CHAPTER I

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.

A superscript is denoted by ^x or ^{xx}, for example xi^o or I^{ère}.

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have

been placed at the end of the book.

The original book had the year relevant to the text on that page as

a top-of-page header under the page number. In this etext this has

been omitted. All other sidenotes in the original text have been put

in-line in brackets [ ] at the relevant place, for example

[Sidenote: 1190 Jan.]

All changes noted in the ERRATA on page ix have been applied to the

etext.

Some other minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

RICHARD THE LION HEART

[Illustration: (colophon)]

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON. BOMBAY. CALCUTTA. MADRAS

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK. BOSTON. CHICAGO

DALLAS. SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

RICHARD

THE LION HEART

BY

KATE NORGATE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1924

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

“When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the

story of Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard not in

his Crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his

lavish recognition of municipal life.” It may well seem strange to

begin by quoting these words of the master who inspired my earliest

venture—and thereby, indirectly at least, all my later ventures

also—into the field of history, the preface to a book on Richard

the First in which that sovereign’s island realm figures scarcely

more than in the background, and the life of its people not at all.

Certainly England and the English people ought to have stood in the

forefront and to have been treated in the fullest detail, if this

book were intended for a history of Richard’s reign; but it has been

written with no such intention. It is merely an attempt to sketch,

from materials of which some of the most valuable and interesting

have become accessible to students only within a comparatively

recent period, the life-story of a prince who reigned less than ten

years and lived less than forty-two, yet whose personal character,

peculiar circumstances, and adventurous career have given him—whether

deservedly or not—a conspicuous place in mediæval history, and made

him a hero of romance in every country from England to Palestine.

The only detailed biography of Richard known to me is that which Mr.

G. P. R. James wrote many years ago. A wealth of material unknown

at that time has since then been placed within our reach. This

is especially the case with regard to the Crusade of 1191-1192.

Richard’s struggle with Saladin is the phase of his career which

has contributed the most to his fame; and my studies have led me

to believe that he himself regarded it as the most important work

of his life. Every step in his policy from the hour when he took

the Cross till he set out for Holy Land appears to have been taken

primarily, if not solely, with a view to the one enterprise which his

contemporaries emphatically called “the work of God”; and there is no

reason to doubt that when compelled to leave that work unfinished,

he left it with the full intention of returning to complete it, and

would have returned, had not his destiny been ordained otherwise. I

have therefore allowed myself to tell the story of the Crusade with

a fullness of detail which may be thought disproportionate to the

brief space of time which the expedition actually occupied, and to

its direct influence on the history of his dominions; and I have made

a lavish use of the materials, Eastern and Western, contained in the

publications of the various French literary and historical societies,

especially the great _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades_. The

chief treasure in that collection—chief, at least, for my purpose—is

the elaborate edition of Bohadin with its French translation,

superseding the crabbed Latin of Schultens; although, as will be

seen, I cannot but think that Schultens’s work still retains a value

of its own. Of the relations between the two versions of our chief

Western authority for the story of the Crusade—the _Itinerarium

Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi_ and the _Estoire de la Guerre

Sainte par Ambroise_—I made, about fourteen years ago, a somewhat

minute study based on the notes written by Mr. T. A. Archer in the

margins of his copies of those two books; I having had the melancholy

pleasure of becoming their owner after his death. The results of

that study, with a brief statement of the circumstances which had

impelled me to it and assisted me in it, appeared in the _English

Historical Review_ for July 1910. After going over the ground again I

see no reason to alter the conclusion which I had then formed on the

subject; rather do I find myself confirmed in that opinion. I have,

however, thought it right, when citing either or both of the two

versions, to give in every case a separate reference to each of them.

KATE NORGATE.

_January, 1924._

CONTENTS

BOOK I

RICHARD OF AQUITAINE, 1157-1189

CHAPTER I

PAGE

THE BOY DUKE, 1157-1179 1

CHAPTER II

FATHER AND SONS, 1179-1183 32

CHAPTER III

KING HENRY’S HEIR, 1183-1189 57

BOOK II

RICHARD’S CRUSADE, 1189-1192

CHAPTER I

THE YEAR OF PREPARATION, 1189-1190 91

CHAPTER II

THE OUTWARD VOYAGE, 1190-1191 119

CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF ACRE, 1191 152

CHAPTER IV

FROM ACRE TO JOPPA, 1191 176

CHAPTER V

THE ADVANCE ON JERUSALEM, 1191-1192 193

CHAPTER VI

RICHARD AND SALADIN, 1192 230

BOOK III

RICHARD AND EUROPE, 1192-1199

CHAPTER I

RICHARD AND THE EMPIRE, 1192-1194 264

CHAPTER II

RICHARD AND FRANCE, 1194-1199 294

NOTES

I. Richard and Leopold at Acre 330

II. The Capitulation of Acre 331

III. The Advance from the Two Casals to Ramlah 333

IV. Casal des Plains and Casal des Bains 334

V. Richard’s Homage to the Emperor 336

VI. Richard, William of Longchamps, and the Great Seal 338

INDEX 341

ERRATA

P. 35, footnote, line 4, _for_ Dien _read_ Dieu.

P. 91, heading of chapter, _for_ 1191 _read_ 1190.

P. 152, heading of chapter, _for_ 1190 _read_ 1191.

Pp. 152 and 153, _delete_ dates in margin.

P. 154, margin, _for_ 1190 _read_ 1189.

P. 159, lines 4 and 10, _for_ Henfrid _read_ Humphry.

Pp. 160 to 175, margin, _for_ 1190 _read_ 1191.

P. 264, heading of chapter, _for_ 1193 _read_ 1194.

P. 314, line 12 from foot, _for_ VIII _read_ VI.

BOOK I

RICHARD OF AQUITAINE

1157-1189

In Regum serie scribatur Dux Aquitanorum et Vasconum Ricardus, qui

ad probitatis opera nunquam exstitit tardus, cujus adolescentia

magna floret industria. (Geoffrey of Vigeois, A.D. 1185).

CHAPTER I

THE BOY DUKE

1157-1179

Bonum est viro cum portaverit jugum adolescentia sua.

“The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third

nesting”—thus ran one of the predictions in the so-called “prophecy

of Merlin,” which in the latter half of the twelfth century

was generally regarded as shadowing forth the destiny of Henry

Fitz-Empress and his family. “The queen,” said those who interpreted

the prophecy after the event, “is called the eagle of the broken

covenant because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and

England, but was separated from the one by divorce and from the other

by long imprisonment. And whereas her first-born son, William, died

in infancy, and the second, Henry, in rebellion against his father,

Richard, the son of her third nesting, strove in all things to bring

glory to his mother’s name.”[1]

There was nothing to mar the rejoicing of either Eleanor or Henry in

September 1157. The young king had overcome the difficulties which

had beset him at the opening of his reign. Public order and the

regular administration of public justice had been restored throughout

his realm. He had obtained the French king’s recognition of his

rights over Normandy and the Angevin lands, and also over Eleanor’s

duchy of Aquitaine,[2] where in the winter of 1156 he had received

the homage of the barons and kept the Christmas festival with her

at Bordeaux.[3] King and queen [Sidenote: 1157] returned to England

in the spring.[4] Soon afterwards the last remnant of opposition to

the rule of the Angevin king in England had been disarmed in the

persons of Earl Hugh of Norfolk and Count William of Boulogne; Henry

had “subdued all the Welsh to his will,”[5] and received, together

with the homage of Malcolm of Scotland, a formal restitution of

Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland,[6] which had been in the

possession of the Scots since 1136. From these successes Henry had

either just returned, or was on his way back to rejoin his queen at

Oxford, when their third son was born there—no doubt in Beaumont

palace—on September 8.[7] A woman of S. Alban’s was chosen for the

boy’s nurse and fostered him together with her own son, born on the

same night and afterwards known as Alexander Neckam,[8] author of a

treatise on natural science or what passed for science in his time.

Her name was Hodierna; in later days she had from the royal domains

in Chippenham an annuity of seven pounds, doubtless granted to her by

her royal nursling, whom she seems to have survived by some twenty

years.[9] Whether she dwelt at the court while he was under her

charge, or whether, like his ancestor Geoffrey Martel, he was sent to

dwell with his foster-mother, there is nothing to show. Before he was

two years old his destiny was planned by the king; Richard was to be

heir to the dominions of his mother.

“Aquitaine,” says an English writer of the time, “abounding in riches

of many kinds, excels other parts of the western world in such wise

that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest and most

fertile among the provinces of Gaul. Although its fields respond

abundantly to culture, its vines to propagation, and its woodlands to

the chase, yet nevertheless it takes its name not from any of these

advantages, but from its waters (_aquæ_), haply esteeming as alone

worthy of account among its delights that which its health-giving

water brings forth either to be returned to the sea, or uplifted

in the air. If, indeed, we track the Garonne from its fount along

its rapid course to the sea, and if we also follow the line of the

Pyrenean mountains, all the country that lies between derives its

name from the beneficent waters that flow through it. Furthermore,

in those parts smoothness of tongue is so general that it promises

impunity to everybody, and any one who knows not the manner of that

people cannot know whether they are more constant in deed than in

word. When they set themselves to tame the pride of their enemies,

they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and

they settle down to rest in peace, they give themselves up wholly to

pleasure.”[10]

Whatever may be thought of Dean Ralph’s etymology, there was an

element of truth in his description, half jesting though it seems to

be, of the country and the character of its people. He gives indeed

hardly sufficient prominence to the pugnacious side of the latter;

and the boundaries which he assigns to the former are considerably

narrower than those of the duchy of Aquitaine as it stood at the time

of Richard’s birth. That duchy comprised, in theory at least, fully

one-third of the kingdom of France. As counts of Poitou its dukes

bore direct sway over a territory bounded on the north by Britanny,

Anjou, and Touraine, on the west by the sea from the bay now known

as that of Bourgneuf to the mouth of the Charente, and on the east

(roughly) by the course of the river Creuse from a little distance

below Argenton to its junction with the Vienne; and also over the

dependent district of Saintonge on the north side of the estuary of

the Garonne, or Gironde. As counts of Gascony they were overlords

of a number of lesser counties and lordships, extending from the

mouth of the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and forming a territory

nearly twice the size of Poitou. Between Poitou and Gascony lay the

counties of Angoulême, La Marche, and Périgord, and, between the

two latter, a cluster of minor fiefs which collectively formed the

district known as the Limousin, and of which the most important was

the viscounty of Limoges. All these had from early times owned the

overlordship of the Poitevin counts in their ducal capacity. So, too,

had Berry, an extensive district lying to the north of La Marche.

The north-eastern portion of Berry, which formed the viscounty of

Bourges, had, however, for a long time past been lost to the dukes

and reckoned as part of the Royal Domain of France. On the eastern

and south-eastern borders of the duchy lay the counties of Auvergne

and Toulouse. Toulouse, with its dependencies—the Quercy or county of

Cahors, Alby, Foix, Carcassonne, Cerdagne and Roussillon—had always

been a separate fief held directly of the Crown; but the right to

its ownership had for the last sixty years been in dispute between

the Poitevin counts and its actual holders, the house of St. Gilles,

who also held the neighbouring county of Rouergue and with it the

overlordship of a number of smaller fiefs along the southern coast.

Auvergne, originally a part of the Aquitanian duchy, was strongly

disposed to reject the authority of the Poitevin dukes; and both

Auvergne and Toulouse were more or less openly supported in this

matter by the French king. Nor were the other underfiefs of the

duchy, or even the barons of Poitou, by any means models of feudal

obedience. For a century or more the dukes had been periodically at

strife with the counts of Angoulême, the counts of La Marche, the

lords of Lusignan (in Poitou), the viscounts of Limoges, and the

neighbours and rivals of these last.[11] It was little more than

twenty years since Count William of Angoulême had carried off from

Poitiers Eleanor’s stepmother, the Countess Emma, “by the counsel of

the chiefs of the Limousin who feared lest the Poitevin yoke should

be laid more heavily upon them” owing to her marriage with the duke,

she being a daughter and a possible co-heiress of the viscount of

Limoges.[12] At Limoges itself, moreover, there seems to have been a

perennial rivalry between the bishop, the viscount, the abbot of the

great abbey of S. Martial, and the townsfolk.[13]

When Henry II went to Limoges after his marriage in 1152 he seems to

have been welcomed as duke by the viscount; but strife arose between

his followers and the citizens which so enraged him that he ordered

the recently built walls of the town to be razed and the bridge to

be destroyed. As the town—locally called “the castle”—was held by

the viscount of the abbot, this was an offence to all parties at

once; and the abbot retorted by refusing to grant the duke’s claim

to a procuration in the city—that is, outside the walls—saying he

was only bound to grant it within the enclosure of the “castle.”[14]

Henry, though angry, had his mind fixed on more important matters,

and let the insult pass; but on his next visit to Limoges, in

[Sidenote: 1156] 1156, he successfully asserted his ducal rights.[15]

In the [Sidenote: 1159] spring or early summer of 1159 he again went

to Aquitaine, to prosecute by force of arms his claim, as Eleanor’s

husband, to the county of Toulouse. The support of the Count of

Barcelona and his wife, the Queen of Aragon, was purchased by a

promise that Richard should wed their infant daughter and should on

his marriage receive the Dukedom of Aquitaine.[16] The Quercy was

conquered by Henry and held for him awhile after he had abandoned the

siege of Toulouse and returned to Normandy. A treaty made between

[Sidenote: 1160] Henry and Louis of France in May 1160 contained a

provision for a year’s truce between Henry and Raymond of Toulouse,

during which Henry was to keep “whatever he at the date of the

treaty had of the honour of Toulouse, Cahors, or Quercy.”[17] This

was probably not much, as his troops had already been withdrawn from

the conquered territory; the greater part of it seems to have fallen

back into Raymond’s hands, and we hear nothing more of the relations

between him and Henry for nearly thirteen years.

Where and how the future duke of Aquitaine was being brought up there

is nothing to show. All that we know about him, till he was well

advanced in his thirteenth year, is that the sheriffs of London

paid ten pounds six and eightpence for his travelling expenses

on some occasion—probably [Sidenote: 1163] his elder brother’s

birthday feast—in 1163,[18] and that in May 1165 he went with his

mother and eldest sister [Sidenote: 1165-6] to join the king in

Normandy.[19] Henry’s quarrel with S. Thomas of Canterbury was then

at its height; and Henry’s discontented subjects in Aquitaine were

quick to take advantage of the opportunity for mischief given them

by the difficulties with France in which that quarrel involved him.

On the pretext of “certain liberties whereof he had deprived them”

some of them became so troublesome—chiefly, it seems, by their

intrigues with King Louis[20]—that [Sidenote: 1166] in November 1166

he summoned them to a conference at Chinon. It took place on Sunday,

November 19,[21] with so little result that he sent Eleanor, who

had apparently been trying to maintain order in the duchy during

his absence, back to England and himself went to keep Christmas at

Poitiers.[22] Whether Richard went with his mother or stayed with his

father does not appear.

[Sidenote: 1167]

In March Henry had a conference with Raymond of Toulouse at

Grandmont. Shortly afterwards he tried to assert his ducal authority

over the count of Auvergne. The only result was a fresh rupture

with Louis,[23] which was temporarily patched up by a truce made in

August to last till Easter next, March 31, 1168.[24] Before that

date a formidable rebellion broke out in Aquitaine. The counts

[Sidenote: 1167-8] of Angoulême and La Marche,[25] the viscount of

Thouars,[26] [Sidenote: =1167-8=] Robert of Seilhac in the Limousin

and his brother Hugh,[27] Aimeric of Lusignan in Poitou, Geoffrey of

Rancogne in the [Sidenote: 1168] county of Angoulême,[28] “with many

others,” sought to rebel against the king, and went about ravaging

with fire and sword. When the king heard of this he hurried to the

place, took the strong castle of Lusignan and made it stronger still,

and destroyed the villages and fortresses of the rebels. He then

revictualled his own castles, and left the duchy under the charge of

Eleanor (who had rejoined him after Christmas) and of Earl Patrick

of Salisbury, while he himself went to meet Louis on the Norman

border on April 7.[29] The truce between the kings was now expired,

and Henry desired a treaty of peace; but meanwhile the southern

rebels were urging Louis to insist that Henry should indemnify them

for the loss and damage which he had inflicted upon them, and which

they represented as a breach of his truce with France, the French

king being supreme lord of Aquitaine.[30] They even placed in the

hands of Louis the hostages which they had promised to Henry.[31]

Louis did not go to the conference in person, but sent some nobles

to represent him.[32] To them Henry proposed a new scheme for the

future of Aquitaine: that its young duke-designate should marry the

youngest daughter of Louis. The French envoys refused to bind their

sovereign to this unexpected condition; it was, however, agreed

“that if Richard should ask for his rights over the Count of St.

Gilles”—that is, of Toulouse—“the king of France should try the

cause in his court.” Thus the settlement of Aquitaine on Richard

was, by implication at least, recognized by France, although Richard

himself was not yet eleven years old. As to the aggrieved nobles,

Henry promised them restitution;[33] but Louis would not give up the

hostages; and the conference ended in another truce to last till the

octave of midsummer.[34]

Scarcely had the parties separated when tidings came that Earl

Patrick had been slain in a fight with some of the malcontents.[35]

Henry was too much overburdened with other cares to attempt during

the rest of that year any personal intervention in Aquitaine. Eleanor

seems to have urged him to make it formally over to Richard.[36] She

probably saw that there was no likelihood of a good understanding

between her people and her Angevin husband, and hoped to be more

successful in governing them herself in the name of her son. Her

suggestion, and that which Henry had made nine months before to

the representatives [Sidenote: 1169] of Louis, were both carried

into effect on January 6, 1169, when the two kings made peace at

Montmirail. The two elder sons of Henry and Eleanor were both present

at the meeting. Henry himself first did homage to Louis for his

continental possessions; young Henry did the like for Britanny, Anjou

and Maine; then Richard was betrothed to the French king’s daughter

Aloysia, and likewise performed the homage due to Louis for the

county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine.[37]

The feudal situation created by these transactions was a strange one.

