Part 4

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 Nomenoë, 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;[235] 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 Æthelwulf 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.[236] 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.[237]

[235] Chron. Namnet. in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. pp. 217, 218; Chronn. Rainald. Andeg., S. Serg., Vindoc., a. 843 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, pp. 5, 129–132, 158).

[236] Ann. Bertin. a. 851 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p. 68) mention the cession of Nantes, etc. That the Mayenne was made the boundary of the two kingdoms appears from a charter of the Breton king Herispoë, dated August 23, 852; “Erispoë princeps Britanniæ provinciæ et usque ad Medanum fluvium.... Dominante Erispoë ... in totam Britanniam et usque ad Medanum fluvium.” Lobineau, _Hist. de Bretagne_, vol. ii. p. 55.

[237] Ann. Bertin. a. 853 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p. 70).

In a breathing-space which followed upon this last attack, Charles received from Æthelwulf of Wessex a personal visit and an overture of mutual alliance against the common foe. The scheme was shattered by a political revolution in Wessex which followed Æthelwulf’s return; and meanwhile a new danger to the Karolingian power arose in the threatening attitude of Robert the Brave, a warrior of obscure birth who was now count of the Angevin march. Under pretext, as it seems, of securing their aid against the northmen, Robert leagued himself with the foes of the monarchy beyond his two frontier rivers, and made a triple alliance with the revolted Bretons and the king’s rebel nephew, Pepin of Aquitaine.[238] Charles, more and more hard pressed every year by domestic and political difficulties, and haunted by the perpetual horror of the pirate ships always in the background, felt that this second wavering lord of the marchland must be won back at any cost. Two years later, therefore, the count of the Angevin march was invested with a vast duchy comprising the whole territory between Seine and Loire as far as the sea and the Breton border; and with this grant the special work of keeping out both Bretons and northmen was distinctly laid upon his shoulders.[239]

[238] Ann. Bertin. a. 859 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._ vol. vii. p. 75).

[239] Regino a. 861 (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. i. p. 571). Ann. Mettens. a. 861 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p. 190).

Robert fulfilled his trust gallantly and successfully till he fell in a Scandinavian ambush at Brissarthe in 866.[240] 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.[241]

[240] Ann. Bertin. a. 866 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p. 94).

[241] Regino, a. 873 (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. i. pp. 585, 586). Ann. Bertin. and Mettens. and Chron. Namnet. a. 873 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. pp. 117, 200, 220, 221). Chron. Sigebert. a. 875 (_ib._ p. 252). Chron. S. Serg., a. 873. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 132, 133).

But the long keels sailed away only to return again. Amid the gathering troubles of the Karolingian house, as years passed on, the cry rose up ever louder and louder from the desolated banks of Seine, and at last even from the inland cities of Reims and Soissons, perilously near the royal abode at Laon itself: “From the fury of the northmen, good Lord, deliver us!” It was not from Laon that deliverance was to come. The success of Charles the Bald at Angers, the more brilliant victory of his grandson Louis III. over Guthrum at Saucourt, were but isolated triumphs which produced no lasting results. At the very moment when the Karolingian empire was reunited under the sceptre of Charles the Fat came the crisis of the struggle with the northmen in West-Frankland; and the true national leader shewed himself not in the heir of Charles the Great, but in Count Odo of Paris, the son of Robert the Brave. It was Odo who saved Paris from the northmen when they besieged it with all their forces throughout the winter of 885; and by saving Paris he saved the kingdom. Before the siege was raised the possessions which his father had held as duke of the French were restored to him by the death of Hugh of Burgundy. A few months later the common consent of all the Karolingian realms deposed their unworthy Emperor, and the acclamations of a grateful people raised their deliverer Odo to the West-Frankish throne.

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 Ælendis, 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 Cæsar; two centuries later tradition still pointed out the site of Cæsar’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.[242] 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.

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

[Illustration: Map I.

GAUL c. 909–941.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co. ]

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 Æthelstan 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.[243] 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.

[243] See note B at end of chapter.

