count was gone.

The old Breton kingdom had now sunk into a duchy which was constantly a prey to civil war. The ruling house of the counts of Nantes were at perpetual strife with their rivals of Rennes. Alan Barbetorte, count of Nantes, had been compelled to flee the country and take shelter in England, at the general refuge of all exiles, the court of AEthelstan, till a treaty between AEthelstan's successor Eadmund and Louis From-over-sea restored him to the dukedom of Britanny for the rest of his life. He died in 952, leaving his duchy and his infant son Drogo to the care of his wife's brother, Theobald, count of Blois and Chartres, a wily, unscrupulous politician known by the well-deserved epithet of "the Trickster," who at once resolved to turn his brother-in-law's dying charge to account for purposes of his own. But between his own territories and the Breton duchy lay the Angevin march; his first step therefore must be to make a friend of its ruler. For this end a very simple means presented itself. Fulk's wife had left him a widower with one son; Theobald offered him the hand of his sister, the widow of Alan, and with it half the city and county of Nantes, to have and to hold during Drogo's minority; while he gave the other half to the rival claimant of the duchy, Juhel Berenger of Rennes, under promise of obedience to himself as overlord. Unhappily, the re-marriage of Alan's widow was soon followed by the death of her child. In later days Breton suspicion laid the blame upon his step-father; but the story has come down to us in a shape so extremely improbable that it can leave no stain on the memory of the Good Count. Two sons of Alan, both much older than Drogo, still remained. But they were not sons of Drogo's mother; Fulk therefore might justly think himself entitled to dispute their claims to the succession, and hold that, in default of lawful heirs, the heritage of Duke Alan should pass, as the dowry of the widow, to her second husband--a practice very common in that age. And Fulk would naturally feel his case strengthened by the fact that part at least of the debateable land--that is, nearly half the territory between the Mayenne and Nantes itself--had once been Angevin ground.

The Chron. Brioc. tells how "ille comes Fulco Andegavensis, vir diabolicus et maledictus," bribed the child's nurse to kill him by pouring boiling water on his head when she was giving him a bath. The fact that the Angevin count is further described as "Fulco Rufus" , would alone throw some doubt on the accuracy of the writer. Moreover, this Chronicle of S. Brieuc is a late compilation, and such a circumstantial account of a matter which, if it really happened, must have been carefully hushed up at the time, is open to grave suspicion when unconfirmed by any other testimony. The Angevin accounts of Fulk's character may fairly be set against it: they rest on quite as good authority. But the sequel of the story furnishes a yet stronger argument, for it shows that the murder would have been what most of the Angevin counts looked upon as much worse than a crime--a great blunder for Fulk's own interest.

Just at this crisis the Normans made a raid upon Britanny, of which their dukes claimed the overlordship. They captured the bishop of Nantes, and the citizens, thus left without a leader of any kind, and in hourly fear of being attacked by the "pirates," sent an urgent appeal to Fulk for help. Fulk promised to send them succour, but some delay occurred; at the end of a week's waiting the people of Nantes acted for themselves, and succeeded in putting the invaders to flight. Indignant at the Angevin count's failure to help, they threw off all allegiance to him and chose for their ruler Hoel, one of the sons of Alan Barbetorte.

These clouds on the western horizon did not trouble the peace of Fulk's last hour. As he knelt to receive the holy communion in S. Martin's church on one of the feasts of the patron saint, a slight feeling of illness came over him; he returned to his place in the choir, and there, in the arms of his brother-canons, passed quietly away. We cannot doubt that they laid him to rest in the church he had loved so well. With him was buried the peace of the Marchland. Never again was it to have a ruler who "waged no wars"; never again, till the title of count of Anjou was on the eve of being merged in loftier appellations, was that title to be borne by one whose character might give him some claim to share the epithet of "the Good," although circumstances caused him to lead a very different life. Fulk the Second stands all alone as the ideal Angevin count, and it is in this point of view that the legends of his life--for we cannot call them history--have a value of their own. The most famous of them all is, in its original shape, a charming bit of pure Christian poetry. One day--so the tradition ran--the count, on his way to Tours, was accosted by a leper desiring to be carried to S. Martin's. All shrank in horror from the wretched being except Fulk, who at once took him on his shoulders and carried him to the church-door. There his burthen suddenly vanished; and at the midnight service, as the count-canon sat in his stall, he beheld in a trance S. Martin, who told him that in his charity he had, like another S. Christopher, unwittingly carried the Lord Himself. Later generations added a sequel to the story. Fulk, they said, after his return to Angers, was further rewarded by a second vision; an angel came to him and foretold that his successors to the ninth generation should extend their power even to the ends of the earth. At the time when this prophecy appears in history, it had already reached its fulfilment. In all likelihood it was then a recent invention; in the legend to which it was attached it has obviously no natural place. But its introduction into the story of Fulk the Good was prompted by a significant instinct. At the height of their power and their glory, the reckless, ruthless house of Anjou still did not scorn to believe that their greatness had been foretold not to the warrior-founder, not to the bravest of his descendants, but to the good count who sought after righteousness and peace. Even they were willing, in theory at least, to accept the dominion of the earth as the promised reward not of valour but of charity.