It was capable of at least two different interpretations, and its

practical result, so far as Aquitaine was concerned, was that for

the next twenty years there were two dukes of that country. Henry’s

purpose in thus making his sons do homage to Louis was to guard

against the possibility of dispute, after his own death, as to the

portion of his dominions to which each of them was entitled. In his

eyes the homage was anticipatory of a future and perhaps—for he was

not yet thirty-six—still very remote event, and its effect was merely

prospective. But, so far as can be seen, no such limitation of its

scope was expressed in the act of homage; and the legal effect of

that act therefore was not merely prospective, but immediate; it at

once made the younger Henry and Richard respectively count of Anjou

and duke of Aquitaine, not under the suzerainty of their father, but

under the direct overlordship of the French king. Such at least would

be its legal effect as soon as the boys were old enough to govern

for themselves; and this age young Henry had almost reached, for he

was in his fourteenth year. Their father, on the other hand, as the

sequel shows, never intended to give during his own lifetime any

real authority at all to young Henry, nor did he intend to give any

to Richard otherwise than with a tacit but perfectly well understood

reservation of his own right of intervention and control whenever

he might choose to exercise it; and he still remained legally both

count and duke, for he had just repeated, in both capacities, his

own homage to Louis. There can be no doubt that Louis was fully

alive (although it seems that Henry was not) to the advantages

which the French Crown might derive from this complicated state of

affairs. But he was, of course, not desirous of pointing them out

to his rival; and during the next four years he carefully refrained

from all interference with the affairs of the Angevin dominions.

The new duke of Aquitaine was, however, not yet twelve years old,

and it was clearly with the French king’s sanction that his father,

in the spring, marched into the duchy and forcibly brought the

counts of Angoulême and La Marche and most of the other rebels to

submission.[38]

Our only certain notice of Richard between January 1169 and June 1172

shows him to have been, at some time in [Sidenote: 1170] 1170, at

Limoges with his mother, laying the foundation-stone of the abbey of

S. Augustine.[39] On the Octave of [Sidenote: 1172] Whit-Sunday, June

11, 1172, his formal installation as duke took place at Poitiers. In

the abbey church of S. Hilary he was placed, according to custom, in

the abbot’s chair, and the sacred lance and banner which were the

insignia of the ducal office were given to him by the Archbishop

of Bordeaux and the Bishop of Poitiers. He afterwards proceeded to

Limoges, where he was received with a solemn procession; the ring of

S. Valeria, the protomartyr of Aquitaine, was placed on his finger,

and he was then proclaimed as “the new Duke”[40]—for it was in virtue

of this double investiture, given not by the king of France, but

by the local prelates and clergy as representatives of the local

saints of the land, that the dukes of Aquitaine claimed to hold their

dukedom.

Eight months later another important ceremony took place at Limoges.

Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by their two elder sons, held court

in the castle for a week with the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and

the counts of Toulouse and Maurienne. Alfonso of Aragon, Raymond of

Toulouse, and Humbert of Maurienne had met Henry at Montferrand in

Auvergne, the last-named to make a treaty of marriage between his

daughter and Henry’s youngest [Sidenote: 1173] son, John, the two

former to seek the king’s mediation in a quarrel between themselves.

Alfonso was the son of Queen Petronilla and Raymond of Barcelona, and

brother of the girl to whom Richard had been betrothed in 1159. He

and Raymond of Toulouse were at strife about the homage of Cerdagne,

Foix, and Carcassonne; both were anxious for the friendship of their

nearest and most powerful neighbour. Henry “made peace between

them,” and Raymond, whose territories were ringed in by those of

Aragon and Aquitaine, paid the peacemaker his price; “he became the

man of the king, and of the new king his son, and of Count Richard

of Poitou, to hold Toulouse of them”—that is, to hold it immediately

of Richard, who held it under his elder brother and his father—“as a

hereditary fief, by military service at the summons of either king or

count, and by a yearly payment of a hundred marks of silver or of ten

destriers worth at least ten marks each.”[41]

A few months later Richard entered actively on public life; and he

made a bad beginning. Towards the end of March the younger King Henry

fled from his father’s court in Normandy to that of Louis.[42] The

elder Henry had been warned at Limoges by Raymond of Toulouse that

“his wife and his sons had formed a conspiracy against him”;[43]

but he had disregarded the warning, and left Richard and Geoffrey

in Aquitaine under the guardianship of their mother. Early in the

summer both the lads joined their elder brother in France,[44] and

all three pledged themselves by a solemn oath, at a great council in

Paris, “not to forsake the king of France, nor to make any peace with

their father save through him (Louis) and the French barons”; Louis

in return swearing, and causing his barons to swear, “that he would

help the young king and his brothers, to the utmost of his power, to

maintain their war against their father and to gain possession of the

kingdom of England” for young Henry.[45]

The “young king” was eighteen years old; he was as shallow-minded

and selfish as he was handsome and superficially attractive; and he

had fallen under the influence of Louis, to whose daughter he was

married. Crowned in 1170 as his father’s heir, he chose to consider

himself aggrieved by being given no share in the government of

England or of the Angevin home-lands. He may have persuaded his

brothers to consider themselves as victims of a similar grievance

with regard to their duchies of Aquitaine and Britanny. He and Louis

were naturally anxious to secure the forces of those two duchies in

support of their scheme of ousting the elder King Henry from his

dominions, continental and insular; and they hoped that the example

of the boy-dukes might help to detach their respective vassals from

their father’s cause.[46] But the lads had a nearer counsellor than

young Henry or Louis, and one to whose counsels it was only natural,

and in a measure right, that they should listen with reverence and

submission. Eleanor unquestionably sided with her elder son against

her husband, for she was caught in the act of trying to make her

way from Aquitaine to the French court disguised in the dress of a

man.[47] Certainly nothing can justify, or even excuse, the duplicity

of this “eagle of the broken covenant” towards the husband and

sovereign who, even when his eyes were fully opened to the treason

of their eldest son, still put such confidence in her loyalty as

to leave the younger eaglets in her charge. But there is a very

considerable excuse for Richard and Geoffrey. On the ground of that

feudal loyalty which was a principle of such importance in the life

of those days, there was, indeed, something to be said for all three

of the brothers, and more especially for Richard. None of them were

homagers of Henry II; all of them were homagers of Louis and of Louis

alone. For Richard it might further be urged that if he was under

any other feudal obligation, it was more to his mother than to his

father; his possession of Aquitaine was their joint gift, but it was

on Eleanor’s consent that the validity of the gift really rested;

Henry possessed the dukedom only in right of his wife. On the higher

ground of filial duty Henry’s and Eleanor’s claims to the obedience

of their children were equal; Richard and Geoffrey suddenly found

that those claims were conflicting, and that a choice must be made

between the two. That the choice really lay between right and wrong

is much plainer to us than it could be to these lads, of whom the

elder was not yet sixteen, and both of whom were under the direct

personal influence of their mother. On her, rather than on them, lies

the responsibility for their wrong choice.

Eleanor, captured by some of her husband’s scouts, was at once

placed by him in strict confinement.[48] Her eldest son’s cause

gained practically nothing by the adhesion of his young brothers.

According to one account, both of them accompanied him to the siege

of Drincourt in July.[49] The success of that siege, however,

was due, not to any of the three, but to their allies the counts

of Flanders and Boulogne; moreover, the death of the latter soon

afterwards caused the Flemish troops to withdraw to their own

country, and nothing further came of the expedition.[50] The rebel

barons of Geoffrey’s duchy all submitted to his father in the

autumn.[51] At a conference on September 25 at Gisors Henry made

fair offers to all three of his sons; “but the king of France did

not deem it advisable that the [English] king’s sons should make

peace with their father.”[52] At some time before the end of the

year Richard was knighted by Louis.[53] Young Henry and Geoffrey

seem to have remained at the French court through the winter,

but Richard characteristically went his own way; he returned to

Aquitaine. Considering the extent of that country and the character

of its previous relations with Henry II, it seems to have furnished

a very small proportion of names to the list of avowed partizans of

the young king; and the more important Aquitanian names which we do

find there are those of men whose disobedience is very unlikely to

have been in any way connected with that of Richard—Count William

of Angoulême, Geoffrey of Rancogne, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan,

William of Chauvigny, and Thomas of Coulonges in Poitou, Charles of

Rochefort in Saintonge, Robert of Blé in the Limousin, and in Gascony

Jocelyn of Maulay and Archbishop William of Bordeaux.[54] The first

four of these needed no incitement from the young duke’s example,

and the last two are not likely to have been influenced by it, to

throw off their allegiance to his father. The Aquitanian rebels in

1173 would probably have been more numerous had not the barons of the

Limousin been at that time too busy fighting among themselves to give

much heed to disagreements between their rival rulers. The confusion

in those parts was aggravated by a swarm of “Brabantines,” or foreign

mercenaries,[55] probably brought in by Henry at an earlier time,

and now roving about the land and preying on it wholly at their own

will and pleasure. There was no one to control either Brabantines

or barons, since Richard’s withdrawal and Eleanor’s imprisonment

had left Aquitaine without any resident governor at all, till in

the winter Richard went back to put himself single-handed at the

head of affairs. We hear of him as far south as Bordeaux, where he

was no doubt sure of a welcome from Archbishop William, and secured

the support of another great churchman, the abbot of S. Cross, by

confirming the privileges of the abbey.[56] He tried to win to his

cause the rising town of La Rochelle; but in this he failed; the

townsfolk shut their gates in his face.[57] He soon, however, had

under his command a considerable force of knights which [Sidenote:

1174 c. _May 12_] at Whitsuntide 1174 seized the city of Saintes.

Henry was then at Poitiers; at the head of a body of loyal Poitevins

he marched upon Saintes and drove out the intruders,[58] and

recovered possession of several other rebel fortresses.[59] The hopes

of young Henry and Louis had broken down both in Aquitaine and in

Normandy. In England they broke down still more completely; and the

failure of the rebellion there led to the reopening of negotiations

for peace.

Some ten or fifteen years later a bitter enemy of Henry II described

the characters of young Henry and of Richard both at once in the

form of a comparison, or rather contrast, between them.[60] The

contrast showed itself even in the ill-omened first stage of their

political and military careers. Throughout the rebellion of 1173-4

the young king was a mere tool—and a very inefficient one—in the

hands of Louis. At the instigation of Louis he had entered upon the

war, and at the dictation of Louis he was ready to accept terms of

peace. Geoffrey was apparently contented with a similar position;

but not so Richard. Eleanor might have made a tool of her second

son, but no one else could do so. It was not for love of either

young Henry or Louis that he had sided with them, and not at their

behest [Sidenote: 1174 _Sept. 8_] would he give up the struggle. On

his seventeenth birthday the kings met at Gisors; but “they could

not come to a settlement because of the absence of Count Richard,

who at that time was in Poitou, making war on the castles and men of

his father.” The conference ended in a truce till Michaelmas,[61]

on the understanding that meanwhile Henry should subdue Richard by

force without hindrance from Louis, young Henry, or their adherents.

Richard was not yet hardened enough to contemplate fighting his

father in person; “when King Henry was come into Poitou, his son

Richard dared not await him, but fled from every place at his

approach, abandoning all the fortresses that he had taken, not daring

to hold them against his father.” When he learned the terms of the

truce, his indignation at being thus deserted by his supposed allies

made him suddenly determine on a better course. “He came weeping,

and fell with his face on the ground at the feet of the king his

[Sidenote: _Sept. 23_] father, beseeching his forgiveness.” It was

granted instantly and completely.[62] Father and son re-entered

Poitiers together.[63] At Henry’s suggestion Richard went in

person to assure his elder brother and Louis that he was no longer

an obstacle to the conclusion of peace; and on September 30 the

peace was made at Montlouis in Touraine. Henry’s three sons placed

themselves at his mercy and “returned to him and to his service as

their lord.” He promised to each of them a specified provision; and

they all pledged themselves to accept these provisions as final

and nevermore to require anything further from him save at his own

pleasure, nor to withdraw themselves or their service from him.

Richard and Geoffrey also did homage to him “for what he granted and

gave them.” Young Henry would have done likewise, but his father

would not permit it “because he was a king.”[64] This treaty seems

to have been afterwards put into writing and formally executed at

Falaise, probably on October 11.[65] [Sidenote: 1175] Early in 1175

Richard and Geoffrey did homage to their father again at Le Mans,[66]

and on April 1 their elder brother did the same at Bures.[67]

The new provision for Richard did not include his reinstatement as

duke of Aquitaine or count of Poitou. It consisted merely of “two

fitting dwelling-places, whence no damage could come to the king,

in Poitou,” and half the revenues of that county in money.[68] The

strict letter of the treaty of Montlouis (or of Falaise) in fact

reinstated Henry II as sole ruler of all the Angevin dominions, and

reduced all his sons to the position of dependents on his bounty.

Henry, however, soon showed that he had no intention of enforcing

this punishment to the uttermost on Richard and Geoffrey. The

treaty ordained that all lands and castles belonging to the king

and his loyal barons were to be restored to their owners and to the

condition in which they had been fifteen days before “the king’s

sons departed from him”; so, too, were the lands of the rebels, but

in their case no mention was made of their castles.[69] With these

castles, therefore, Henry was left free to deal at his pleasure.

Accordingly, when early in 1175 he set himself to carry out this

clause of the treaty in Anjou and Maine, he not only revictualled

and repaired whatever fortresses of his own had suffered damage, and

destroyed whatever new fortifications had been added to the castles

whose owners had defied or resisted him, but also ordered that some

of these latter should be razed. Geoffrey was sent to carry out this

process in Britanny, and Richard in Aquitaine, while the two Henrys

returned to England together on May 9.[70]

Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there

were others who had seized the opportunity afforded them by the war

to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority at defiance.

The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly

have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was

wielded by the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her

son. The Aquitanian barons whose castles had in the time of the war

been fortified or held against Henry II made it clear that they were

not disposed to give them up to Richard. He therefore, in pursuance

of his father’s orders, set out “to reduce the said castles to

nothing.” He began after midsummer by marching into the county of

Agen, where Arnald of Bonville had fortified Castillon against him,

“and would not give it up.” This place, “fortified by both nature and

art,” held out against the duke and his engines of war for nearly

two months; “at last he took it, and in it thirty knights whom he

kept in his own hands.”[71] We have no certain knowledge of his

further movements [Sidenote: 1176] till the following spring, when

he and Geoffrey of Britanny went to England together. They landed

on Good Friday, April 7.[72] Richard’s purpose seems to have been

to seek counsel and help in the difficult task which his father had

assigned to him, for when the Easter festivities were over it was

arranged by the elder Henry that the younger one should go with

Richard into Poitou “to subdue his enemies.” Young Henry went to

Normandy on April 20;[73] Richard probably returned about the same

time, though the brothers did not cross the Channel together.[74]

During his absence Vulgrin of Angoulême, a son of the reigning

count William Taillefer, had “presumed” to march into Poitou at the

head of a troop of Brabantines. The bishop of Poitiers had at once

resolved, with Theobald Chabot, who was “the leader of Duke Richard’s

soldiery,” to “deliver the people committed to him out of the hand of

their enemies,” and the invaders, although they far outnumbered the

forces of the bishop and the constable, had been completely routed

near Barbezieux.[75] Richard made straight for Poitou and called

out its feudal levies, “and a great multitude of knights from the

regions round about flocked to him, for the wages that he gave them.”

He began by punishing some of the rebels in Poitou; next, after

Whitsuntide (May 23), he marched against Vulgrin’s Brabantines and

defeated them in a pitched battle between St. Maigrin and Bouteville,

near the western border of the Angoumois. Thence he led his host

into the Limousin, to punish Count Aimar of Limoges, who also had

taken advantage of the duke’s absence to commit some breaches of the

peace. First, Richard besieged and took Aimar’s castle of Aixe with

its garrison of forty knights. Then he attacked Limoges, and in a few

days was master of the city and all its fortifications. All this was

the work of a month. Shortly after midsummer he returned to Poitiers;

there he was at last joined by the young king. After taking counsel

with the Poitevin barons it was decided that the next step should be

the punishment of Vulgrin of Angoulême. The brothers led their united

forces to Châteauneuf on the Charente, south-west of Angoulême,

and won the place after a fortnight’s siege. Thereupon young Henry

“would stay with his brother no longer, but following evil counsel

departed from him.” Richard, thus suddenly deserted, moved cautiously

further away from Angoulême to Moulineuf, another castle belonging

to Vulgrin; this he captured in ten days. Then he turned back again

and laid siege to Angoulême itself. Within its walls were not only

Vulgrin and his father, Count William, but also Aimar of Limoges and

two other rebel leaders, the viscounts of Ventadour and of Chabanais.

In six days Count William was forced to surrender into Richard’s

hands himself, his city, and all its contents, his castles of

Bouteville, Archiac, Montignac, Jarnac, La Chaise, and Merpins, and

to give hostages for his submission to the mercy of Richard and of

King Henry, to whom Richard immediately sent him and the other nobles

who had surrendered with him.[76] They presented themselves before

Henry at Winchester on September 21, fell at his feet, and “obtained

mercy from him”; that is to say, he, it seems, sent them back again

with instructions that they should be temporarily reinstated in their

possessions, pending a fuller consideration which he purposed to give

to their case when he should return to Normandy.[77]

Having for the moment reduced northern Aquitaine to subjection,

Richard set himself to a like task in Gascony. After keeping

Christmas at Bordeaux he marched upon Dax, which had been fortified

against him by its viscount [Sidenote: _Jan._ 1177] with the help of

the count of Bigorre. Its recovery by Richard was quickly followed

by that of Bayonne, held against him by its viscount Ernald Bertram.