Their disdain, however, mattered little to Fulk. In those critical times, he who had the keenest sword, the strongest arm, the clearest head and the boldest heart, had the best title to nobility--a title whose validity all were sooner or later compelled to acknowledge. Fulk held Anjou by the grace of God, the favour of his lord the duke, and the might of his own good sword. He was, however, no mere man of war; he was quite willing to strengthen his position by peaceful means. One method of so doing was suggested by his father’s example; it was one which in all ages finds favour with ambitious men of obscure origin, and which was to be specially characteristic of the Angevin house. As Ingelger had married Ælendis of Amboise, so Fulk sought and won the hand of another maiden of Touraine, Roscilla, the daughter of Warner, lord of Loches, Villentras and Haye. It can only have been as the dowry of his wife that Fulk came into possession of the most valuable portion of her father’s lands, the township of Loches.[244] It lay some twenty miles south of Amboise, on the left bank of the Indre, a little river which takes its rise in the plains of Berry and winds along a wooded valley, through some of the most romantic scenery of southern Touraine, to fall into the Loire about half way between Amboise and Angers. In a loop of the river, sheltered on the south and west by a belt of woodland which for centuries to come was a favourite hunting-ground of Roscilla’s descendants, rose a pyramidal height of rock on whose steep sides the houses of the little township clustered round a church said to have been built in the sixth century by a holy man from southern Gaul, named Ursus, the “S. Ours” whom Loches still venerates as its patron saint.[245] By the acquisition of Loches Fulk had gained in the heart of southern Touraine a foot-hold which, coupled with that which he already possessed at Amboise, might one day serve as a basis for the conquest of the whole district.

[244] _Gesta Cons. Andeg._ (Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_), pp. 65, 66. The pedigree there given to Roscilla is impossible.

[245] The life of S. Ours is in Gregory of Tours, _Vitæ Patrum_, c. xviii.

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 Orléans and through the Gâtinais, 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.[246] 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.[247] 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;[248] 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.[249] 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.[250] 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.[251]

[246] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 239. The true date is shewn by a charter of Fulk, in Mabille’s Introd. to _Comtes d’Anjou, pièces justif._ no. vi., p. ci.

[247] Chron. Frodoard, a. 937 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 192).

[248] Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

[249] Richer, l. ii. c. 48; _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 66, where the king is miscalled Charles the Simple.

[250] Chron. Frodoard, a. 948 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 204). Richer, l. ii. c. 82.

[251] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 67. The date is proved by two charters, one dated August 941, signed by “Fulco comes” and “Fulco filius ejus” (Mabille, _ibid._, introd., _pièces justif._, no. viii. p. cv); the other, dated May 942, and signed by one Fulk only (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. ix. p. 723).

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,[252] 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 Châteauneuf 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 Châteauneuf; 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.[253] 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.[254] 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.”[255] 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,[256] 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.[257] 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.

[252] “Iste Fulco nulla bella gessit.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 69.

[253] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 70.

[254] _Ib._ pp. 71, 72.

[255] “Scitote, domine, quod rex illitteratus est asinus coronatus.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 71. It is curious that John of Salisbury, writing at the court of Henry of Anjou some years before the compilation of the _Gesta Consulum_, quotes the saying as coming from “literis quas _Regem Romanorum_ ad Francorum regem transmisisse recolo” (_Polycraticus_, l. iv. c. 6; Giles, vol. iii. p. 237). The proverb was well known in the time of Henry I.; see Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 390 (Hardy, p. 616).

[256] _Fragm. Hist. Franc._ in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 298.

[257] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 74, 75.

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 Æthelstan, till a treaty between Æthelstan’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;[258] 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.[259] 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.[260] 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.

[258] Her name was Gerberga, as appears by a charter of her son, Geoffrey Greygown, quoted in _Art de vérifier les Dates_, vol. xiii. p. 47.

[259] Chron. Brioc. in Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i. cols. 29, 30. Chron. Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 277.

[260] The Chron. Brioc. (Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i. col. 30) 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” (_ib._ col. 29), 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.[261]

[261] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i. cols. 30, 31. Chron. Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 277.

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.[262] We cannot doubt that they laid him to rest in the church he had loved so well.[263] 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.[264] 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.[265] 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.

[262] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 75. According to _Gallia Christiana_ (vol. xiv. col. 808) the Norman attack on Nantes took place about 960. It is probable that Fulk died soon after; but no charters of his successor are forthcoming until 966.

[263] The _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 67, 75) say that Ingelger, Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good were all buried in S. Martin’s. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376) says the place of their burial is unknown to him. The statement of the later writers therefore is mere guess-work or invention; but in the case of Fulk the Good it is probably right.

[264] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 73, 74.

[265] R. Diceto (Stubbs), 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 Corméri in Touraine.[266] 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,[267] 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.

[266] _Gall. Christ._, vol. xiv. col. 258.

[267] “Indutus tunicâ illius panni quem Franci Grisetum vocant, nos Andegavi Buretum.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 81.