R. Diceto , vol. i. p. 149.

Whatever may be the origin of the prophecy, however, it was in the reign of Fulk's son and successor Geoffrey Greygown that the first steps were taken towards its realization. Legend has been as busy with the first Geoffrey of Anjou as with his father; but it is legend of a very different kind. The epic bards of the marchland singled out Geoffrey for their special favourite; in their hands he became the hero of marvellous combats, of impossible deeds of knightly prowess and strategical skill, of marvellous stories utterly unhistoric in form, but significant as indications of the character popularly attributed to him--a character quite borne out by those parts of his career which are attested by authentic history. Whatever share of Fulk's more refined tastes may have been inherited by either of his sons seems to have fallen to the second, Guy, who early passed into the quiet life of the monk in the abbey of S. Paul at Corm?ri in Touraine. The elder was little more than a rough, dashing soldier, whose careless temper shewed itself in his very dress. Clad in the coarse grey woollen tunic of the Angevin peasantry, Geoffrey Greygown made himself alike by his simple attire and by his daring valour a conspicuous figure in the courts and camps of King Lothar and Duke Hugh.

Richer, l. iii. c. 68.

Chron. Vindoc. a. 954 .

Richer, l. iii. c. 71.

Richer, l. iii. cc. 72-77.

See note C at end of chapter.

See note D at end of chapter.

Chron. Brioc., as above.

See note D at end of chapter.

The death of Lothar, early in March 986, brought Hugh Capet within one step of the throne. The king's last years had been spent in endeavouring to secure the succession to his son by obtaining for him the homage of the princes of Aquitaine and the support of the duke of the French--two objects not very easy to combine, for the great duchies north and south of the Loire were divided by an irreconcileable antipathy. In 956 William "T?te-d'Etoupe," or the "Shockhead," strong in his triple power as count of Poitou, count of Auvergne and duke of Aquitaine--strong, too, in his alliance with Normandy, for he had married a sister of his namesake of the Long Sword--had bidden defiance not unsuccessfully to Lothar and Hugh the Great both at once. In 961 Lothar granted the county of Poitiers to Hugh; but all he could give was an empty title; when William Shockhead died in 963, his son William Fierabras stepped into his place as count of Poitou, duke of Aquitaine, and leader of the opposition to Hugh Capet.

Richer, l. iii. cc. 3-5.

Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. .

It was now evident that the line of Charles the Great was about to expire in a worthless boy. While the young King Louis, as the chroniclers say, "did nothing," the duke of the French and his followers were almost openly preparing for the last step of all. The count of Anjou, following as ever closely in the wake of his overlord, now ventured on a bold aggression. Half by force, half by fraud, he had already carried his power beyond the Mayenne; he now crossed the Loire and attacked his southern neighbour the count of Poitou. Marching boldly down the road which led from Angers to Poitiers, he took Loudun, and was met at Les Roches by William Fierabras, whom he defeated in a pitched battle and pursued as far as a place which in the next generation was marked by the castle of Mirebeau. Of the subsequent details of the war we know nothing; it ended however in a compromise; Geoffrey kept the lands which he had won, but he kept them as the "man" of Duke William. They seem to have consisted of a series of small fiefs scattered along the valleys of the little rivers Layon, Argenton, Thouet and Dive, which furrow the surface of northern Poitou. The most important was Loudun, a little town some eighteen miles north-west of Poitiers. Even to-day its gloomy, crooked, rough-paved streets, its curious old houses, its quaintly-attired people, have a strangely old-world look; lines within lines of broken wall wind round the hill on whose slope the town is built, and in their midst stands a great square keep, the work of Geoffrey's successors. He had won a footing in Poitou; they learned to use it for ends of which, perhaps, he could as yet scarcely dream. Loudun looked southward to Poitiers, but it looked northward and eastward too, up the valley of the Thouet which led straight up to Saumur, the border-fortress of Touraine and Anjou, and across the valley of the Vienne which led from the Angevin frontier into the heart of southern Touraine. Precious as it might be in itself, Loudun was soon to be far more precious as a point of vantage not so much against the lord of Poitiers as against the lord of Chinon, Saumur and Tours.

"Ludovicus qui nihil fecit" is the original form of the nickname usually rendered by "le Fain?ant."

See note D at end of chapter.

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