Thence he marched up to the very “Gate of Spain”—St. Pierre de

Cize, on the Navarrese border at the foot of the Pyrenees—took the

castle of St. Pierre in one day, razed it, compelled the Basques and

Navarrese to swear that they would keep the peace, “destroyed the

evil customs which had been introduced at Sorde and Lespéron” (two

towns in the Landes) “where it was customary to rob pilgrims on their

way to or from S. James,” and by Candlemas was back at Poitiers,

having—for the moment—“restored all the provinces to peace.”[78]

The count of Bigorre in the south and a few barons of Saintonge and

of the Limousin had not yet submitted; Richard, however, made no

further movement against any of them for many months. His inaction

may have been due to instructions from his father, who was probably

unwilling to let him engage in another campaign against these rebels

at a moment when all the available forces of the Angevin house and

the presence of Richard himself seemed likely to be needed in another

quarter.

The richest baron of Aquitanian Berry, Ralf of Déols, the lord

of Châteauroux, whose lands were said to be worth as much as the

whole ducal domains of Normandy,[79] had died at the close of 1176

leaving as his sole heir a daughter three years old. The wardship

of this child and of her heritage belonged of right to her suzerain,

the Duke of Aquitaine; but her relations were resolved to keep, if

possible, both herself and her lands in their own power,[80] so they

carried her off to La Châtre,[81] and prepared her castles and their

[Sidenote: 1176] own for defence and defiance. When these tidings

reached King Henry in England, he sent urgent orders to his eldest

son to assemble the Norman host without delay and take forcible

possession of the lands of Déols.[82] Henry’s action in this matter

is noticeable as showing that he regarded Richard’s tenure of the

dukedom of Aquitaine at this period as merely nominal or delegated;

he claimed Denise of Déols as his own vassal, not as Richard’s. It

is, however, not at once apparent why, since he had intrusted to

Richard the task of subduing the other Aquitanian rebels, he did not

leave the affair of Déols to the same hands. The reason may have been

mainly a geographical one. These things [Sidenote: 1176-7] may have

taken place at a moment when Henry knew Richard to be busily engaged

at the very opposite end of the duchy, at any rate somewhere in

Gascony, perhaps at its extreme southern border. The young king, on

the other hand, was in Normandy, whence it would be easy for him to

lead a force through Maine and Touraine into Berry. On receiving his

father’s instructions he did so, and laid siege to Châteauroux, which

surrendered to him at once.[83] He did not, however, gain possession

of the little heiress or of the rest of her lands; for the matter now

became complicated by the intervention of the supreme lord of Berry

and of Aquitaine, King Louis.

For more than eight years, ever since January 1169, Aloysia of

France had been in Henry’s guardianship as the destined bride of

Richard. According to one of the best informed English writers of

the time, Louis, when this engagement was made, had promised that on

the marriage of the young couple he would make over to Richard, as

Aloysia’s dowry, the city of Bourges with all its appurtenances;[84]

that is, the portion of Berry the ownership of [Sidenote: =1176-7=]

which was in dispute between France and Aquitaine. Ten years

before—in the year of Aloysia’s birth—he had promised to King Henry

a like cession of the Vexin, the disputed border-land of France and

Normandy, as the dowry of Aloysia’s sister Margaret on her intended

marriage with Henry’s eldest son, and Henry had taken advantage of

the ambiguous wording of a clause in the treaty to have the two

children—contrary to Louis’s intention—at once formally married in

church; whereby he gained immediate possession, not indeed of the

whole Vexin, but of that portion of it which had once been Norman

and which contained its most valuable fortresses, these being

surrendered to him by the Templars, who were by the treaty to have

them in custody till the marriage should take place. That marriage,

nevertheless, had brought more advantage to Louis than to Henry, by

bringing Margaret’s husband, as soon as he reached manhood, under

the influence of his father-in-law in opposition to his own father.

There was but too much reason to fear a like result in the case

of Richard; and the dangers of such a result were even greater in

this case than in the former one, owing to special circumstances

connected with the betrothal of Richard and Aloysia. That betrothal

was the price, or part of the price, paid by Henry at Montmirail in

1169 for Louis’s sanction, as overlord, to the scheme devised by

Henry for securing a certain distribution of his dominions among his

sons. Henry’s own renewal of homage to Louis on that occasion for

all his continental territories was a token that he did not intend

to renounce his personal rights over any of his lands, but merely to

secure for himself the power of sharing those rights with his sons

whenever he might choose to do so, and for the boys an unquestionable

right of succession at his death to their respective shares of the

Angevin heritage. But, somewhat like Louis nine years before, Henry

made a mistake which rendered it possible for his adversary to put

another construction upon the matter. He secured young Henry’s claims

to the future possession of the heritage of Geoffrey of Anjou and

Maud of Normandy, and Richard’s claim to the heritage of Eleanor, by

making them do homage to Louis for Anjou and Aquitaine [Sidenote:

=1176-7=] respectively; but he omitted to secure the subordination of

their claims to his own during his lifetime by making them do homage

to himself. Owing to this omission, it was open to Louis to assert,

if he chose, that the Angevin counties and the Norman duchy legally

belonged to young Henry and the duchy of Aquitaine to Richard, in

virtue of the homage rendered by them for those lands direct to

himself as overlord; Henry II—so he might argue—having by his consent

to that homage tacitly renounced all claim to the lands for which it

was rendered, and being thenceforth merely in temporary charge of

them as guardian of the boys. The promise of the cession of Bourges

was a very small price to pay for a weapon so tremendous as that

which Henry had thus, it seems, unconsciously placed in the hands of

an enemy whose mean jealousy and unscrupulous astuteness he appears

never to have fully realized. He unintentionally made this possible

construction of the treaty of Montmirail still more plausible through

the crowning of his eldest son in 1170 and the solemn installation of

the second as duke of Aquitaine in 1172. Louis acted upon it in 1173,

although he does not seem ever to have put it into formal words; and

his action, coupled with that of the ungrateful sons urged on by

their mother, must have opened Henry’s eyes to the peril in which he

had involved himself through his misplaced confidence in the loyalty

both of his overlord and of his own family. It showed that as soon as

Richard and Aloysia were married, Louis might and in all probability

would demand the recognition of his new son-in-law as sole ruler of

Aquitaine, independent of any superior save Louis himself.

At the close of 1175 or early in 1176 Louis, it seems, reminded Henry

that, Richard being now in his nineteenth [Sidenote: 1175-6] year

and Aloysia in her sixteenth, it was full time for the contract of

marriage between them to be carried into effect; but the answer which

he received was so unsatisfactory that he referred the matter to the

Pope. We have no actual record of any communication between the kings

on the subject at this time, but something of the kind must have

[Sidenote: 1176] taken place to cause the Pope’s action. In May 1176

Alexander bade Cardinal Peter, then legate in France, lay the whole

of Henry’s lands on both sides of the sea under Interdict “unless

he (Henry) would permit Richard and Aloysia to be married without

delay.”[85] The legate, however, seems to have done nothing in the

matter for more than a year. Probably the two kings were negotiating;

[Sidenote: 1177] but we hear nothing of their negotiations till June

1177, when Henry sent an embassy to France to “convene” Louis about

the dowries which he had promised to give with his two daughters to

the young king and to Richard—to wit, the Vexin (that is, its eastern

or “French” part, which was still in Louis’s hands) and the viscounty

of Bourges.[86] It seems that Henry, having found Margaret’s marriage

fail to give him the control over her promised lands, demanded to

be put in possession of those of Aloysia before he would allow her

to marry Richard. But meanwhile the Pope had in May renewed the

injunctions which he had issued to Cardinal Peter eleven months

before; and on July 12 the English envoys returned with the news that

Peter was instructed to lay the whole of their sovereign’s dominions,

insular and continental, under Interdict, unless Richard were at

once permitted to take for his wife the maiden whom Henry “had so

long already, and longer than had been agreed, had in his custody

for the said Richard.”[87] Henry at once made the English bishops

appeal to the Pope. Illness detained him in England for nearly five

weeks;[88] then he went to Normandy (August 18), and on September 21

met Louis and the legate at Nonancourt.[89] In the legate’s presence

he promised that Richard should wed Aloysia, if Louis gave Bourges

to Richard and the Vexin to the young king as previously agreed.[90]

Whether the wedding or the cession was to take place first, however,

seems to have been left an open question; and four days later the

whole matter was again postponed indefinitely by a treaty whereby

the two elder kings pledged themselves to take the Cross and go

to the Holy Land together, and meanwhile, as brother Crusaders, to

lay aside all mutual strife and make no claims or demands upon each

other’s possessions as they held them at that moment, except with

regard to Auvergne and to any encroachments which the men of either

party might have made upon those of the other in the territory of

Châteauroux or of the lesser fiefs on the border of their respective

lands in Berry. If on these excepted matters they could not agree

between themselves, twelve arbitrators were to decide according to

the sworn evidence of the men of the lands in question.[91]

All immediate danger of interference from either Louis or the

Legate being thus removed, Henry summoned the Norman host to meet

at Argentan on October 9 for an expedition against the rebels in

Berry.[92] Young Henry and Richard had, by his desire, joined him on

his arrival in Normandy;[93] the former was now despatched in advance

into Berry, and when the king’s host reached the Norman border at

Alençon Richard was detached from it and once more sent into Poitou

“to subdue the enemies” there, while the king himself marched upon

Châteauroux. After receiving its formal surrender he proceeded to La

Châtre; this place, and the little Lady of Déols, were also given up

to him at once. Thence he proceeded into the Limousin and called upon

those of its nobles and knights who had taken part in the rebellion

of 1173 to give an account of their conduct; one of the most

important of them, the viscount of Turenne, surrendered his chief

castle, “strongly fortified by both art and nature”; with the others

Henry dealt “according as each of them deserved.”[94] He then hurried

back to Graçay in Berry, to meet Louis and the commissioners who were

to report to the two kings the result of their investigations about

Auvergne. What that result was we are nowhere directly told; we only

hear that both the rivals declared themselves content to abide by

it.[95] The next reference to the overlordship of Auvergne, however,

some twelve years later, seems to indicate that the commissioners

gave their award in favour of the duke of Aquitaine.

Another of Henry’s vassals in Berry, Odo of Issoudun, had lately

died leaving an infant heir, and this child had been stolen by his

kinsman the duke of Burgundy. The custody of his fief was offered to

the king by the barons who had it in their keeping, but he refused

to receive it without the child,[96] whom he made no attempt to

reclaim. It was not worth while to risk an embroilment with Burgundy

about a petty lordship in Berry at the moment when an opportunity

was just presenting itself for annexing to the Poitevin domains a

valuable fief of the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of La Marche,

which lay between Berry and the Limousin. Count Adalbert V of La

Marche had separated from his wife, lost his only son, and seemingly

disinherited his only daughter with her own consent;[97] the kinship

between him and his only other surviving relatives was so remote that

he deemed himself free to dispose of his county without regard to

them; and he now offered to sell it to its overlord, King Henry, for

a sum of money wherewith he himself might go to end his lonely days

in the Holy Land. In December Henry went to meet him at Grandmont;

the bargain was quickly struck, the conveyance executed, and the

purchase money—less than a third of what Henry is said to have

estimated the county as worth—paid down, and the barons and knights

of La Marche did homage to Henry as their immediate liege lord.[98]

In all these proceedings of Henry in Aquitaine there is no reference

to Richard. They clearly indicate that the elder holder of the ducal

title still claimed the ducal power and authority as his own, not

his son’s. He seems, however, to have left to Richard the punishment

of one important Limousin rebel whose case he had a year before

expressly reserved for his own judgement; for it was Richard who now

“took away the castle”—that is, the fortified town—“at Limoges where

S. Martial rests in his minster” from the viscount; “and it served

the viscount right,” adds a Norman chronicler, “for helping the count

of Angoulême against the duke.”[99] This seems to have been about the

time when Henry was in Aquitaine, and it is the only act of Richard’s

mentioned by any chronicler between Henry’s arrival in Normandy in

August 1177 and his return to England in July 1178.[100] We may

infer, almost with certainty, that it was done by Henry’s order; and,

with considerable probability, that the unusual state of quiescence

in which Richard seems to have passed these eleven months was due in

part at least to the restraint placed on him by Henry’s presence on

the continent. So long as Richard remained in the dependent position

to which he had been reduced by the agreement at Montlouis, it would

be impossible for him to take any considerable military or political

action, unless by his father’s order, while his father was within

reach. [Sidenote: 1178] But in the autumn of 1178, when Henry was

once more in England, Richard’s activity re-commenced. “With a great

host” he again proceeded into Gascony[101] as far as Dax. There, to

his delight, he found that the count of Bigorre, who two winters

before had helped the viscount of Dax to hold the city against the

duke, had somehow incurred the displeasure of the citizens and was

fast in their prison. They seem to have handed him over to Richard;

“but [Sidenote: 1177] King Alfonso of Aragon, grieving that his

friend the count of Bigorre was held in chains, came to the said

duke, and entreating that his friend might be liberated, stood surety

for him that he would do the will of the duke and of his father the

king of England; and the count of Bigorre, that he might be set free,

gave up to the duke Clermont and the castle of Montbron.” Richard

then went northward again, and after keeping Christmas at Saintes

gathered another “great host” for the subjugation of Saintonge and

the Angoumois.[102] These two districts had been for years, and

indeed for generations, a seed-plot of rebellion. Richard seems to

have been bent upon reducing them to order once [Sidenote: 1178] for

all. The moving spirits of defiance there were Vulgrin of Angoulême

and Geoffrey of Rancogne. Count William of Angoulême, after being

reinstated by Henry in his capital city, seems to have made over the

government of his county to his eldest son, Vulgrin, who had headed

the resistance to Richard in 1176. Geoffrey of Rancogne took his name

from a place in the same county, and was also owner of two lordships

of far greater importance in Saintonge, one of which, Pons, lay close

to the border of the Angoumois, and the other, Taillebourg, was a

fortress of great strength, about half way between Saintes and St.

Jean d’Angély. It was to Pons that Richard now laid siege. After

some weeks, finding that he made no progress, he left his constables

[Sidenote: 1179] there with a part of his forces, and led the rest,

in Easter week (April 1-8), into the Angoumois. A three days’ siege

won the castle of Richemont; four other castles—Genzac, Marcillac,

Gourville, Auville—were taken in the last fortnight of April and

levelled with the ground. Then he turned westward again, re-crossed

the border, and marched upon Taillebourg.[103]

By Richard’s contemporaries the siege of Taillebourg was looked upon

as “a most desperate enterprize, which none of his predecessors had

ever ventured to attempt. Never before had a hostile force so much

as looked upon the castle.” It seems indeed to have been not merely

a castle but a strongly fortified, though small, town, the castle

proper—perched on the summit of a rock of which three sides were

inaccessible by nature and the fourth was defended by art—forming

the citadel. “Girt with a triple ditch; defying from behind a triple

wall every external authority; amply secured with weapons, bolts,

and bars; crowned with towers placed at regular intervals; furnished

with a handy stone laid ready for casting from every loop-hole;

well stocked with victuals; filled with a thousand men ready for

fight,” this virgin fortress “was in no wise affrighted” at the

duke’s approach. Richard, however, had made up his mind to “subdue

the pride of Geoffrey of Rancogne once for all.” He had collected

auxiliaries from every quarter; and he set them all to work as soon

as the host reached Geoffrey’s border. “He carried off the wealth of

the farms; he cut down the vines; he fired the villages; whatever was

left he pulled down and laid waste; and then he pitched his tents

on the outskirts of the castle close to the walls, to the great

alarm of the townsfolk, who had expected nothing of the kind.” At

the end of a week (May 1-8), “deeming it a disgrace that so many

high-spirited and well-proved knights should tamely submit to be

shut up within the walls, they agreed to sally forth and fall upon

the duke’s host at unawares. But the duke bade his men fly to arms,

and forced the townsmen to retire. The mettle of horses, the worth

of spears, swords, helmets, bows, arbalests, shields, mailcoats,

stakes, clubs, were all put to proof in the stubborn fight that raged

at the gates, till the townsmen could no longer withstand the fierce

onslaught of the duke’s van headed by the duke himself. As they

retired helter-skelter within the walls, he by a sudden dash made

his way with them into the town. The citadel now became their only

refuge from their assailants, who rushed about the streets plundering

and burning at their will.” Two days later—on Ascension Day, May

10—the castle was surrendered, seemingly by Geoffrey in person; and

in a few days more the whole of its walls were levelled with the

ground.[104]

The capture of Taillebourg was Richard’s first great military

exploit. It laid the foundation of his military fame, not so much by

the intrinsic importance of the exploit itself as by the revelation,

in the campaign of which it was at once the turning-point and the

crown, of the character and capability of the young duke. Its

immediate result was the complete submission of the rebels against

whom that campaign was directed. Not only did Geoffrey of Rancogne

surrender Pons,[105] but Vulgrin of Angoulême, before the end of the

month, gave up his capital city and his castle of Montignac; and

when Richard, after razing the walls of all these places, sailed for

England, he left in Aquitaine, for the moment at least, “all things

settled according to his will.”[106] He seems to have visited the

tomb of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury[107] before joining his

father. Henry received him “with great honour”[108] and gave him his

reward; when the young conqueror returned to Aquitaine shortly before

Michaelmas, he returned not merely as his father’s lieutenant, but as

once again, with his father’s sanction, count of Poitou.[109]

CHAPTER II

FATHER AND SONS

1179-1183

Domus divisa contra se.