The receiver of Fulk’s famous letter had gone before him to the grave; Louis From-over-sea, the grandson of Eadward the Elder, the last Karolingian worthy of his race, had died in 954. His death brought the house of France a step nearer to the throne; but it was still only one step. Lothar, the son of Louis, was crowned in his father’s stead; two years later the king-maker followed the king; and thenceforth his son, the new duke of the French, Hugh Capet, steadily prepared to exchange his ducal cap for a crown which nevertheless he was too prudent to seize before the time. In the face of countless difficulties, Louis in his eighteen years’ reign had contrived to restore the monarchy of Laon to a very real kingship. His greatest support in this task had been his wife’s brother, the Emperor Otto the Great. The two brothers-in-law, who had come to their thrones in the same year, were fast friends in life and death; and Otto remained the faithful guardian of his widowed sister and her son. So long as he lived, Hugh’s best policy was peace; and while Hugh remained quiet, there was little scope for military or political action on the part of his adherent Geoffrey of Anjou. In 973, however, the great Emperor died; and soon after he was gone the alliance between the Eastern and Western Franks began to shew signs of breaking. Lothar and Otto II. were brothers-in-law as well as cousins, but they were not friends as their fathers had been. In an evil hour Lothar was seized with a wild longing to regain the land which bore his name,--that fragment of the old “Middle Kingdom,” known as the duchy of Lotharingia or Lorraine, which after long fluctuating between its attachment to the imperial crown and its loyalty to the Karolingian house had finally cast in its lot with the Empire, with the full assent of Louis From-over-sea. Lothar brooded over its loss till in 978, when Otto and his queen were holding their court at Aachen, his jealousy could no longer endure the sight of his rival so near the border, and he summoned the nobles of his realm to an expedition into Lorraine.[268] Nothing could better fall in with the plans of Hugh Capet than a breach between Lothar and Otto; the call to arms was readily answered by the duke and his followers, and the grey tunic of the Angevin count was conspicuous at the muster.[269] The suddenness of Lothar’s march compelled Otto to make a hasty retreat from Aachen; but all that the West-Franks gained was a mass of plunder, and the vain glory of turning the great bronze eagle on the palace of Charles the Great towards the east instead of the west.[270] While they were plundering Aachen Otto was preparing a counter-invasion.[271] Bursting upon the western realm, he drove the king to cross the Seine and seek help of the duke, and before Hugh could gather troops enough to stop him he had made his way to the gates of Paris. For a while the French and the Germans lay encamped on opposite banks of the river, the duke waiting till his troops came up, and beguiling the time with skirmishes and trials of individual valour.[272] But as soon as Otto perceived that his adversaries were becoming dangerous he struck his tents and marched rapidly homewards, satisfied with having inflicted on his rash cousin a far greater alarm and more serious damage than he had himself suffered from Lothar’s wild raid.[273]

[268] Richer, l. iii. c. 68.

[269] Chron. Vindoc. a. 954 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 163).

[270] Richer, l. iii. c. 71.

[271] The exact date of Lothar’s attack on Lotharingia seems to be nowhere stated. That of Otto’s invasion of Gaul, however, which clearly followed it immediately, is variously given as 977 (Chronn. S. Albin. and Vindoc., Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 21, 163) and 978 (Chronn. S. Flor. Salm. and S. Maxent., _ib._ pp. 186, 381). The later date is adopted by Mr. Freeman, _Norm. Conq._, vol. i. p. 264.

[272] Among these the Angevin writers (_Gesta Cons._, Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 79, 80) introduce Geoffrey Greygown’s fight with a gigantic Dane, Æthelwulf. It seems to be only another version, adorned with reminiscences of David and Goliath, of Richer’s account (l. iii. c. 76) of a fight between a German champion and a man named Ivo; and the whole story of this war in the _Gesta_ is full of hopeless confusions and anachronisms.

[273] Richer, l. iii. cc. 72–77.