We are not told on what conditions, if any, the restitution of Poitou

was made to Richard by his father. The matter might become important

whenever Henry should again cross the sea; but so long as the king

remained in England it would have scarcely any practical effect on

Richard’s position in Aquitaine. Whether he commanded the feudal

host and disposed of the feudal revenues of Poitou as count or as

his father’s delegate, he was, in his father’s absence, equally

master of both; and in Aquitaine at large the temporary degradation

inflicted on him by Henry seems never to have been recognized at

all. He himself had never laid aside the style and title of duke of

Aquitaine, nor the princely state belonging to that dignity, nor had

he hesitated to deal with the demesne lands of Poitou as his own

absolute property. In his own eyes he was count and duke by virtue

not of any grant from either Henry or Louis, but of his descent from

the old ducal line and of the investiture which he had received at

Poitiers and at Limoges from the clergy and people of the duchy. His

subjects regarded him in the same light. They fought and intrigued

against him not as an intruder or a usurper, nor as the lieutenant of

one whom they counted as such, but precisely because he was to them

the incarnation of the ducal authority in a form which was specially

obnoxious to their habits of turbulent independence and lawless

self-will. For seven years they had been watching with growing

uneasiness and dismay the development of the “new duke,” whom as a

boy of fourteen they had acclaimed at Limoges in 1172, into a man

of very different character from the dukes of the last two or three

generations.

None of the pictures of Richard’s outer or inner man which have

come down to us date from a time quite so early as the year 1179;

but the main features of his personality, outward and inward, were

already marked enough to show us in those pictures a true likeness

of the young conqueror of Taillebourg. In the sculptured effigies of

Richard at Fontevraud and at Rouen the outlines of the face give so

little indication of age as to suggest that in the living model they

may have been—except for the beard and moustache—almost the same at

forty-one as at twenty-one; the features are well proportioned and

finely formed. In life they were crowned with a profusion of hair

“of a colour midway between red and yellow”—in other words, of the

rare golden or still rarer auburn hue. The young duke’s stature was

lofty,[110] above the average height,[111] his frame shapely and well

proportioned, with long, straight, flexible limbs; “no arm was better

adapted than his for drawing sword, nor more powerful to strike with

it.”[112] His whole person had such an aspect of dignity that two

independent observers, at different times, described it in the same

words—“a form worthy to occupy a place of high command”;[113] and

the seemliness of his appearance was enhanced by that of his manners

and dress.[114] The stories of his gigantic strength all relate to

the time of the Crusade, when that strength was in its maturity; but

a man of whom such tales were told must have been a born athlete.

On the other hand, it was certainly before his Aquitanian days were

over that he contracted the quartan ague which, says Gerald of Wales,

“was given him to repress the over fierce workings of his mind, but

by which he, like the lion, yea, more than lion that he was,[115]

seemed rather to be influenced as by a goad; for while thus almost

continually trembling, he remained intrepid in his determination to

make the whole world tremble and fear before him.”[116]

In this sentence of Gerald’s we have perhaps the earliest

foreshadowing of the epithet which was to become attached exclusively

to Richard’s name. The king of beasts has in all ages been a common

simile for a king of men, whether the kingship be material or

metaphorical.[117] But Gerald’s words seem, from their context, meant

to carry a special significance which is more distinctly implied

in the special form of Richard’s traditional surname. Richard is

not the only hero whom poets and romancers, in the golden age of

old French poetry and romance, credited with the possession of “a

lion’s heart,”[118] but he is the only one who became known to the

world for all time as pre-eminently and absolutely “The Lion-Heart.”

We cannot tell precisely when the epithet came into general use;

one writer used it within eight years after Richard’s death.[119]

It had evidently fixed itself in popular tradition before a less

high-souled generation of romancers sought to explain a surname,

whose true meaning they were too far removed from the old epic spirit

to appreciate or understand, by devising an origin for it in an

impossible tale of their own clumsy invention.[120] Its true origin

need be sought no further than the character of him who bore it.

“Among the virtues in which he excels, three especially distinguish

him beyond compare: supereminent valour and daring;[121] unbounded

liberality and bountifulness; stedfast constancy in holding to his

purpose and to his word”—thus Gerald of Wales wrote of Richard some

eight or nine years after the campaign of Taillebourg.[122] The young

duke’s energy and daring had been proved before that expedition; and

his lavish readiness to reward those who served him had contributed

in no small degree to his military successes, by means of the crowd

of highly trained soldiers whom it attracted to his standard. What

medieval writers call “constancy” was one of the qualities most

universally admired in the medieval world. Richard’s “constancy” had,

as yet, shown itself chiefly in a form which compelled the admiration

and respect of all his Aquitanian subjects, but was not likely to

win him the love of the Aquitanian baronage. From the hour when his

father laid on him, a lad of scarce sixteen years and a half, the

task of restoring the ducal authority in Aquitaine, his aim was

to rule and govern what Gerald truly calls “that hitherto untamed

country” in such wise “that not only might he establish within its

borders a far more complete and unbroken peace than was wont to

reign there, but also, recovering what in time past had been lopped

off and separated from it, restore all things to their pristine

condition.”[123] The barons of the duchy were for the most part far

from regarding “peace within its borders” as a thing to be desired;

and Richard’s ideal of a well-ordered state, while thus differing

from theirs, was not made more attractive in their eyes by the

methods which he employed to realize it. Unlike his elder brother,

he did not court popularity; he was indeed absolutely indifferent to

it, if not contemptuous of it. “Strictness and firmness, gravity and

constancy,” were the characteristics in him which men contrasted with

the young king’s easy good-nature, indulgent temper, and pleasantness

towards all who approached him. Richard’s generosity and graciousness

were of a higher type than young Henry’s; they were displayed only

where they were deserved.[124] With him everything was earnest.

Even martial sports had no charm for a lad who, while other young

knights of his day—his brothers among them—were acquiring the use of

arms in an endless round of tournaments, was serving his military

apprenticeship in real warfare; a warfare which he waged with

tireless persistence and relentless severity for nearly ten years,

“that he might quell the insubordination of an unruly people, and

make innocence secure amid evildoers.”[125]

His zeal for public order and justice, his ruthless application of

the utmost rigor of law to those who in his eyes deserved punishment,

naturally provoked the hatred of his opponents, and laid him open

to the charge of cruelty.[126] No instances, however, are recorded;

the Aquitanian chroniclers say nothing on the subject, and there is

no real ground for supposing that his sternness towards the barons

who withstood his will was other than what Gerald represents it to

have been—part of a wholesome and necessary discipline.[127] In 1183

they are said to have accused him of crimes of another kind;[128]

but this accusation rests only upon an English writer’s report of

the pleas by which they sought to justify their own treason. That

some at least of the worst details of the charge were a product of

that “recklessness of tongue” for which the men of the south were

notorious, may with much probability be inferred from the silence of

the Aquitanian chroniclers on this point also. The only comment made

by a contemporary local writer on Richard’s character and conduct

during these early years of storm and stress is a tribute of praise

even more impressive, considering the period and the circumstances

in which it was written, than the panegyrics that were lavished from

all quarters upon his later achievements. Geoffrey of Breuil seems

to have been a member of a junior branch of the knightly family of

Breuil in Poitou; his father’s house was at Ste. Marie de Clairmont,

near Excideuil in Périgord. He made his profession as a monk at S.

Martial’s abbey at Limoges in 1160, was ordained priest in 1167,

and ten years later was made Prior of Vigeois in the Limousin. His

sketch of Aquitanian history ends abruptly at the year 1185. In that

year he, as he says, decided to insert in his work “the names of the

kings who are ruling the world in this our age.” After mentioning by

name Prester John, the two Emperors, the kings of Jerusalem, France,

England, Scotland, Denmark, Sicily, Morocco, Spain, and Hungary, he

continues: “In the list of the kings let there be written down the

duke of Aquitaine and Gascony, Richard, who has never been slack

in deeds of prowess, and whose youth is distinguished by great

strenuousness of life.”[129]

A cessation of war between duke and barons in Aquitaine was usually

followed by trouble with the mercenary troops who were always

employed by one party or the other, sometimes by both parties,

and who when such employment was lacking fell to raiding on their

own account. This occurred in the summer of 1179 during Richard’s

absence in England after the fall of Taillebourg. Bordeaux was

ravaged and burnt by some “Basques, Navarrese, or Brabantines,”

evidently soldiers of this class.[130] With the barons Richard seems

to have had no particular trouble for the next two years or more.

On July 7, 1179, old Count William of Angoulême and his stepson

Aimar of Limoges, “with many others,” set out on a pilgrimage to

Jerusalem.[131] William died a month later at Messina; Vulgrin, who

had surrendered the city to Richard, thus became head of the family,

but the dignity and authority of count of Angoulême seems to have

been shared between him and his brothers.[132]

The recent humiliation of Vulgrin and the absence of Aimar of Limoges

and his fellow pilgrims may help to account for the fact that the

year 1180 is almost a blank in the chronicles of Aquitaine. King

Henry’s presence in Normandy from April 1180 to July 1181 may also

have had a pacific effect throughout all his continental dominions.

It is, moreover, probable that some of the pilgrims had come

[Sidenote: 1180] to an agreement with Richard before they started; it

seems almost certain that Aimar had done so, for when he returned,

in December 1180, he was solemnly welcomed at Limoges on Christmas

Day[133] in a manner which implies that he had been reinstated in

his former position of authority there, and we hear of no further

hostilities between him and Richard for more than six months.[134]

We hear indeed of no [Sidenote: 1181] further military movements in

Aquitaine till after King Henry’s return to England at the end of

July 1181. Then Richard marched into Gascony and took possession

of Lectoure, the chief town of the viscounty of Lomagne. He was

seemingly on his way thence to Dax when Vézian of Lomagne, in the

middle of August, came and submitted himself to him at S. Sever.

Vézian was probably a very young man, for he was not yet a knight.

His submission was not only accepted as frankly as it was offered,

but it was rewarded by the bestowal of knighthood from Richard’s

hand.[135] In November Richard joined his brothers in punishing the

count of Sancerre for his rebellion against the young King Philip of

France, whom Henry had charged his sons to protect and support during

his own absence over-sea.[136]

It was probably in the interval between these two expeditions, to

Gascony and to Sancerre, that a new strife arose in the Angoumois.

Count Vulgrin Taillefer III had died on June 29[137] leaving an only

child, a girl “who,” says Geoffrey of Vigeois, “was the cause of

great calamity to her country.” Richard, as duke, took her into his

wardship as heiress of Angoulême and claimed also the wardship of

her land;[138] but her uncles, William and Aimar, tried to seize

their dead brother’s heritage. Richard drove them out of Angoulême,

whereupon they found a refuge at Limoges with their half-brother,

viscount Aimar.[139] It was plain that Richard would soon be involved

in a new war with them and with Aimar of Limoges; and meanwhile other

influences were tending to develope that war into a general one. The

comparative peace of the last eighteen months was almost ominous;

it certainly did not imply contentment on the part of the barons of

Aquitaine. They were all this while writhing under the iron rule of

their young duke; many of them were plotting schemes for “doing their

utmost to drive him out of the duchy of Aquitaine and the county

of Poitou altogether.”[140] Strangely enough, the impulse which at

length brought their plottings to a head seems to have sprung from a

private quarrel between two brothers who did not rank among the great

vassals of the duchy.

The castle of Hautefort, on the border of the Limousin and Périgord,

was the joint patrimony of Constantine and Bertrand de Born. They

lived in it together, but in continual discord, till Constantine

drove Bertrand out, seemingly in the latter part of 1181 or early

in 1182. Bertrand, however, soon made his way back, and expelled

Constantine in his turn. Constantine appealed for help to their

immediate feudal superior, the viscount of Limoges,[141] and also,

it seems, to the duke. Both took up his cause; but at the moment

they were at enmity with each other—probably about the Angoulême

succession—so “Richard made war against Aimar, and Richard and

Aimar made war against Bertrand and ravaged and burned his land.”

Constantine was “a good knight as regards fighting”;[142] Bertrand

was something more—“a good knight, and a good fighter, and a good

squire of dames, and a good troubadour, and wise and well-spoken,

knowing how to deal with bad and good—and all his time he was at war

with all his neighbours.”[143] The condition of things described

in these last words was to Bertrand an ideal condition: “I would

that the great men should be always quarrelling among themselves,”

he said.[144] It was the ideal of a typical Aquitanian baron; and

that ideal had become much less easy of realization now that the

young duke was master of the land than it had been while the ducal

interests were represented only by a woman or left in charge of mere

seneschals. Bertrand seems to have conceived a project of so working

on the minds of the other malcontents as to band them together with

himself in a conspiracy whose primary and ostensible object was to be

the overthrow of the duke, but which by uniting all its members in

a sworn alliance with each other and therefore with its originator,

Bertrand, should enable him to maintain his position as master of

Hautefort. If Aimar of Limoges could be bound to Bertrand in a sworn

league against Richard, Bertrand would be at once rid of one of his

present antagonists, and another and a greater one would—so at least

the allies might hope—soon have [Sidenote: 1181-2] his hands too full

of other work to trouble himself further about Hautefort.[145]

Aimar and his three half-brothers,[146] being already banded together

against the duke for the preservation of Angoulême to the male line

of Taillefer, were naturally quite ready to [Sidenote: =1181-2=]

embrace Bertrand’s project—if indeed the project had originated

with Bertrand. It seems to have first taken shape in a meeting at

Limoges: “in an ancient minster of S. Martial,” says Bertrand, “many

rich men swore to me on a missal.”[147] They seem to have sworn

that no individual among them should make terms with Richard for

himself independently of his allies.[148] Among the earliest members

of the league thus formed were, besides the brothers of Angoulême

and their half-brother of Limoges, the three other viscounts of the

Limousin—Ventadour, Comborn, and Turenne—the count of Périgord, and

William of Gourdon in Quercy.[149] To these were soon added “other

barons of Périgord and of the Limousin and Quercy whom Richard was

disinheriting.”[150] In one of his most vigorous sirventes Bertrand

made a stirring appeal to the great nobles of Gascony, Gaston of

Béarn, Vézian of Lomagne, Bernard of Armagnac, Peter of Dax, Centol

of Bigorre: “if they will it, the count [of Poitou] will have enough

to do in those parts; and then, since he is so valiant, let him

come with his great host this way and measure himself with us!” The

effect of Richard’s repressive measures in Saintonge and in Poitou

are indirectly acknowledged in the poet’s next words: “If Taillebourg

and Pons and Lusignan and Mauléon and Tonnay were fit for action,

and if there were a stirring and stalwart viscount at Sivray, I

will never believe that they would not help us. He of Thouars,

too, whom the count has threatened, should join us if he be not a

dastard.”[151] Of Richard’s relations at this period with Aimeric of

Thouars, Ralf of Mauléon, and the lords of Tonnay and Sivray, we know

nothing. The head of the house of Lusignan was that same Geoffrey

who had been a prominent leader in the Poitevin rising of 1167, and

had also [Sidenote: =1181-2=] joined in the revolt of 1173. Since

then a new cause of strife had arisen between him and the Angevin

rulers of Aquitaine. At the time when Adalbert of La Marche sold his

county, according to his own statement, there was “no one protesting

and indeed no one existing who had a right to protest” against the

sale.[152] But on the actual annexation of La Marche to the ducal

domain Geoffrey of Lusignan “with his brothers”—he had five—did more

than protest; he “resisted, saying that La Marche belonged to him

as heir—and,” adds Geoffrey of Vigeois, “he got it.”[153] How and

when he got it we do not know, but it was probably not earlier than

the autumn of 1182, since Bertrand de Born shortly before that time

evidently did not regard the Lusignans as being in a position to

afford much practical help to the league, and in June of that year

Henry was still sufficiently master of the county to make a peaceful

visit to Grandmont for the third time within sixteen months.[154]

Obviously, however, the league would have the sympathies of the

claimant of La Marche and his brothers. It seems to have also had

those of some at least of the towns; “the burghers are shutting

themselves in all round”—that is, rebuilding or strengthening their

town walls—said Bertrand.[155]

Concerted action was, however, so difficult to men accustomed by

lifelong habit to fighting each for his own hand that before the

allies were ready for a simultaneous rising their project seems to

have become known to the duke. On Sunday, April 11, 1182, he “with a

few of his people manfully captured” the Puy-St.-Front, a stronghold

which stood in much the same relation to the city of Périgueux as

that of the “castle of S. Martial” to the city of Limoges. The

capture was evidently a surprise, characteristically planned and

executed by Richard on the spur of the moment [Sidenote: 1182] when

he discovered that Elias of Périgord, with whom he does not seem to

have had any previous trouble, “was favouring his enemies.” He then

marched upon Excideuil and ravaged the Limousin border from that

fortress to Corgnac. By the middle of May the rebel leaders were

apparently so disheartened that they were ready to discuss terms

of peace, not indeed with Richard, but with his father. Soon after

Whitsuntide (May 16) the counts of Angoulême and Périgord and the

viscount of Limoges met the king at Grandmont, but no agreement was

reached. Henry then went to support Richard in the Limousin. Richard

suddenly attacked Excideuil, and took the town, though not the

castle; Henry went to St. Yrieix, placed a garrison there, and then

laid siege to Pierre-Buffière, which surrendered after twelve days.

At midsummer he was back at Grandmont. Richard meanwhile had gone

from Excideuil back to Périgueux. It seems that in his absence Elias

had recovered Puy-St.-Front, and this time it was well prepared for

defence. Richard “girded it all round about with a very great host”;

in a few days he was rejoined by his father, and at the end of the

month by his elder brother. The result was that in the first week of

July both Elias of Périgord and Aimar of Limoges submitted. The peace

was sworn in S. Augustine’s abbey at Limoges; Aimar promised that

his half-brothers should have no further help from him, and placed

two of his sons in Richard’s hands as hostages; Elias surrendered

Périgueux to the young duke, who thereupon made peace with him,

but took the precaution of destroying all the towers of the city

wall.[156] [Sidenote: 1181] Twelve months earlier, he had ordered

a more complete destruction of the defences of Limoges. There, the

walls of the castle of S. Martial, which Henry had ordered to be

razed thirty years before, had been hurriedly rebuilt by the burghers

during the war of 1174, “lest when peace was restored the duke should

forbid it.”[157] The duke seems to have let them alone for seven

years; it may have been [Sidenote: 1181-2] some recent addition to

the fortifications which made him issue at midsummer 1181 an order

that they should again be pulled down; and the burghers dared not

disobey him.[158]

[Sidenote: =1181-2=]

The league seemed to have failed; but its ultimate failure was by

no means assured yet. Two at least of its members were by this

time contemplating, if indeed they had not already taken, steps to

win support for it outside the duchy. Aimar Taillefer offered his

homage for Angoulême to the lord paramount, King Philip of France;

Philip accepted the homage, and thus pledged himself to uphold

Aimar in his struggle for the county against Richard, who was still

determined to reclaim it for its late count’s daughter, [Sidenote:

1182] Maud.[159] There was another young king in whom, although his

kingship was merely nominal, Bertrand saw a yet more desirable tool

for the purposes of the league. Before young Henry joined his father

and brother at the siege of Puy-St.-Front, he had been “joyfully

received” by the monks of S. Martial’s at Limoges[160]—perhaps

not by the monks only. The careless, easy, shallow disposition of

Eleanor’s eldest son was far more in accord than the energetic temper

of Richard with the ideas of the Aquitanian nobles as to what their

duke should be. The policy of setting him up as Richard’s rival was

obvious; and a characteristic action on Richard’s part helped, most

opportunely from Bertrand’s point of view, to stir up the elder

brother’s latent jealousy of the greater independence granted to the

younger one by their father. About half way between Châtelleraut and

Poitiers, on the borders of Anjou and Poitou, there rose out of the

champaign land a certain hill which seems to have struck Richard as

being a good site for a castle. He built a castle on it accordingly,

just as the first “great builder” of the Angevin family, Fulk the

Black, had built so many of the fortresses in the Loire valley, and

just as he himself in later days built the last and greatest of

all the fortresses reared by Fulk’s descendants—without regard to

the fact that the site did not belong to him. It really belonged to

his father; but, being in Anjou, it formed part of the territory

destined to fall at his father’s death to the share of the young

king.[161] Bertrand seized his opportunity. “At Clairvaux”—such was

the name given, somewhat inappropriately as it seems, to the new

fortress—“a fair castle has been, without hindrance, built and set

in the midst of the fields. I would not that the young king knew of

it or saw it,” ran the troubadour’s sarcastic verse, “for he would

not be pleased therewith; but I fear, so white it is, he will see it

from Matefélon.”[162] The young king seems to have remonstrated with

Richard,[163] but without effect. It is doubtful whether these things

took place before or after his visit to Limoges; the sequence of

events in Aquitaine during the years 1181-2, like that of Bertrand’s

_sirventes_ on which we are largely dependent for our knowledge of

those events, is obscure; but one thing is clear: before Christmas

1182 young Henry was secretly pledged to the league against his

brother.

Outwardly, that league was for a time broken up by the submission

of Aimar of Limoges and Elias of Périgord, and for some months

the Taillefer brothers and their adherents in the Angoumois seem

to have been the only enemies whom Richard had to fight. At the

beginning of November he took from them the castle of Blanzac;[164]

and about the same time Chalais was fortified against him by its

lord, Oliver of Castillon.[165] Before Christmas Richard rejoined

his father and brothers in Normandy. He seems to have taken Bertrand

de Born with him; at any rate he and Bertrand were for a while both

at once with the court at Argenton, and to all appearance on very

friendly terms.[166] Most likely, however, their friendliness was on

both sides only external. Bertrand soon afterwards unceremoniously

expressed his opinion that the Norman court, “where there was no

_gab_ and laughter and no giving of presents,” was not worthy to be

called a court, and declared that the dulness and rusticity (“l’enois

e la vilania”) of Argenton would have been the death of him, but for

the “good company” of the duchess of Saxony,[167] Richard’s sister,

to whom the troubadour had (according to his own account) been

introduced in a highly complimentary manner by Richard himself.[168]

Bertrand’s own military resources were small,[169] and he is not

likely to have taken any active part in the recent war; but the

earlier _sirventes_ by which he had striven to foment it seem to have

already brought upon him a warning from the duke,[170] and it may

have been a measure of policy on Richard’s part, when he quitted his

duchy, to command or invite the poet to accompany him, and even to be

at some pains to furnish him with a new subject for his verse.

The darkest secrets connected with the league did not come out till

after Christmas. The festival week was spent by the two Henrys,

Richard, and Geoffrey, at Caen.[171] On [Sidenote: 1183] January

1, 1183, the young king, “of his own accord, no one compelling

him,” publicly took an oath on the Gospels that he would serve his

father loyally and faithfully from that time forth; “and because—as

he asserted—he desired to retain in his mind no malice or rancour

whereby his father might afterwards be offended, he made known to

him that he (young Henry) was bound by an agreement with the barons

of Aquitaine against his brother Richard; having been moved thereto

because the castle of Clairvaux had been built against his will,

in the patrimony which was his rightful inheritance, by his said

brother; wherefore he besought his father to take that castle from

Richard and retain it in his own keeping.” Richard, when admonished

by his father on the subject, at first refused to give up the castle,

but afterwards at his father’s desire “freely made it over to him to

dispose of it according to his good pleasure.”[172]

The question of Clairvaux was thus settled for the lifetime of the

elder king; the settlement was that which the younger one had himself

proposed, and it ought to have led to his immediate withdrawal from

his engagements with Richard’s enemies. But the incident had a

further significance which filled Henry II with dismay. It showed

him that on his death not only might this particular dispute between

young Henry and Richard be reopened, but a crowd of other disputes

might arise among all his sons about their feudal relations with each

other, and that unless these relations were fixed beforehand, all

his schemes for preserving the integrity of the Angevin dominions

would probably come to nought. As soon as the festival season was

over he set out with his sons for Anjou. When they reached Le Mans,

he expressed his desire that young Henry, as the future head of

the family, should receive the homage of Richard and Geoffrey for

their respective duchies.[173] It seems that the proposition was

made privately to the young king, and was at least tacitly accepted

by him. Accordingly, on arriving at Angers, Henry II took measures

for confirming once for all “a bond of perpetual peace” between the

three brothers. First, each of them swore to keep his fealty to his

father always and against all men, and always to render to him due

honour and service. Next, they all swore that they would “always

keep peace among themselves according to the disposition made by

their father.”[174] Whatever may have been the case with regard to

Geoffrey and Britanny, it appears that Richard, at least, was thus

far wholly unaware that the “disposition” which he was thus pledged

to respect implied any arrangements beyond those which already

existed concerning his tenure of Poitou or of Aquitaine. The elder

king now publicly called upon the younger one to receive Geoffrey’s

liege homage for Britanny. To this neither of the brothers objected,

and the homage was duly rendered and received.[175] Next, the father

“used his utmost endeavours that the young king should grant the

duchy of Aquitaine to his brother Richard, to be held by Richard and

his heirs by an undisputable right.”[176] Richard at first declared

he would do no homage to his brother, who was no more than his

equal either in personal distinction or in nobility of birth; but

afterwards, yielding to his father’s counsel,[177] he consented.

Thereupon, however, the young king drew back.[178] He seems to have

explained more fully the nature and extent of his entanglement

with the malcontent barons of Aquitaine, and to have urged that

he could not thus desert their cause without a guarantee that his

father would make a settled peace between them and Richard. The

final settlement between the brothers was therefore postponed till

the Aquitanian barons could meet the king and his sons at Mirebeau.

Henry promised that he would then confirm peace on the terms settled

in the preceding summer, or, if this did not satisfy the barons, he

would judge their cause in his own court. Geoffrey of Britanny was

sent to invite or summon the barons to the meeting.[179] With these

arrangements young Henry professed himself content, and he promised

that he would, at Mirebeau, accept Richard’s homage, but on one

further condition: that Richard should, after performing the homage,

swear fealty to him on some holy relics. This last requirement, being

a plain insinuation of lack of confidence in Richard’s honour, was an

insult to which Richard could not submit. He “broke out in a white

heat of passion,” and not only again refused to perform the homage

at all, but—so it was said—declared that it was unmeet for him to

acknowledge, by any kind of subjection, a superior in a brother born

of the same parents, and that as their father’s property was the due

heritage of the first-born, so he himself claimed to be, with equal

justice, the lawful successor of their mother.[180] “Leaving nought

but insults and threats behind him” he quitted the court, hurried

into his own duchy, and prepared for defence.[181] His vehemence

kindled the wrath of his father, who hastily bade the young king

“rise up and subdue Richard’s pride,” and sent orders to Geoffrey to

“stand faithfully by his eldest brother and liege lord.”[182]

Neither young Henry nor Geoffrey needed a second bidding. Geoffrey,

sent into Aquitaine as a messenger of peace, had carried thither,

as a contemporary writer says, not peace but a sword. He and his

eldest brother were already in collusion, and instead of executing

his father’s commission to the malcontent barons, he had secretly

used the opportunity which that commission gave him to renew the

alliance between them and the young king, whom they were now eager

to set up as duke in Richard’s stead.[183] At the beginning of

February[184] the young king set out for Limoges; it seems to have

been arranged that his father, with a small force, should travel

by another route and join him there later.[185] Geoffrey was there

already; the viscount, Aimar, at once joined them, and endeavoured

to terrify the burghers of the castle into doing likewise. His

threats were emphasized by the neighbourhood of a host of Routiers

who seem to have been secretly engaged to be in readiness for a

call from Geoffrey.[186] That call Geoffrey now gave, and one body

of these ruffians, with some of his own vassals, swooped down from

Britanny upon Poitou and began plundering and burning the demesnes

of the count, who retaliated by making similar raids into Britanny,

“and if any man of that troop fell into his clutches, that man’s

head was cut off without respect of persons.”[187] Another body of

Routiers had come up from Gascony under a certain Raymond “Brunus,

or Brenuus” at the call of Aimar, and were with him engaged on

February 12 at Gorre, some few miles south of Limoges, in besieging

a church—probably fortified by the villagers for use as a place of

refuge—when the duke fell suddenly upon them. From a castle somewhere

beyond Poitiers he had ridden for two days almost without stopping;

his force was small, but the enemies were caught at unawares; many

of them were made prisoners; a nephew of their commander, Raymond,

was laid low by Richard’s own hand; Aimar and the rest of the band

escaped only because the horses of the Poitevins were too exhausted

for pursuit.[188]

The English chronicler who records Richard’s treatment of the

captured invaders may have been shocked at the indiscriminate

ruthlessness which slew mercenaries and knights all alike; but the

Prior of Vigeois evidently saw nothing more than just retribution in

the fate of the sacrilegious “children of darkness” who were made

prisoners at Gorre. Richard dragged them to Aixe and there “caused

some of them to be drowned in the Vienne, some to be slain with the

sword, and the rest to be blinded.”[189] It was almost a necessity to

get rid of these men. The league was no longer secret; many of the

conspirators were delivering up their castles to the young king.[190]

The danger was evident enough to make Richard send an urgent message

to his father asking him to come to the rescue at once.[191] Henry

accordingly advanced towards Limoges. A watchman on the castle wall

cried out that the city folk were bringing up troops to destroy their

rivals of the castle; someone else spread a report that Geoffrey of

Britanny was in great danger outside the walls; the townsfolk rushed

out and began a fierce fight which was with difficulty stopped when

the royal banners were recognized.[192] The king withdrew to Aixe.

At night young Henry—still maintaining a pretence of loyalty—went

to his father and tried to excuse the blunder of the townsfolk; but

his excuses were rejected. “Then, at the viscount’s command, the

people swore fealty to the young king in the church of S. Peter of

Carfax.”[193]

All concealment was now flung aside. Walls and ramparts, turrets

and battlements, rose with incredible speed all round Limoges; the

material being of course mostly wood, derived, it seems, from some

half dozen or more churches which castle folk and city folk alike

pulled down without scruple. Another horde of Routiers, hired by the

viscounts of Limoges and Turenne, and commanded by one Sancho “of

Sérannes” and another leader who seems to have adopted the heathen

appellation of Curbaran,[194] appeared at Terrasson in Périgord,

crossed the Limousin frontier, seized Yssandon, and swept across

the viscounty of Limoges as far north as Pierre-Buffière, which

they wrested from King Henry’s soldiers and restored to its rebel

owner and to the viscount; thence they went south again and after an

unsuccessful attempt on Brive took up their quarters at Yssandon.

Other “Tartarean legions” poured in from the north, sent by Philip

of France to support the cause of his brother-in-law.[195] If these

Routiers could have been controlled by their employers, Henry and

Richard might probably have been easily surrounded and captured.

Nothing of the kind was, however, attempted. Instead, “the whole

assembly of malignants, gathered together from divers parts,” were

left to take their own way and spread themselves over the whole of

Périgord, the Angoumois and Saintonge; the country was ravished,

shrines were plundered, altars desecrated, and expelled monks fled

with the relics of their patron saints as in the days of the heathen

Northmen.[196] Meanwhile King Henry had called up the feudal forces

of his other continental dominions[197] to deal with the rebels in

Limoges. On Shrove Tuesday, March 1, he entered the city, broke down

the bridge behind him, and disposed his forces for a siege of the

town. That siege dragged on till midsummer. Shortly before Easter

(March 17) the young king went to secure Angoulême by filling it

with “a crowd of malignants,” hired with the proceeds of a forcible

seizure of the treasures of S. Martial’s Abbey. On account of this

sacrilege the town guard of S. Martial’s castle, when he returned

thither, pelted him ignominiously away;[198] but Aimar and Geoffrey

continued to hold the place.[199]

Richard had accompanied his father to the siege,[200] but soon left

it for more active work. He set himself to recover Saintonge and the

Angoumois from the Routiers and the rebels; and he seems to have

not only succeeded in this, but to have chased the marauders out of

Saintonge northward across western Poitou right over the frontier of

Britanny.[201] This campaign, ignored by the chroniclers, won for

him a striking tribute from his most determined enemy; Bertrand de

Born, composing a _sirventes_ in behalf of the league and actually at

the request of the young king, could not refrain from expressing his

admiration for the courage and persistence of the count of Poitou.

“When this game is played out we shall know which of the king’s sons

is to have the land. The young king would have soon conquered it

if the count were not so well practised at the game; but he shuts

them (his enemies) in so fast and presses them so hard that he has

recovered Saintonge by force, and delivered the Angoumois as far

as the border of Finisterre.... Hunted and wounded wild boar saw

we never more furious than he is, yet he never swerves from his

course.”[202] On the other hand, two of the most powerful feudataries

of the French Crown, the duke of Burgundy and the count of Toulouse,

had by this time definitely pledged themselves to the league. Both of

them met young Henry at Uzerche on May 24 and brought reinforcements

to his cause.[203] Bertrand’s boast that the war begun in the

Limousin should involve France, Normandy and Flanders before it was

ended[204] might yet have been fulfilled, but for an unexpected

catastrophe: early in June young Henry fell sick, and on the 11th he

died.[205]

Almost instantly the league fell asunder. The object which its

non-Aquitanian members had in view was to break the power of Henry

II; they had found a priceless tool for their purpose in his eldest

son, who, being like himself a crowned and anointed king, could be

set up as a rival head of the Angevin house; the Aquitanian revolt

had offered a promising opportunity for using that tool to their

advantage. When young Henry was gone, their purpose in joining the

league was ruined; the internal quarrels of Aquitaine and its rulers

had no interest for them. Accordingly Hugh of Burgundy and Raymond

of Toulouse “hurried away after their own affairs”;[206] and instead

of the great coalition which was to have ringed in the Angevins from

the Pyrenees to the Channel, Henry and Richard had now only to face

the enfeebled remains of a local revolt. The news came to Richard

when he was besieging Aixe, which young Henry had seized a few weeks

before.[207] The king, when the first shock of grief was over,

resumed the siege of Limoges; Geoffrey seems to have slipped away to

Britanny; once more, on Midsummer day, Aimar surrendered the town

and renounced all dealings with his brothers of Angoulême “till they

should deserve grace of the king and the duke”; and once more the new

fortifications were levelled to the ground.[208] For what remained

to be done Henry’s presence was needless. At the end of the month he

went back to his northern dominions, while Alfonso of Aragon joined

Richard in laying siege to Hautefort. In a week (June 30-July 6)

Bertrand de Born was forced to surrender it; and a punitive harrying

of Périgord by Richard brought the revolt to an end.[209]

Brief as the war had been, it was not without results. A few at least

of the insurgent barons had made their profit out of the general

confusion. It must have been during this time that the Lusignans

gained a hold on La Marche which they never entirely lost. Richard’s

efforts to establish Maud as countess of Angoulême may have been

continued for a while longer, but they were doomed to fail sooner

or later by reason of Philip’s grant of the city to the rival

claimant. Bertrand de Born, in spite of the warning given him some

months before by the duke himself, had persisted in his defiance to

the uttermost. He was captured with his castle, brought before his

conqueror, and compelled to resign his claim to its ownership.[210]

He implored the duke’s mercy, and Richard at once granted him his

full forgiveness,[211] but gave back Hautefort to Constantine.[212]

This decision, however, was reversed by King Henry,[213] probably on

an appeal from the troubadour. Richard appears to have acquiesced

without difficulty in his father’s decision on the point;[214] and

Richard, not Henry, was destined to reap its results. Bertrand had

already declared that if the duke would be gracious and generous to

him he should find him as true as steel,[215] and he kept his word;

for he perceived that his talents for fighting, and for setting

others to fight, might after all be exercised not less actively, and

with less danger of disastrous consequences to himself, on the side

of the duke than on that of the duke’s enemies.

CHAPTER III

KING HENRY’S HEIR

1183-1189

Et vos, patres, nolite in iracundiam provocare filios vestros.