From that time forth, at least, Geoffrey Greygown’s life was a busy and a stirring one. It seems to have been in the year of the Lotharingian raid that he married his second wife, Adela, countess in her own right of Chalon-sur-Saône, and now the widow of Count Lambert of Autun.[274] By his first marriage, with another Adela, he seems to have had only a daughter, Hermengard, who had been married as early as 970[275] to Conan the Crooked, count of Rennes. There can be little doubt that this marriage was a stroke of policy on Geoffrey’s part, intended to pave the way for Angevin intervention in the affairs of Britanny. The claims of Fulk the Good to the overlordship of Nantes had of course expired with him; whatever rights the widow of Duke Alan might carry to her second husband, they could not pass to her stepson. Still Geoffrey could hardly fail to cherish designs upon, at least, the debateable ground which lay between the Mayenne and the original county of Nantes. Meanwhile the house of Rennes had managed to establish, by the right of the stronger, its claim to the dukedom of Britanny. Hoel, a son of Alan Barbetorte, remained count of Nantes for nearly twenty years after Fulk’s death; his career was ended at last by the hand of an assassin;[276] and as his only child was an infant, his brother Guerech, already bishop of Nantes, was called upon to succeed him, as the only surviving descendant of Alan who was capable of defending the state. Guerech was far better fitted for a secular than for an ecclesiastical ruler; as bishop, his chief care was to restore or rebuild his cathedral, and for this object he was so eager in collecting contributions that he made a journey to the court of Lothar to ask help of the king in person. His way home lay directly through Anjou. Geoffrey felt that his opportunity had come; and he set the first example of a mode of action which thenceforth became a settled practice of the Angevin counts. He laid traps in all directions to catch the unwary traveller, took him captive, and only let him go after extorting homage not merely for the debateable land, but also for Nantes itself; in a word, for all that part of Britanny which had been held or claimed by Fulk as Drogo’s guardian.[277]

[274] See note C at end of chapter.

[275] Morice, _Hist. Bret._, vol. i. p. 63. See note C at end of chapter.

[276] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _preuves_, vol. i., p. 31. Chron. Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 278. “C. 980,” notes the editor in the margin.

[277] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i. col. 32.

Geoffrey had gained his hold over Nantes; but in so doing he had brought upon himself the wrath of his son-in-law. Conan, as duke of Britanny, claimed for himself the overlordship of Nantes, and regarded Guerech’s enforced homage to Geoffrey as an infringement of his own rights. His elder sons set out to attack their step-mother’s father, made a raid upon Anjou, and were only turned back from the very gates of Angers by a vigorous sally of Geoffrey himself.[278] Conan next turned his vengeance upon the unlucky count-bishop of Nantes. The Angevin and his unwilling vassal made common cause against their common enemy, who marched against their united forces, bringing with him a contingent of the old ravagers of Nantes--the Normans.[279] The rivals met not far from Nantes, on the _lande_ of Conquereux, one of those soft, boggy heaths so common in Britanny; and the issue of the fight was recorded in an Angevin proverb--“Like the battle of Conquereux, where the crooked overcame the straight.”[280] Conan was, however, severely wounded, and does not appear to have followed up his victory; and the Nantes question was left to be fought out ten years later, on the very same ground, by Geoffrey’s youthful successor.

[278] See note D at end of chapter.

[279] Chron. Brioc., as above.

[280] 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 “Tête-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.[281] In 961 Lothar granted the county of Poitiers to Hugh;[282] but all he could give was an empty title; when William Shockhead died in 963,[283] his son William Fierabras stepped into his place as count of Poitou, duke of Aquitaine, and leader of the opposition to Hugh Capet.

[281] Richer, l. iii. cc. 3–5.

[282] _Ib._ c. 13.

[283] Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 381).

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,”[284] 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.[285] 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.[286] 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.

[284] “Ludovicus qui nihil fecit” is the original form of the nickname usually rendered by “le Fainéant.”

[285] See note D at end of chapter.

[286] Fulk Nerra’s Poitevin castles, Maulévrier, Thouars, etc., must have been built on the ground won by Geoffrey.