It was into the life of Richard himself that his brother’s death

brought the most important change. He was now the eldest son of Henry

II, heir to the headship of the houses of Anjou and Normandy and to

the crown of England. Some re-adjustment of his feudal relations

both with his father and with the King of France would seem to be a

probable consequence of this change in his prospects. Henry was not

likely to repeat the mistake which he had made thirteen years before

in crowning his heir; but Richard might naturally expect that the

other measures which had been taken to secure the Angevin and Norman

heritages for young Henry would be renewed in his own behalf. He was

evidently quite unprepared for the step which his father actually

took. In September or October Henry summoned him to Normandy, and on

his arrival “bade him grant the duchy of Aquitaine to his brother

John and receive John’s homage for it.”[216]

In all Henry’s plans for the future of his dynasty there was assumed

a fundamental principle, implied rather than expressed, because

(to him at least) too self-evident to need expression: that the

territories which he had inherited from his parents, Anjou, Normandy,

and England, must remain united under the direct control of the head

of the family. Any deviation from this principle would, he saw,

endanger the stability of the Angevin dominion, for it would be a

breaking-up of the foundation on which that dominion was based. The

devolution of Aquitaine and of Britanny to junior branches of the

Angevin house, under the overlordship of its head, would not involve

the same danger; and thus after his agreement with Conan of Britanny

in 1166 Henry had ready to his hand the means of making a fair and

substantial provision for two younger sons; but when a fourth son

was born, he saw so little chance of being able to provide for the

child on anything like the same scale that he at once called him

“John Lackland,” and, it seems, placed him when little more than a

twelvemonth old as an oblate in the abbey of Fontevraud.[217] At the

age of six years, however, if not sooner, John was brought back to

his father’s court, and in the next ten years scheme after scheme for

his future was planned by Henry, but without success. Now at last,

just when John had reached an age at which he must have begun to feel

keenly the difference between his prospects and those of Richard

and Geoffrey, the death of the eldest brother opened a possible

way—possible at least in Henry’s eyes—for redressing this inequality.

We cannot tell what was the precise form of the proposition made by

Henry to Richard; but if the report of it given by a contemporary

English chronicler be correct, it clearly involved a tacit, if not an

explicit, recognition of Richard as heir to the headship of the royal

house of England and Anjou, and, as such, to the overlordship of the

whole of the Angevin dominions, including Aquitaine. The chronicler’s

words do not, on the other hand, necessarily or even probably imply

that Henry contemplated an immediate transfer of the fief which he

desired Richard to “grant” to John. John was not yet seventeen; he

seems to have been brought up partly in England, partly in Normandy;

it would have been sheer madness to think of setting him to take the

command of affairs in a country which the united energies of Richard

and of Henry himself scarcely sufficed to keep under control. In

all likelihood the settlement which the king desired to make had

reference, like that of 1169, wholly to the future, and was designed

to confirm the earlier settlement, only with a change of persons; as

Richard must take the place of the dead Henry, John was to take the

place of Richard.

The execution of this project required the consent of two persons:

Richard and the King of France. Richard’s consent proved harder

to win than Henry seems to have expected. There was a fundamental

though unexpressed difference between the views taken by the father

and the son of the place actually held by the son in Aquitaine.

Henry’s intention apparently had been from the outset, and was still,

that Aquitaine should during his own lifetime be governed by his

son—whether Richard or John—as his representative, and after his

death should become an underfief of the Angevin dominion—as Britanny

already was—in the hands of that same son and his heirs. Unluckily

he had allowed one part of this intention to be obscured, and in

practice well-nigh defeated, by his anxiety to secure the fulfilment

of the other part. From Henry’s point of view, Richard in 1183 was

simply his homager for the county of Poitou, his lieutenant over the

rest of the duchy, heir to the whole of it when he himself should

die, and, after young Henry’s death, heir also to the headship of

the royal house of England, Normandy and Anjou. But Richard could,

and did in effect, claim to be already duke of Aquitaine in his own

right, by virtue of his homage to France and his investiture at

Limoges. Moreover, Eleanor’s duchy held a different place in the

estimation of her son—the son who from his infancy had been her

recognized heir—from that which it held in the estimation of her

husband. Henry looked upon it as a mere appendage to his ancestral

territories; Richard looked upon it as his own especial possession,

and a possession which ought to rank in the future, as it always

had ranked in the past, on a footing of equality with them. The

same feeling which made Henry shrink from reducing the heritage of

Geoffrey Plantagenet or that of Maud of Normandy to the position of

an underfief would make Richard shrink from contemplating a like

alteration in the status of the heritage of his mother. The tragedy

of the last summer and the sudden change in his own prospects had so

far chastened his impetuous temper that he did not at once refuse his

father’s demand, but asked for two or three days delay that he might

consult with friends before giving a reply. Then he withdrew from the

court; at nightfall he mounted his horse, and rode southward with all

speed, sending word to his father that “he would never grant Poitou

to be held by anyone but himself.”[218]

At the Christmas feast, which he kept at Talmont—a favourite hunting

seat of the Poitevin counts, on the coast near La Rochelle—Richard

“showed himself lavish in the distribution of gifts.”[219] Some of

these were probably rewards to vassals who had kept their allegiance

during the recent war; others may have purchased the withdrawal from

the country, or the permanent enlistment under the ducal banner, of

some of the mercenary leaders whom it was needful to dispose of in

one way or the other, if the ducal government was to be carried on at

all. The various bands of Routiers, left suddenly without employers

by the submission of Aimar of Limoges, the death of young Henry,

and the collapse of the league, had scattered in all directions.

Raymond “the Brown” seemingly went into the Angoumois; on August

10 (1183) he was slain at Châteauneuf.[220] One large body under

Curbaran swept across Berry into the Orléanais, only to be almost

destroyed at Châteaudun on July 30 by the “Peace-makers,” a sworn

brotherhood formed among the country folk to resist the marauders

and restore peace to the land.[221] Curbaran himself was among the

prisoners, who were all hanged.[222] Sancho was still in the Limousin

with his followers; and Curbaran’s place seems to have been taken by

a man who in the “tongue of _oc_” bore the name of “Lo Bar,”[223]

a name which, transmuted by northern speakers into “Louvrekaire”

or “Lupicar,” was in later days to be closely associated with the

last struggle of the Angevins to keep their hold on Normandy. The

privilege of private warfare, which was [Sidenote: 1183-4] the most

cherished birthright of the barons of Aquitaine, enabled Aimar of

Limoges to supply Lobar and Sancho and “a countless host” with

occupation which they supplemented by harrying monasteries from

Yssandon to Orleans, and ravaging “the king of England’s lands” in

the Limousin and La Marche. Richard evidently suspected, perhaps

knew, that in this last matter the hand of Aimar was with them. It

is at this juncture that the most famous of all the Routiers of the

period, Mercadier, first appears in Richard’s service. “Under the

protection of the duke Mercadier and his troop dashed across Aimar’s

territory, and on the [Sidenote: 1184] first day of the second

week of Lent (1184) cruelly ravaged the town of Excideuil and its

suburbs” are almost the last words that have come down to us from the

chronicler who thus far has been our chief authority for the history

of Aquitaine under duke Richard.[224]

Henry meanwhile had come to an agreement with the king of France

which was likely to have an important influence on the future of

Richard and of his duchy. On December 6, [Sidenote: 1183] 1183, the

two kings held a conference, and Henry did a thing which he had

never before consented to do: he did homage to Philip for “all his

territories on the French side of the sea.”[225] Philip’s acceptance

of this homage constituted a legal recognition on his part, as lord

paramount, of Henry as—among other things—duke of Aquitaine. The

kings then proceeded to make a new settlement about the dowry of

young Henry’s widow. As she was childless, that portion of it which

was in the hands of her father-in-law—Gisors and the rest of the

Norman Vexin—legally reverted to France on her husband’s death.

Philip, however, in consideration of an annuity to be paid by Henry

to Margaret, “quit-claimed Gisors to the English king, so that he

might give it to whichever of his sons he should choose, with the

French king’s other sister,” Aloysia.[226] Henry evidently hoped to

keep Aloysia and her dowry by substituting John for Richard as her

bridegroom, and thus to facilitate the winning of Philip’s assent to

the further substitution of John for Richard as heir of Aquitaine.

Richard was probably quite [Sidenote: 1183-4] willing to relinquish

his personal claim upon Aloysia; there is no indication that he had

ever cared for her; and on the other hand there are indications that

about this time he formed an attachment to another maiden of royal

birth, Berengaria of Navarre.[227] On the subject of Aquitaine,

however, he was immoveable. In vain Henry alternately besought and

commanded him to grant “if not the whole of Aquitaine, at least a

part of it,” to John. Richard’s answer was always the same: never,

so long as he lived, would he give any part of the duchy [Sidenote:

1184] to anyone. At last, in a burst of anger, Henry gave John leave

to “lead an army into Richard’s land and get what he wanted from

his brother by fighting him.”[228] The words were probably uttered

without thought of their consequences, in a fit of ungovernable

impatience at Richard’s obduracy; but John was quite ready to

take them literally, and knew that his next brother, Geoffrey—who

had been formally reconciled to his father and to Richard in July

1183[229]—both could and would supply him with means for his purpose.

No sooner had the king returned to England in June 1184 than Geoffrey

and John collected “a great host” and marched plundering and burning

into Richard’s land. Henry, when he learned what was going on,

peremptorily summoned all the three to England, brought them to a

public reconciliation in November, and then sought to dispose for a

while of Geoffrey where he could make no further mischief between the

two others, by sending him, not back to Britanny, but to Normandy,

as a nominal assistant to the officers who were in charge of that

duchy.[230] It [Sidenote: 1185] was not till after Christmas that

Richard received permission to return to Poitou. He crossed from

Dover to Wissant;[231] whether on his way through Normandy and Anjou

he met Geoffrey—who was certainly the evil genius of the family—and

what may have passed between them if he did, we know not; we only

know that on April 16 Henry himself went back to Normandy, and

straightway “gathered a great host to subdue his son Richard, who

had fortified Poitou against him and attacked his brother Geoffrey,

contrary to the king’s prohibition.”[232]

Henry’s military preparations were in reality only a part of a new

scheme which he had devised for making Richard surrender Poitou.

In the preceding June (1184) Queen [Sidenote: 1184] Eleanor, after

eleven years of captivity, had been released by her husband’s order

and permitted to join their eldest daughter and her husband the duke

of Saxony, now for the second time driven into exile.[233] At the end

of April (1185) [Sidenote: 1185] Henry sent for her, and also for

their daughter and son-in-law, to join him in Normandy; “and when

they arrived, he sent instructions to his son Richard that he should

without delay surrender the whole of Poitou with its appurtenances to

his mother Queen Eleanor, because it was her heritage; and he added

that if Richard in any way delayed to fulfil this command, he was

to know for certain that the queen his mother would make it her own

business to ravage the land with a great host. And Richard, when he

had heard his father’s command, yielded to the wholesome advice of

his friends; and laying down the arms of iniquity, returned with all

meekness to his father, and surrendered all Poitou, with his castles

and fortresses, to his mother.”[234]

Henry’s scheme seemed to be on the verge of success. Richard had

at last been induced to surrender, nominally to his mother, but

practically to his father—for Eleanor was clearly a mere cipher in

the matter—the fief for which he was his father’s homager, and which

was the material basis of the ducal power over all Aquitaine; he had

set his father free to make a new grant of that fief to whomsoever

he would. If a grant of it were made to John, with the sanction

of the lord paramount, Richard would soon be unable to stand his

ground in the duchy, should he even attempt to do so. For the time

being Richard was utterly passive. It was his nature to do nothing

by halves, and his submission seems to have been as whole-hearted

as his defiance had been; “he remained,” says an English chronicler

with evident admiration, “with his father as an obedient son.”[235]

Henry kept [Sidenote: 1186] him in suspense for eleven months. Then,

on March 10, 1186, the two kings held another conference, and the

treaty made in December 1183 was confirmed, but with a modification

of one article. In 1184 Henry had either made overtures, or readily

accepted overtures made to him, for a marriage between Richard and

a daughter of the Emperor;[236] but the maiden had died before the

end of the year.[237] This project had been succeeded by another

whose originator is most likely to have been Richard himself;

it can hardly have been at any other time than during his brief

period of freedom from his engagement to Aloysia that he received

a promise of Berengaria’s hand from her father, King Sancho.[238]

His inclination, however, was overridden by his father’s imperious

will and by the exigencies of the family policy. If Philip knew or

suspected anything of Henry’s projects for John, he was probably

keen-witted enough to perceive their futility and to prefer running

no risk of a family alliance with a Lackland. On the other hand,

the retention of Aloysia’s dower-lands was a matter of interest to

Henry’s heir as well as to Henry himself. The sequel was to show that

Henry had no real intention of marrying Aloysia to either of his

sons; he may therefore have privately intimated to Richard that the

sacrifice now required of him was only temporary. At any rate, in the

treaty with Philip as ratified [Sidenote: 1186] on March 10, 1186, it

was distinctly stated that Aloysia and her dowry, the Vexin, were to

be given to the bridegroom for whom she had been originally destined,

Richard.[239]

An agreement with France was at that moment especially important

for Henry because he was anxious to return to England. He began his

preparations for departure over sea by making some changes in the

custody of his various demesne lands and castles;[240] in particular,

he appointed new castellans of his own choosing to the charge of

the principal fortresses of Aquitaine. It was hardly possible for

Richard not to feel hurt by this measure, “yet his father met with

no complaint from him.”[241] Suddenly the king again changed his

mind, or at least his policy. We cannot tell whether he was moved by

Richard’s unwonted meekness, or whether some unrecorded occurrence

opened his eyes to a fact which in all likelihood Richard’s southern

counsellors, when they advised the young duke to accede to his

father’s demand, foresaw would be made manifest ere long: the fact

that Richard was the only person who could preserve anything like

administrative order and political security in Aquitaine when Henry

himself was out of reach. We only know that at the end of April the

king “entrusted to his son Richard an infinite sum of money, bidding

him go and subdue his enemies under him,” and then himself sailed for

England, taking the queen with him.[242]

Richard’s surrender of Poitou was thus practically annulled. It may

have been merely verbal, so that no formal act was necessary to

reinstate him as count. The particular enemies whom he was to subdue

are not named, but it seems plain that the chief of them was Raymond

of Toulouse; for Richard “straightway departing (from Normandy)

collected a great multitude of knights and foot-soldiers, with which

he invaded the lands of the count of S. Gilles and not only ravaged,

but conquered, the greater part of them.”[243] Geography suggests

that the part of Raymond’s lands which Richard “conquered” at this

time was probably the northern part, that is, the Quercy, where

Richard as suzerain had already had to chastise more than one of

Raymond’s subfeudataries; and this inference is strengthened by later

indications. Raymond, helpless before the sudden violence of the

duke’s onset, fled from place to place and despatched messenger after

messenger to their common overlord, King Philip, imploring succour

from France. Philip, however, was just then in no mind to quarrel

openly with the king of England or his son; it suited him better to

plot secretly with one of the younger sons against the father and the

eldest son, and this was what he was actually doing with Geoffrey

when in August their plotting was cut short by Geoffrey’s death.[244]

A question at once arose whether Henry, the immediate overlord of

Britanny, or Philip, the lord paramount, should be guardian of

Geoffrey’s child. An embassy sent from England to treat with Philip

on this subject met with a very uncivil reception, and went back

accompanied by two French knights charged with a message to Henry

that he must expect no security from attack in Normandy unless Count

Richard of Poitou ceased to molest the count of S. Gilles.[245] What

Raymond had done to excite the wrath of both Henry and Richard we are

not told, but it is clear that Henry did not disapprove Richard’s

proceedings; he made no attempt to check them, and did not return to

Normandy [Sidenote: 1187] till February of the next year. Richard

met him at Aumale, and accompanied him on Low Sunday, April 5, to

a conference with Philip “from which they withdrew without hope

of peace or concord, on account of the intolerable demands made by

the king of France.”[246] These demands were, first, that he should

receive Richard’s homage for the county of Poitou;[247] and secondly,

that Aloysia and her dowry, Gisors, should be restored to France.[248]

However “intolerable” these demands might be to Henry, they were in

themselves not unreasonable. Richard seems to have been personally

not unwilling to comply with the first condition; he had when a boy

been made to do homage to Louis VII, and probably saw no reason

for not doing the same to Louis’s successor. Henry, however, was

resolved that the homage should not be done, and while ostensibly

leaving the matter in Richard’s hands, made him put it off from day

to day.[249] The second condition was a natural consequence of the

fact that although more than twelve months had passed since the

explicit renewal of Richard’s engagement to Aloysia, there was still

no sign of any preparations for their marriage. On this point Henry

and Richard were probably at one. At a somewhat later time a horrible

reason was assigned—seemingly by persons whose testimony had weight

enough to carry conviction to both Richard and Philip—for Henry’s

obstinate non-compliance with Philip’s demands for either Aloysia’s

marriage or the restoration of her person together with her dowry.

As yet, however, Richard at least evidently did not suspect his

father of being actuated by any worse motives than, as regards the

former alternative, consideration for Richard’s own disinclination

to make Aloysia his wife; and as regards the latter alternative, a

reluctance, which Richard himself could not but share, to loose the

Angevin hold on Gisors.