The little marchland had thus openly begun her career of aggression on the west and on the south. It seems that a further promise of extension to the northward was now held by Hugh Capet before the eyes of his faithful Angevin friend. Geoffrey’s northern neighbour was as little disposed as the southern to welcome the coming king. The overlordship of Maine was claimed by the duke of the Normans on the strength of a grant made to Hrolf in 924 by King Rudolf; it was claimed by the duke of the French on the strength of another grant made earlier in the same year by Charles the Simple to Hugh the Great,[287] as well as in virtue of the original definition of their duchy “between Seine and Loire”; but the Cenomannian counts owned no allegiance save to the heirs of Charles the Great, and firmly refused all obedience to the house of France. Hugh Capet, now king in all but name, laid upon the lord of the Angevin march the task of reducing them to submission. He granted Maine to Geoffrey Greygown[288]--a merely nominal gift at the moment, for Hugh (or David) of Maine was in full and independent possession of his county; and generation after generation had to pass away before the remote consequences of that grant were fully worked out to their wonderful end. Geoffrey himself had no time to take any steps towards enforcing his claim. Events came thick and fast in the early summer of 987. King Louis V. was seized at Senlis with one of those sudden and violent sicknesses so common in that age, and died on May 22. The last Karolingian king was laid in his grave at Compiègne; the nobles of the realm came together in a hurried meeting; on the proposal of the archbishop of Reims they swore to the duke of the French a solemn oath that they would take no steps towards choosing a ruler till a second assembly should be held, for which a day was fixed.[289] Hugh knew now that he had only a few days more to wait. He spent the interval in besieging a certain Odo, called “Rufinus”--in all likelihood a rebellious vassal--who was holding out against him at Marson in Champagne; and with him went his constant adherent Geoffrey of Anjou. At the end of the month the appointed assembly was held at Senlis. Passing over the claims of Charles of Lorraine, the only surviving descendant of the great Emperor, the nobles with one consent offered the crown to the duke of the French. From his camp before Marson Hugh went to receive, at Noyon on the 1st of June,[290] the crown for which he had been waiting all his life. Geoffrey, whom he had left to finish the siege, fell sick and died before the place, seven weeks after his patron’s coronation;[291] and his body was carried back from distant Champagne to be laid by his father’s side in the church of S. Martin at Tours.[292]

[287] Chron. Frodoard, a. 924 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 181).

[288] See note E at end of chapter.

[289] Richer, l. iv. cc. 5 and 8.

[290] Richer, l. iv. c. 12. On this Kalckstein (_Geschichte des französischen Königthums unter den ersten Capetingern_, vol. i. p. 380, note 2), remarks: “Aus Rich. iv. 12 wäre zu schliessen, dass Hugo in Noyon gekrönt wurde ... aber eine gleichzeitige Urkunde von Fleury entscheidet für Reims. Richer gibt wohl in Folge eines Gedächtnissfehlers den 1 Juli (wie für Juni zu verbessern seine wird) als Krönungstag. Hist. Francica um 1108 verfasst, Aimoin Mirac. S. Bened. ii. 2 (Bouq., x. 210 u. 341).” The _Hist. Franc. Fragm._ here referred to places the crowning at Reims on July 3. Aimoin, however, places it at Noyon and gives no date. The question therefore lies really between Richer and the Fleury record referred to, but not quoted, by Kalckstein; for the two twelfth century writers are of no authority at all in comparison with contemporaries. We must suppose that the Fleury charter gives the same date as the _Hist. Franc. Fragm._ But is it not possible that Hugh was really crowned first at Noyon on 1st June, and afterwards recrowned with fuller state at Reims a month later?

[291] Chronn. S. Albin., S. Serg., and Vindoc., a. 987; Rain. Andeg. a. 985; S. Maxent. a. 986 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 21, 134, 164, 9, 382). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 376.

[292] Fulk Rechin, as above, and _Gesta Cons._ (_ib._), p. 89, say he was buried in S. Martin’s. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 165) buries him in S. Aubin’s at Angers.

The century of preparation and transition was over; the great change was accomplished, not to be undone again for eight hundred years. The first period of strictly French history and the first period of Angevin history close together. The rulers of the marchland had begun to shew that they were not to be confined within the limits which nature itself might seem to have fixed for them; they had stretched a hand beyond their two river-boundaries, and they had begun to cast their eyes northward and dream of a claim which was to have yet more momentous results. In the last years of Geoffrey Greygown we trace a foreshadowing of the wonderful career which his successor is to begin. From the shadow we pass to its realization; with the new king and the new count we enter upon a new era.

NOTE A.

ON THE SOURCES AND AUTHENTICITY OF EARLY ANGEVIN HISTORY.

Our only detailed account of the early Angevins, down to Geoffrey Greygown, is contained in two books: the _Gesta Consulum Andegavensium_, by John, monk of Marmoutier, and the _Historia Comitum Andegavensium_, which goes under the name of Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches. Both these works were written in the latter part of the twelfth century; and they may be practically regarded as one, for the latter is in reality only an abridgement of the former, with a few slight variations. The _Gesta Consulum_ is avowedly a piece of patchwork. The author in his “Proœmium” tells us that it is founded on the work of a certain Abbot Odo which had been recast by Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches, and to which he himself, John of Marmoutier, had made further additions from sundry other sources which he enumerates (Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. 353. This “Proœmium” is there printed at the head of the _Historia Abbreviata_ instead of the _Gesta Consulum_, to which, however, it really belongs; see M. Mabille’s introduction, _ib._ p. xxxi.). The _Historia Comitum Andegavensium_ (_ib._ p. 320) bears the name of Thomas of Loches, and thus professes to be the earlier version on which John worked. But it is now known that the work of Thomas, which still exists in MS., is totally distinct from that published under his name (see M. Mabille’s introduction to _Comtes d’Anjou_, pp. xviii., xix.), and, moreover, that the printed _Historia Comitum_ is really a copy of a series of extracts from Ralf de Diceto’s _Abbreviationes Chronicorum_--extracts which Ralf himself had taken from the _Gesta Consulum_ (see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to R. Diceto, vol. ii. pp. xxiii.–xxix). There is, however, one other source of information about the early Angevins which, if its author was really what he professed to be, is of somewhat earlier date and far higher value, although of very small extent. This is the fragment of the _Angevin History_ which goes under the name of Count Fulk Rechin. Its authorship has been questioned, but it has never been disproved; and one thing at least is certain--the writer, whoever he may have been, had some notion of historical and chronological possibilities, whereas John of Marmoutier had none. Fulk Rechin (as we must for the present call him, without stopping to decide whether he has a right to the name) gives a negative testimony against all John’s stories about the earlier members of the Angevin house. He pointedly states that he knows nothing about the first three counts (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376), and he makes no mention of anybody before Ingelger. Now, supposing he really was Count Fulk IV. of Anjou, it is fairly safe to assume that if anything had been known about his own forefathers he would have been more likely to know it than a monk who wrote nearly a hundred years later. On the other hand, if he was a twelfth-century forger, such a daring avowal of ignorance, put into the mouth of such a personage, shews the writer’s disregard of the tales told by the monk, and can only have been intended to give them the lie direct.

The two first members of the Angevin house, then--Tortulf of Rennes and his son Tertullus--rest solely on the evidence of these two late writers. Their accounts are not recommended by intrinsic probability. We are roused to suspicion by the very first sentence of the _Gesta Consulum_:--“Fuit vir quidam de Armoricâ Galliâ, nomine Torquatius. Iste a Britonibus, proprietatem vetusti ac Romani nominis ignorantibus, corrupto vocabulo Tortulfus dictus fuit” (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 35). When one finds that his son is called Tertullus, it is impossible not to suspect that “Torquatius” and “Tertullus” are only two different attempts to Latinize a genuine Teutonic “Tortulf.” For the lives of these personages John of Marmoutier gives no distinct dates; but he tells us that Torquatius was made Forester of Nid-de-Merle by Charles the Bald, “eo anno quo ab Andegavis et a toto suo regno Normannos expulit” (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 35). Now this is rather vague, but it looks as if the date intended were 873. We are next told that Tertullus went to seek his fortune in France “circa id temporis quo Karolus Calvus ... ex triarcho monarchus factus, non longo regnavit spatio” (_ib._ pp. 36, 37), whatever that may mean. The next chronological landmark is that of the “reversion” of S. Martin, which John copies from the Cluny treatise _De Reversione B. Martini_, and copies wrong. Then comes Fulk the Red, on whom he says the whole county of Anjou was conferred by Duke Hugh of Burgundy, guardian of Charles the Simple, the county having until then been divided in two parts; and he also says that Fulk was related to Hugh through his grandmother (_ib._ pp. 64, 65).

There are several unmanageable points in this story. 1. The pedigree cannot be right. It is clear that John took Hugh the Great (“Hugh of Burgundy,” as he calls him) to be a son of the earlier Hugh of Burgundy (one copy of the _Gesta_, that printed by D’Achéry in his _Spicilegium_, vol. iii. p. 243, actually adds “filius alterius Hugonis”), and this latter to have been the father of Petronilla, wife of Tertullus.

The chronology of the life of Fulk the Red, long a matter of mingled tradition and guess-work, has now been fairly established by the investigations of M. E. Mabille. This gentleman has examined the subject in his introduction to MM. Marchegay and Salmon’s edition of the _Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou_, and in an article entitled “Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire,” in the _Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes_, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194; to each of these works is appended by way of _pièces justificatives_ a series of charters of the highest importance for establishing the facts of the early history of Anjou and Touraine. The first appearance of Fulk is as witness to a charter given at Tours by Odo, as abbot of S. Martin’s, in April 886. (Mabille, introd. _Comtes_, p. lxix. note). Now if Fulk the Red was old enough to be signing charters in 886, his parents must have been married long before the days of Louis the Stammerer--in 870 at the very latest, and more likely several years earlier still. His grandparents therefore (_i.e._ Tertullus and Petronilla) must have been married before 850. It is possible that Hugh the Abbot who died in 887 may have had a daughter married as early as this; but it does not seem very likely.