Seeing that he could get no satisfaction by negotiation, Philip

prepared for war. Marching from the French part of Berry into the

Aquitanian part, he seized Issoudun and Graçay and advanced upon

Châteauroux.[250] It is doubtful whether Henry and Richard set out

together to check him, or whether Henry sent forward Richard and

John, each at the head of a body of troops, to defend Châteauroux

till he himself could join them.[251] At any rate, by midsummer the

combined action of father and sons had caused Philip to raise the

siege and decide upon trying his fortune against them in the open

field. On the eve of S. John the two armies were drawn up facing each

other in battle array, ready to engage next morning. At the last

moment, however, the kings made a truce and withdrew each to his

own domains. Two English authorities assign the most important part

in the preliminary negotiations to Richard. According to Gervase of

Canterbury the first overtures came from the French side, and were

addressed to the count of Poitou; Count Philip of Flanders contrived

to get speech with him and urged upon him the importance, for his

own future interest, of making a friend of the king of France; after

some discussion Richard followed Flanders back through the French

lines to the tent of Philip Augustus, held a long private colloquy

with him, and “at length returned, with his mind at rest, to his own

comrades in arms.” He had gone without his father’s knowledge; Henry,

when he heard of the incident, “suspected that it meant treachery,

not peace,” and sent a request to some of the French nobles that they

would come and confer with himself. They complied; he commissioned

them to ask Philip for a truce of two years, on the plea of a vow of

Crusade; Philip consented, but when his consent was announced Henry

declared he had changed his mind—he would have no truce. Philip on

hearing this ordered an attack at break of day. Henry grew alarmed;

the midsummer daybreak was very near, for it was already past

midnight, when he hurriedly called his son. “What shall we do? what

counsel dost thou give me?” “What counsel can I give,” said Richard,

“when thou hast refused the truce which yesterday thou desiredst? We

cannot ask for it again now without great shame.” Moved, however,

by his father’s evident distress, he offered to face the shame. He

went; he found Philip already armed for battle; bare-headed he

knelt before him, offered him his sword, and begged him for a truce,

promising that if Henry should break it in any way he, Count Richard,

would submit his own person in Paris to the judgement of the French

king. On this condition Philip gave a reluctant consent to the

truce.[252] Gerald of Wales, on the other hand, represents the first

advances as having been made by Henry in a letter to Philip proposing

peace on the following terms: that Aloysia should be given in

marriage to John, with the counties of Poitou and Anjou and all the

other territories held by Henry of the French king, except Normandy,

which was to remain united to England as the heritage of the eldest

son. Philip sent the letter to Richard, who, when he had mastered its

contents, was naturally moved to deep indignation on learning that

his father was thus scheming to deprive him of the larger part of his

heritage at a time when they were actually in camp together and he

was loyally fulfilling his duties as vassal and son. Caring no longer

to fight for his father against Philip, he seized an opportunity

which presented itself at the moment to bring about a truce.[253]

Neither of these two accounts seems to imply that Richard at

Châteauroux acted otherwise than loyally and in good faith towards

his father. In one of them, however, the father is distinctly charged

with plotting behind his son’s back to deprive him of half his

inheritance. The proposal which Henry is said to have made to Philip

is indeed utterly at variance with the policy implied in all his

previous arrangements for the future of his dynasty; it is a proposal

to disintegrate the foundations of the edifice which he had been

building up all his life, by putting asunder what the marriage of

his parents had joined together, Anjou and Normandy. We are not told

whether it provided that John should hold his share of the Angevin

territories under his brother’s overlordship, or not. If it did, its

fulfilment would have reduced the original Angevin patrimony to the

rank of a mere underfief; if not, the scheme would seem to imply

nothing short of a deliberate intention on Henry’s part of rending

in twain with his own hands the dominion which he had been for

thirty years labouring to weld together into a solid whole. Yet that

Henry would, if he could, willingly have gone as far as this or even

farther, in his infatuated partiality for John, seems to be the only

possible explanation of his attitude, or rather of his endless shifts

and changes of attitude, towards both Richard and Philip through the

six years which followed the death of the young king. When the end

came, he himself summed up the tragic story of those years in one

significant sentence: “For the sake of John’s advancement I have

brought upon me all these ills.”[254] His paternal affection had

been concentrated mainly upon two of his sons, the eldest and the

youngest; after young Henry’s death it was concentrated upon John

alone; Richard, though of all the four he was certainly the least

unworthy, seems never to have enjoyed more than a comparatively small

share of it. The story of the letter may have been a fiction, or the

letter may have been a forgery; but whether the falsehood—if there be

one—were Gerald’s or Philip’s, it was a lie which was half a truth.

The formal terms of the truce—which was to last for two

years[255]—were arranged by the papal legate then resident in France,

and some other men of religion[256] acting “on the orders of the

Pope and the advice of the faithful men of both kings.”[257] When

the agreement was signed, the French king, “by way of shewing to

all men that concord was attained,” invited Richard to accompany

him to Paris. Richard accepted the invitation;[258] and he stayed

so long, and—so at least it was reported—on terms of such close and

affectionate intimacy with Philip that Henry “marvelled what this

might be,” and delayed his intended journey to England “till he

should know what would be the outcome of this sudden friendship”

between his overlord and his son.[259] He sent messenger after

messenger to call Richard back, promising “to do all that might be

justly required of him.” Richard answered that he was coming, but

instead of doing so he went to Chinon, where the treasure of Anjou

was kept; in spite of the treasurer’s opposition he carried off “all

the treasure that he found there”—which indeed is not likely to have

been much—proceeded with it into Poitou, and there used it to fortify

or revictual his castles. His contumacy, however, as usual, did not

last long. His father “ceased not to send messengers to him till they

brought him back; and when he came, he submitted to his father in all

things and was penitent for having consented to the evil counsels

of those who strove to sow discord between them. So they came both

together to Angers; and there the son became his father’s obedient

man, and swore on the holy Gospels, before many witnesses, fealty to

him against all men; and he swore also that he would not go against

his father’s counsel.”[260]

Early in November Richard was at, or near, Tours, when suddenly the

tidings of an event which had occurred in Holy Land four months

before changed the whole current of his aspirations and desires. On

July 7 the Saracens under Saladin had won a great victory at Hattin

over the Latin king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, and captured not

only Guy himself, but also the most sacred relic in all Christendom,

the relic of the Holy Cross. This news arrived in France about the

end of October or beginning of November.[261] It came to Richard’s

ears—so the story goes—one evening; his resolve was made at once

and with his whole heart; early next morning he received the Cross

from the hand of Archbishop Bartholomew.[262] When Henry, who seems

to have been in Normandy, was informed of his son’s action, he

appeared exceedingly perturbed, and for several days would scarcely

see anyone.[263] Not a word of comment on the matter, however,

passed his lips till Richard rejoined him. Then, after a few days,

he said: “Thou shouldst by no means have undertaken so weighty a

business without consulting me. Nevertheless, I will not oppose thy

pious design, but will so further it that thou mayest fulfill it

right well.”[264] Philip on the other hand was quick to seize the

opportunity for bringing up again the matter of Gisors and Aloysia.

That Aloysia’s plighted bridegroom should betake himself to far-off

Holy Land while that question was still unsettled was a thing not to

be tolerated; so Philip “gathered a great host” and threatened that

he would harry all the English king’s lands on the French side of

the sea unless either Gisors were surrendered or Richard married to

Aloysia without more ado. Henry, on hearing this, hurried back from

the Norman coast to the border for a meeting [Sidenote: 1188] with

Philip at Hilary-tide (1188).[265] Their conference was interrupted

by the arrival of the Archbishop of Tyre, who had come to Europe to

plead as only one who had personal knowledge of the state of affairs

in Holy Land could plead, for a Crusade to check the advance of

Saladin. Carried away by his appeal, both kings took the Cross[266]

and separated to prepare for the enterprise on which they agreed to

set out together at the next Easter twelvemonth; that is, Easter

1190.[267]

Whether Richard had been present at the conference does not appear;

he was, however, at Le Mans with his father a few days afterwards,

when Henry issued the ordinance for the “Saladin tithe” to raise

money for the Crusade.[268] The kings might require a delay of

fifteen months to make their preparations; but the count of Poitou

had no mind to be so long detained from fulfilling his vow. He now

came to his father with two requests. First, he begged that the king

would either lend him money for his expedition on the security of the

county of Poitou, or would give him leave to raise the needful sum

by pledging that county to some safe and trustworthy man known to

be loyal to both father and son, and would confirm the transaction

by a royal charter. Secondly, he prayed that “forasmuch as the

journey that lay before him was long and perilous, lest aught should

be maliciously plotted to his disadvantage during such a lengthy

absence” he might be permitted to receive the fealty of the nobles

of England and of Henry’s continental lands, “saving in all things

the fealty due to his father.” To the former of these requests

Henry answered that his son should go to Palestine with him; they

would have in common all things needful for their journey, and

“nought should separate them but death.” No answer could Richard

get but this, which in regard to his second request was tantamount

to a refusal.[269] Yet he had asked nothing beyond what was

natural and reasonable; nothing, indeed, beyond what he might have

fairly expected to receive without needing to ask for it. A public

confirmation of the rights of King Henry’s eldest surviving son as

heir to the crown of England and to the headship of the house of

Anjou, such as would safeguard those rights until the son’s return

from Holy Land in case the father should die before the Crusade was

over, was a measure of obvious prudence not merely for the personal

interest of the heir but also for the security of the Angevin

dominion as a whole. Henry’s obstinate silence when the measure was

suggested to him was one more indication that his sense of right

and his care for the future of his house were both alike obscured

by his infatuation for John. Richard understood it only too well,

and “finding that he could get no other answer, he departed from his

father in heart as well as in body.”[270]

No considerations either of policy or of self-interest, however, had

any influence on his resolve to fulfil his vow without delay. While

his father returned to England,[271] he hurried back to Poitou, sent

messengers to his brother-in-law, King William of Sicily, to expedite

arrangements for the equipment of the ships needful for his voyage,

and busied himself with preparations for setting out in the coming

summer.[272] But his plans were checked by a new outbreak of revolt.

Geoffrey of Lusignan, it is said, laid an ambush for one of Richard’s

most intimate friends and treacherously put him to death. Richard of

course marched against Geoffrey, and punished him by taking several

of his castles and slaughtering a number of his men, only those

being spared who purchased their lives by taking the Cross.[273]

Geoffrey’s outrage proved to be part of a concerted rising which ran

what had now become the ordinary course of an Aquitanian revolt.

The rebels, headed as usual by Aimar of Angoulême and Geoffrey of

Rancogne, harried the domains of the count of Poitou, and the count

retaliated by overrunning their lands, capturing and destroying

their castles, burning and wasting their farms and orchards, till

he had once more subdued them to his will.[274] The leaders took

refuge in Taillebourg, and there they were surrounded by Richard’s

forces. The damage inflicted by him on that famous stronghold in

1179 had doubtless been long ago repaired; but this time the siege

lasted only a few days, though the place was occupied by “more than

seventy picked men of might.” They surrendered on the only condition

which Richard would grant—that every one of them should join him

in his Crusade.[275] This was an excellent practical expedient for

increasing the force which he hoped to lead to Palestine, and at the

same time withdrawing from Aquitaine the men who were most likely to

cause a disturbance if left there during his absence.

But behind the revolt lay graver complications. It was rumoured

that King Henry, in the hope of compelling his son to abandon his

project, had not only stirred up Geoffrey of Lusignan and the other

rebels and secretly furnished them with help and money, but had also

instigated Raymond of Toulouse to join them against Richard.[276]

However this may be, Raymond did, while Richard was busy quelling the

revolt in Saintonge, capture “certain merchants from Richard’s land”

who were travelling through the land of Toulouse; some of them he

imprisoned, some he blinded and mutilated, some he put to death.[277]

On hearing of this Richard, after again destroying the defences

of Taillebourg,[278] marched into Gascony and there collected a

great force of Brabantines with which he invaded the county of

Toulouse.[279] In a short time he took Moissac and several other

castles of Raymond’s, harried all the northern part of the county

with fire and sword,[280] and captured, among many other prisoners,

a certain intimate friend of Raymond’s, Peter Seilun, who had long

been Richard’s enemy and is said to have instigated the imprisonment

of the Poitevin merchants. Richard placed this man in close and harsh

confinement and refused all Raymond’s offers of ransom for him.

Raymond now began a system of treacherous warfare against Richard,

laying ambushes for him and his soldiers, and setting men on the

watch, in towns and castles, to seize anybody who belonged to the

following of either Richard or Henry. By this means two knights of

Henry’s household, who had been on pilgrimage to Compostella and

for some reason or other went round by Toulouse on their way home,

were captured and imprisoned. After a while Raymond let one of them

go—seemingly on parole—to Richard with a message that both should

be set free, if Richard would liberate Peter Seilun in exchange.

Richard, however, on learning that they had been captured when

pilgrims, declared that “no prayers and no price” should make him

a party to such a transaction; “it would be an intolerable offence

against God and His holy Apostle S. James, were he to give a ransom

for men whose character of pilgrims was in itself sufficient to

entitle them to their freedom.”[281] Meanwhile Raymond had complained

to Philip Augustus of Richard’s invasion of Toulouse, as being a

breach of the agreement made between the two kings when they took the

Cross, that no interference with each other’s lands should take place

till after the Crusade.[282] Philip appears to have gone “into those

parts” in person, hoping to pacify the belligerents; and to him the

captive knights, finding they could get no help from Richard, told

their story. Philip seemingly regarded the matter in the same light

as Richard; he bade Raymond release them “not for love of the king

of England or of Count Richard, but out of love and reverence for S.

James.” Raymond, however, still insisted on the condition which he

had originally demanded. “Then the French king, seeing he could make

no peace or agreement between the two counts, inflamed with wrath and

mortal hatred against each other, returned to France.” He, however,

so far took Raymond’s part as to send messengers over sea to Henry,

complaining of Richard’s doings in Toulouse, and asking the English

king to make amends for them; to which Henry merely answered “that it

was not by his counsel or desire that his son had done any of these

things, and that he could not justify him.”[283]

Whatever may have been Henry’s real share—if indeed he had any real

share at all—in the origin of the quarrel, matters had by this time

reached a pass at which his personal sympathies could hardly fail to

be on the side of his son. Richard had taken no less than seventeen

castles in the territory of Toulouse,[284] and was almost at the

gates of its capital city—that famous city which both he and his

father had always longed to call their own, and of which he still

considered himself the rightful owner as being through his mother the

legal representative of Count William IV—and was actually preparing

to lay siege to it.[285] Both Raymond and Philip were so much alarmed

that Philip, at Raymond’s entreaty, sent envoys to the invader to

tell him that if he would desist, “he should receive his rights and

be justly compensated for his wrongs in the Court of France.” The

French king’s distrust of Henry’s attitude in the affair was shown by

his despatch at the same time of another mission, to the seneschals

of Normandy and Anjou, warning them that they must either “recall

count Richard” at once, or consider themselves no longer protected

by the truce between the two kings. Henry, no doubt urged by the

terrified seneschals, sent to admonish his son; but his admonitions

and Philip’s threats were alike unheeded.[286] To Henry, indeed,

Richard’s answer was that “he had done no ill in the lands of the

count of S. Gilles except by leave of the king of France, forasmuch

as the count refused to be in the truce and peace which the two kings

had made.”[287]

The king of France, however, was now gathering his host for an

invasion of the Angevin lands. Directing his attack against the

unprotected north-eastern frontier of Aquitaine, after seizing some

of the border castles of Touraine,[288] he advanced into Berry, and

by the middle of June was master of its northern part as far as

Châteauroux, which he captured on June 16.[289] On that day Henry,

perplexed and terrified alike by what he heard of Philip’s doings and

of Richard’s, despatched four envoys to the former “to entreat for

peace in some form or other.”[290] If they ever reached the French

king, their mission was fruitless; he continued his conquests till he

was master of everything that Henry possessed or claimed in Berry and

Auvergne as far as Montluçon.[291]

On July 11 Henry returned to Normandy with an armed force of English

and Welshmen, and at once summoned the Norman host to a muster at

Alençon.[292] Richard meanwhile had abandoned his attack on the

lesser foe to march against the greater one, and was advancing

northward with fresh forces towards Berry. Philip, probably fearing

to be caught between two fires, hereupon retired into France, leaving

Châteauroux in the custody of William des Barres.[293] Richard, “by

way of doing something,”[294] began to devise schemes for regaining

the place. One day some of its garrison who had been out on a

foraging expedition found on their return the gate blocked by him and

his troops. They, however, cut their way through and stirred up their

comrades within the castle to make a sally in force. The Poitevins,

taken by surprise, were repulsed with heavy loss; the count himself

was in such danger that he fled for his life. Thrown from his horse,

he was rescued by a sturdy butcher,[295] and with the remnant of his

troops rejoined his father, seemingly somewhere in Touraine. The

defence of Henry’s frontiers was clearly the matter most in need

of attention now; father and son accordingly led their combined

forces back to the Norman border. At Trou, in the south-eastern

corner of Maine, they were all but overtaken by Philip “with a great

host”; they escaped, however, and the loss of forty knights and

the burning of Trou (which Philip fired because he could not take

it[296]) were compensated by Richard’s capture of a neighbouring

fortress, Les Roches, with its garrison of twenty-five knights and

forty men-at-arms. This place was in the dominions of Count Burchard

of Vendôme, who was an adherent of the king of France.[297] Philip

dropped the pursuit, and on August 16 met Henry in conference at

Gisors, but they came to no agreement.[298] Among other proposals

there seems to have been one for a settlement of the disputes between

the two kings by a combat of four champions on either side. Four

names on the English (or Angevin) side were suggested to Henry by

William the Marshal; Richard was offended because his own name was

not among them. “You have done me grievous wrong; of all the men of

my father’s lands I was deemed one of the best to defend him; but you

give him to understand otherwise.” The Marshal protested that Richard

misinterpreted his motive: “You are our lord the king’s most direct

heir; it would be an outrage and crime to risk your life in such a

business.” “It is true, Richard,” interposed Henry, “what he has said

is but right”; and therewith it seems the whole project fell to the

ground.[299] At the end of the month Richard, hearing that Philip was

at Mantes, proposed to attack that place. The expedition, however,

resulted merely in a skirmish between Richard himself, Earl William

de Mandeville, and some of Henry’s followers on the one side and a

few French knights on the other, in which William des Barres, who had

been commandant of Châteauroux for Philip at the time of Richard’s

recent adventure there, was made prisoner by Richard, but broke his

parole and escaped.[300] Next day Richard took leave of his father,

“promising that he would serve him well and faithfully,” and set out

again for Berry.[301] What he did there we are not told; but he seems

to have recovered at least one—Palluau—of the castles which Philip

had captured in the spring.[302]