2. The story of Ingelger’s investiture with Orleans and the Gâtinais is suspicious. His championship of the slandered countess of Gâtinais (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 40–45) is one of those ubiquitous tales which are past confuting. Still the statement that he somehow acquired lands in the Gâtinais is in itself not impossible. But the coupling together of Gâtinais and Orléans is very suspicious. Not one of the historical descendants of Ingelger had, as far as is known, anything to do with either place for nearly two hundred years. There is documentary proof (see the signatures to a charter printed in Mabille’s introd. _Comtes_, p. lxiv, note 1; the reference there given to Salmon is wrong) that in 942, the year after the death of Fulk the Red, the viscount of Orléans was one Geoffrey; and he belonged to a totally different family--but a family which, it seems, did in time acquire the county of Gâtinais, and in the end became merged in the house of Anjou, when the son of Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou succeeded his uncle Geoffrey Martel in 1061. It is impossible not to suspect that the late Angevin writers took up this story at the wrong end and moved it back two hundred years.

3. Comes the great question of Ingelger’s investiture with half the county of Anjou.

In not one of the known documents of the period does Ingelger’s name appear. The only persons who do appear as rulers of the Angevin march are Hugh the Abbot and his successor Odo, till we get to Fulk the Viscount. Fulk’s first appearance in this capacity is in September 898, when “Fulco vicecomes” signs a charter of Ardradus, brother of Atto, viscount of Tours (Mabille, Introd. _Comtes_, p. xciii). He witnesses, by the same title, several charters of Robert the Abbot-Count during the next two years. In July 905 we have “signum Fulconis Turonorum et Andecavorum vicecomitis” (_ib._ p. xcv); in October 909 “signum domni Fulconis Andecavorum comitis” (_ib._ p. xcviii); and in October 912 he again signs among the counts (_ib._ p. lxi, note 4). But in May 914, and again as late as August 924, he resumes the title of viscount (_ib._ pp. c and lxii, note 2). Five years later, in the seventh year of King Rudolf, we find a charter granted by Fulk himself, “count of the Angevins and abbot of S. Aubin and S. Licinius” (_ib._ p. ci); and thenceforth this is his established title.

These dates at once dispose of R. Diceto’s statement (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 143) that Fulk succeeded his father Ingelger as second count in 912. They leave us in doubt as to the real date of his appointment as count; but whether we adopt the earlier date, in or before 909, or the later one, between 924 and 929, as that of his definite investiture, we cannot accept the _Gesta’s_ story that it was granted by Hugh the Great on behalf of Charles the Simple. For in 909 the duke of the French was not Hugh, but his father Robert; and in 924–929 the king was not Charles, but Rudolf of Burgundy.

But the chronology is not the only difficulty in the tale of Count Ingelger. The _Gesta_-writers admit that “another count” (_i.e._ the former count, Duke Hugh) went on ruling beyond the Mayenne. This at once raises a question, very important yet very simple--Did the Angevin March, the March of Robert the Brave and his successors, extend on both sides of the Mayenne? For the assumption that it did is the ground of the whole argument for the “bipartite” county.

The old territory of the Andes certainly spread on both sides of the river. So also, it seems, did the march of Count Lambert. The commission of a lord marcher is of necessity indefinite; it implies holding the border-land and extending it into the enemy’s country if possible. It appears to me that when Lambert turned traitor he carried out this principle from the other side; when Nantes became Breton, the whole land up to the Mayenne became Breton too. This view is distinctly supported by a charter in which Herispoë, in August 852, styles himself ruler of Britanny and up to the river Mayenne (Lobineau, _Hist. Bretagne_, vol. ii. col. 55); and it gives the most rational explanation of the Breton wars of Fulk the Good, Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk Nerra, which ended in Anjou’s recovery of the debateable ground. If it is correct, there is an end at once of the “bipartite county” and of Count Ingelger; “the other count” cannot have ruled west of the Mayenne, therefore he must have ruled east of it, and there is no room for any one else.

The one writer whose testimony seems to lend some countenance to that of the _Gesta_ need not trouble us much. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 374) does call Ingelger the first count; but his own confession that he knew nothing about his first five ancestors beyond their names gives us a right to think, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, that he may have been mistaken in using the title. He says nothing about the county having ever been bipartite, and his statement that his forefathers received their honours from Charles the Bald, not from the house of Paris (_ib._ p. 376), may be due to the same misconception, strengthened by a desire, which in Fulk Rechin would be extremely natural, to disclaim all connexion with the “genus impii Philippi,” or even by an indistinct idea of the investiture of Fulk I. For, if this is regarded as having taken place between 905 and 909, it must fall in the reign of Charles the Simple, and might be technically ascribed to him, though there can be no doubt that it was really owing to the duke of the French. Every step of Fulk’s life, as we can trace it in the charters, shows him following closely in the wake of Odo, Robert and Hugh; and the dependance of Anjou on the duchy of France is distinctly acknowledged by his grandson.

The latter part of the account of Ingelger in the _Gesta_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 47–62) is copied bodily from the _Tractatus de reversione B. Martini a Burgundiâ_, which professes to have been written by S. Odo of Cluny at the request of his foster-brother, Count Fulk the Good. The wild anachronisms of this treatise have been thoroughly exposed by its latest editor, M. A. Salmon (_Supplément au Recueil des Chroniques de Touraine_, pp. xi–xxviii), and M. Mabille (“Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire et les pérégrinations du corps de S. Martin,” in _Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes_, ser. vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194). It is certain, from the statement of S. Odo’s own biographer John, that the saint was born in 879 and entered religion in 898; at which time it is evident that Fulk the Good, the Red Count’s youngest son, must have been quite a child, if even he was in existence at all. The letters in which he and the abbot address each other as foster-brothers are therefore forgeries; and the treatise which these letters introduce is no better. The only part of it which directly concerns our present subject is the end, recounting how the body of the Apostle of the Gauls, after a thirty years’ exile at Auxerre, whither it had been carried to keep it safe from the sacrilegious hands of Hrolf and his northmen when they were ravaging Touraine, was brought back in triumph to its home at Tours on December 13, 887, by Ingelger, count of Gâtinais and Anjou, and grandson of Hugh, duke of Burgundy. Now there is no doubt at all that the relics of S. Martin were carried into Burgundy and afterwards brought back again, and that the feast of the Reversion of S. Martin on December 13 was regularly celebrated at Tours in commemoration of the event; but the whole history of the adventures of the relics as given in this treatise is manifestly wrong in its details; _e.g._ the statements about Hrolf are ludicrous--the “reversion” is said to have taken place after his conversion. M. Salmon has gone carefully through the whole story: M. Mabille has sifted it still more thoroughly. These two writers have shewn that the body of S. Martin really went through a great many more “peregrinations” than those recounted in the Cluny treatise, that the real date of the reversion is 885, and in short that the treatise is wrong in every one of its dates and every one of the names of the bishops whom it mentions as concerned in the reversion, save those of Archbishop Adaland of Tours and his brother Raino, who, however, was bishop of Angers, not of Orléans as the treatise says. The passages in the Tours chronicle where Ingelger is described as count of Anjou are all derived from this source, and therefore prove nothing, except the writer’s ignorance about counts and bishops alike.

The mention of Archbishop Adaland brings us to another subject--Ingelger’s marriage. Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 139) says that he married Ælendis, niece of Archbishop Adaland and of Raino, bishop of Angers, and that these two prelates gave to the young couple their own hereditary estates at Amboise, in Touraine and in the Orléanais. The _Gesta Consulum_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 45) say the same, but afterwards make Raino bishop of Orléans. This story seems to be a bit of truth which has found its way into a mass of fiction; at any rate it is neither impossible nor improbable. The author of the _De Reversione_ is quite right in saying that Archbishop Adaland died shortly after the return of the relics; his statement, and those of the Tours Chronicle, that Adaland was consecrated in 870 and died in 887, are borne out by the same charters which enable us to track the career of Fulk the Red. As to Raino--there was a Raino ordained bishop of Angers in 881 (Chron. Vindoc. ad ann. in Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p. 160). The version which makes Orléans his see is derived from the false Cluny treatise.

Fulk the Red was witnessing charters in 886 and died in 941 or 942. He must have been born somewhere between 865 and 870; as the traditional writers say he died “senex et plenus dierum, in bonâ senectute,” it may have been nearer the earlier date. There is thus no chronological reason why these two prelates should not have been his mother’s uncles; and as the house of Anjou certainly acquired Amboise somehow, it may just as well have been in this way as in any other.

NOTE B.

THE PALACE OF THE COUNTS AT ANGERS.