The war languished partly because the counts of Flanders and Blois

and some other chief nobles of France refused to fight against

princes who, like themselves, wore the Cross; and in October Philip

asked Henry for another conference. It took place on October 7 at

Châtillon, on the border of Touraine and Berry. A proposition that

all conquests made by Philip from Henry and by Richard from Raymond

of Toulouse since the beginning of the truce should be restored

came to nothing through Philip’s demand for a security which Henry

would not grant. Then, it seems, Richard offered to do what Philip

had in vain required of him a few months before—to go to the French

king’s court and stand to its judgement on all that had taken place

between himself and the count of S. Gilles, “in order that peace

might be made between his father and the king of France.”[303]

The action of the French magnates may have opened Richard’s eyes

to the unseemliness of all this strife between fellow-soldiers of

the Cross and led him to see that peace, at almost any price, was

absolutely necessary for the purpose which he had most at heart, the

fulfilment of his vow of Crusade. His proposal, however, “greatly

displeased” his father,[304] and Philip seems to have deemed the

moment a favourable one for seeking to impose upon Richard some other

requirements whose nature we are not told, but which led to “high

and bad words” and finally resulted in the count of Poitou giving

his lord paramount the lie direct and calling him a “vile recreant,”

whereupon the conference broke up with a mutual defiance.[305] Philip

went into Berry, re-took Palluau, and proceeded to Châteauroux, but

only to withdraw the mercenaries whom he had left there and lead them

back to Bourges, where he dismissed them.[306]

For military and political reasons alike Philip did not want to fight

with Richard. He knew that Richard would be compelled ere long to

make a friend of him, for nothing but his friendship could enable

Richard to secure his rights as Henry’s heir; and Richard himself

now saw that until those rights were secured it was impossible for

him to venture on leaving Europe. He therefore resolved on bringing

matters to a crisis. At his suggestion the two kings arranged to

meet again on November 18 at Bonmoulins.[307] Meanwhile, as an

English writer says, he “was reconciled to” Philip—which probably

means that he made, and Philip accepted, an apology for what had

occurred at Châtillon—and “endeavoured to soften the mind of the

French king, that in him he might find at least some solace if his

own father should altogether fail him.”[308] Accordingly he had a

private interview with Philip before the formal conference, and went

to the place of meeting in his company, “for the sake,” so he told

his father, “of concord and peace.”[309] Philip opened the colloquy

with a proposal that all the results of the fighting since a certain

event—which is stated as “the taking of the Cross,” but seems to

have been really the agreement at Gisors on March 10, 1186—should be

wiped out, he himself setting the example of restitution, “and after

this, all things should continue as they were before” the specified

date. This Richard opposed; “it seemed to him unmeet that he should

by the acceptance of these terms be compelled to restore Cahors and

its whole county, and many other places forming part of his domain,

which were worth a thousand marks a year or more, in exchange for

Châteauroux and Issoudun and Graçay which were not ducal domains,

but merely underfiefs.”[310] Philip’s proposal and Richard’s answer

may have been arranged between them beforehand, and may have been

merely intended to prepare the way for the introduction of the

crucial question which Richard was determined to bring, with Philip’s

help, to a decisive issue once for all. He now asked his father for

an explicit recognition, to be confirmed by an oath, of his rights

as heir. Furthermore, as such a recognition would, so far as Henry’s

continental territories were concerned, be ineffectual without

Philip’s sanction as overlord, and as it was now clearly understood

that Philip’s sanction depended on the marriage of Aloysia, her

hitherto reluctant bridegroom at last made up his mind to the

sacrifice and asked his father to give him at once the bride who was

lawfully his, “and the kingdom”—that is, the assurance of succession

to the Crown. In these requests he was supported by Philip.[311]

Henry answered “that he would on no account do this in existing

circumstances, since he would appear to be acting under constraint

rather than of his own free will.”[312] Richard persisted in his

entreaties, but in vain. At last he exclaimed: “Now what I hitherto

could not believe looks to me like truth.” Ungirding his sword, he

turned to the French king and, “imploring his aid that he might not

be deprived of his due rights,” did homage to him[313] as his “man”

for the whole continental dominions of the Angevin house and swore

fealty to him against all men, saving Henry’s right of tenure for

life and the fidelity due from son to father.[314] Philip responded

by promising that Châteauroux, Issoudun, and all the other castles,

lands, and fiefs which he had taken from Henry in former wars should

be restored to Richard.[315] Henry was, it seems, too thunderstruck

to say or do anything except consent without more ado to a truce with

Philip till S. Hilary’s day.[316]

“Thus began the quarrel that never was fought out,”[317] says a

contemporary poet of the fateful conference at Bonmoulins. The

meeting had been held, according to custom, in the open air and in

public, the two kings and Richard, with the Archbishop of Reims,

standing in the middle of a wide and dense circle of their followers

and other spectators. To some of these the symbolical action which

accompanied homage must have been visible; and when the central

group broke up and father, son, and lord paramount were seen to

move away, each in a different direction, “all men marvelled.”[318]

Richard’s homage to Philip was an act of filial undutifulness, since

it was done in opposition to the known wishes of his father; but it

involved no further breach of duty, if he really intended—and there

is nothing to show that he did not, at that time, intend—to abide

by the saving clause which reserved his father’s rights. Fairly

interpreted with that clause, the homage would be merely prospective

in its effect; and some prospective measure of this kind had been

made almost necessary as a matter of self-protection on Richard’s

part, by the conduct of both Henry and Philip. We cannot tell

precisely to what it was that Richard alluded in the words which

he spoke immediately before the homage; but it can only have been

one, or both, of two things: the sinister rumours about Henry and

Aloysia, and the suggestion that Henry aimed at making John his heir

instead of Richard. As to the truth or falsehood of the former charge

against Henry we have no means of judging; but of the truth of the

latter charge it is impossible to doubt. The anathema said to have

been pronounced by the Legate Henry of Albano against Richard as a

disturber of the peace which the pope was anxious to secure for the

furtherance of the Crusade[319] might have fallen more justly upon

Richard’s father; perhaps, too, not less justly upon their overlord.

Richard had no sooner set out for Poitou than his father sent

messengers to recall him; but it was too late.[320] Either for the

same purpose, or to secure, if possible, some of the fortresses

of Aquitaine,[321] Henry himself went as far south as Le Dorat

in La Marche; there, however, he “did nothing”;[322] and indeed

nothing could be done till the truce expired. It had been agreed

at Bonmoulins that the two kings should [Sidenote: 1189] then, on

January 13 (1189) meet again to discuss terms for a lasting peace.

When the time came, Henry on the plea of illness postponed the

meeting, first till Candlemas, and then till after Easter.[323] This

was too much for the patience of either Philip or Richard. Philip,

it is said, had already promised that he would assist Richard in any

attempt to gain possession of Henry’s continental dominions.[324]

Accordingly, after the expiration of the truce he and Richard made

a joint raid across Henry’s borders.[325] Henry in alarm sent the

Archbishop of Canterbury to confer with Richard; but Richard had now

come to regard with distrust every messenger and every message from

his father, and curtly refused to give Baldwin an audience.[326] His

confidence in Philip was—justly enough—not much greater; when Henry

sought to renew negotiations with France, his envoys found Richard’s

chancellor, William of Longchamp, at the French king’s side, placed

there on purpose to prevent any betrayal by Philip of the interests

of the count of Poitou; and William’s diplomacy proved more than a

match for theirs.[327] After Easter the long delayed meeting of the

kings took place at La Ferté-Bernard;[328] this was followed during

the next five or six weeks by several conferences between Henry and

Richard, “but it was all lost labour.”[329] Another legate, John of

Anagni, was now endeavouring to reconcile the kings,[330] and had

succeeded in obtaining from both of them an undertaking to stand

to his judgement and that of four archbishops, two from Philip’s

realm and two from Henry’s.[331] Accordingly, in Whitsun week Henry,

Philip, Richard, the legate, and the four assistant arbitrators

all met together near La Ferté-Bernard.[332] Philip set forth his

demands for himself and for Richard: that Aloysia should be given to

Richard to wife, that some security should be granted to Richard for

his succession to the kingdom of England after his father’s death,

and that John should take the Cross and join the Crusade;[333] if

these conditions were granted, Philip offered to restore all that

he had taken from Henry during the current year and the preceding

one.[334] Richard made the same demands in his own behalf, “saying

that he himself would in no wise go to Jerusalem unless John went

with him.”[335] The suspicion which had evidently prompted these

demands was amply justified by Henry’s reply. He “said that he would

never do this; but he offered, if the French king would consent,

to give Aloysia with all the things aforesaid, more fully and

completely than Philip asked”—not to Richard, but to John.[336] The

writer who reports this offer of Henry’s does not explicitly mention

security for Richard’s succession to the English Crown as one of the

conditions demanded by Philip and Richard; he says they asked Henry

to “cause the men of his lands to swear fealty to Richard.”[337] Even

if the lands here meant were only the English king’s continental

territories, Henry in refusing to do any of the things asked of

him for Richard and proposing to do all and more than all of

them for John was clearly proposing nothing less than a complete

disinheritance, so far at least as those territories were concerned,

of the elder brother in favour of the younger one. What Richard had

suspected and feared, what Philip had, to some extent at least, known

to be in Henry’s mind ever since the truce of Châteauroux, if not

earlier still, was thus confirmed by Henry’s own lips. Philip had

doubtless indirectly encouraged Henry in this insane project, so long

as it suited his own interest to play off the father and the elder

son one against the other; but he was far too practical to have ever

intended giving it his serious support; and he now at once refused to

sanction it.[338] He seems to have expected, reasonably enough, that

the legate would uphold him in his refusal; but instead of this, John

of Anagni threatened to lay all France under Interdict if its king

did not come to a full agreement with the king of England. Philip

retorted that he did not fear, and would not heed, a sentence without

basis in either equity or law, and that the legate had been bribed

with English gold. The meeting broke up in hopeless discord.[339]

If ever a father set at nought the precept “Provoke not your

children to wrath,” Henry had done so by his conduct towards Richard,

not merely on one or two isolated occasions, but persistently through

a course of years. And if any circumstances are conceivable in which

a son might be, not indeed justified, but in some degree excused for

taking forcible measures against his father, in such a case Richard

stood now. Neither he nor Philip could possibly acquiesce in the

scheme which Henry had just proposed; and it was clear that Henry

would not be induced to renounce that scheme by any persuasion, nor

even by intimidation unless it were something more than verbal. Both

parties had come to the conference “with horses and arms,”[340]

and the main body of Henry’s available forces was quartered in and

around Le Mans. While he rode slowly back towards that city, Philip

attacked the castle of La Ferté; its constable made a brave defence,

but was obliged to surrender. Philip then advanced to Ballon, which

he reached just after Henry had quitted it, and at once “took it, no

man gainsaying him.”[341] In a few days most of the castles around

Le Mans on the north and east—Bonnétable, Beaumont, Montfort—were

likewise occupied by his troops. But it was not to him that they had

surrendered. Richard was with him; and the castellans “all round

about” showed their disapproval of Henry’s scheme for altering the

Angevin succession by voluntarily delivering up their castles to the

count of Poitou.[342]

On June 12 the allies surprised Le Mans; their troops forced an

entrance into the lower town, the fire kindled to keep them out

of the city set it ablaze, and Henry fled.[343] There was a hot

pursuit; Richard was among the foremost, but it seems that he had

taken no part in the assault, and now only wished to prevent by his

presence any personal violence to his father, for he was clad only

in a doublet and an iron headpiece and carried no arms at all. Some

of his men, however, outstripped him, and before he could overtake

them were skirmishing with Henry’s rearguard, one of whom, William

des Roches, had just unhorsed a knight of Richard’s household when

the count came spurring up and shouted: “William! you waste time

in folly; mend your speed, ride on!” At the sound of that voice

another of the little band covering the king’s retreat turned round

and spurred his horse straight at Richard, and the heir of the

Angevin empire suddenly found his life at the mercy of one who was

already known as the most accomplished warrior of his day, William

the Marshal. So close was the encounter that Richard caught hold of

his assailant’s lance and by sheer strength of arm turned it aside,

shouting: “By God’s Feet, Marshal, slay me not! it were an ill deed,

for I am wholly unarmed.” But the thrust had not been meant for him,

and its aim was only momentarily diverted. “Nay! may the devil slay

you, for so will not I,” answered the Marshal as he recovered control

of his weapon and plunged it into the body of Richard’s horse.[344]

The animal instantly fell dead, dragging its rider with it to the

ground; knights and men-at-arms crowded anxiously to the spot, and

when Richard had struggled to his feet he bade them proceed no

further—“You have spoiled everything; you are a set of distracted

fools!”[345]

Three weeks later father and son met once more, and for the last

time. From Le Mans the allies moved eastward along the borders of

Maine and the Vendômois, and thence into Touraine as far as Amboise;

castle after castle surrendering to them without resistance. Henry

had at first gone northward, but changed his course, and while they

were thus occupied he made his way back, with a very small escort,

to Chinon.[346] Negotiations were resumed; but the French king now

saw his opportunity for an unparalleled display of his sovereign

authority as lord paramount, and he resolved to be satisfied with

nothing less than a surrender of the whole continental possessions of

the Angevin house into his hands, to be restored or re-distributed at

his own pleasure.[347] On July 1 he laid siege to Tours; on July 3 he

took it by assault. Next day (July 4), at Colombières, Henry made the

required surrender.[348] This done, Philip formally made him a new

grant of the surrendered lands and received his homage for them on

new conditions. One of these conditions was for the sole benefit of

Philip; it was a fine of twenty thousand marks to be paid to him by

Henry. The others concerned Richard. One related to Aloysia; another

bound Henry to make all his barons, insular and continental, swear

fealty to his rightful heir. No baron or knight who in this war had

withdrawn from Henry’s service and joined Richard was to return to

the former within a month of Mid-Lent next, at which date the two

kings and Richard were to set out all together on the Crusade. All

Henry’s barons were to swear that if he broke his plighted word with

regard to anything in the agreement they would support Philip and

Richard against him; and it seems that Philip and Richard, while

restoring all their other conquests, were to retain either Tours, Le

Mans, and the castles of Château-du-Loir and Trou, or Gisors, Pacy,

and Nonancourt, “until all the things above determined by the king of

France should be fulfilled.”[349]

The meeting between the two kings at which this extraordinary

arrangement took place was held in the open air. So far as we can

gather, Richard was either a silent spectator or was not actually

present, though he was certainly close at hand. After its conclusion

he went to his father’s lodging in the house of the Knights Templars

at Ballan, hard by Colombières,[350] to receive, according to

agreement, the kiss of peace. He did receive it, but as he turned

to depart he heard his father mutter: “The Lord grant that I may

not die till I have had my revenge of thee!”[351] The words were

the half delirious utterance of a sick man whose brain was on fire

with fever and, still more, with shame at the public degradation

he had just gone through, and with disappointment at the failure

of his most cherished scheme; although the worst detail connected

with that failure did not become known to him till some hours later,

when he received the list of the followers who had deserted him.

Then he learned that John had anticipated the issue of the struggle

and secured for himself the protection of the party whose success

he saw to be a foregone conclusion, by pledging his allegiance to

Richard.[352]

The triumph of Philip Augustus was for the moment complete. He had

successfully asserted and exercised his sovereign authority over the

greatest of his vassals, the vassal who was, no less than himself,

a crowned and anointed king, and whose lands comprised, besides

the island realm, more than two-thirds of the realm of France. The

succession to all those lands, including England, had been, or seemed

to have been, determined at Philip’s bidding. He was, or seemed

to be, master of both Henry and Richard. But his triumph was only

momentary. Within three days the convention of Colombières was a mere

piece of waste parchment, for Henry of England was dead.

BOOK II

RICHARD’S CRUSADE

1189-1192

Ma fu di pensier nostri ultimo segno

Espugnar de Sion le nobil mura.

CHAPTER I

THE YEAR OF PREPARATION

1189-1190

Surgite, et ascendamus in Sion.

The headquarters of Philip and Richard had been at Tours since

their capture of that city on July 3;[353] it was probably there

that Richard received, from a messenger despatched by William the

Marshal,[354] the tidings of his father’s death at Chinon on the 6th

and the intended burial at Fontevraud. The night-watch round the

open coffin was beginning in the great abbey church when he reached

it next evening.[355] All endeavours to guess at his feelings were

baffled by the rigid stillness of his aspect and demeanour,[356]

broken only by a momentary shudder when he saw the uncovered

face.[357] For a long while he stood gazing at it in silence;[358]

for a briefer space he knelt in silent prayer.[359] When at last he

spoke, it was to call for two of his father’s most loyal adherents,

William the Marshal and Maurice of [Sidenote: 1189 _July 7_] Craon.

They came forward, and at his command, followed him, with some

others, out of the church. “So, fair Sir Marshal,” he began, “you

were minded to slay me the other day! and slain I should have been of

a surety had I not turned your lance aside by the strength of my arm.

That would have been a bad day’s work!” The Marshal answered that his

own strength of arm was great enough to drive a lance-thrust home to

its aim in spite of interference, and the issue of the encounter was

sufficient proof that he had sought only the life of the horse, not

the rider. “Marshal, I will bear you no malice; you are forgiven,”

was Richard’s reply.[360] The burial took place next morning.

[Sidenote: _July 8_] As soon as it was over Richard despatched

the Marshal and another envoy[361] to England with orders for the

release of his mother, and with a commission to her authorizing

her to act as his representative until he could himself go over

sea.[362] His choice of the Marshal for this errand was an indication

of the spirit in which he took up the rights and duties of his new

position. He showed himself gracious to all persons who had been

faithful to Henry, and expressed his intention of confirming them

in their several offices and rewarding their fidelity to the late

king. He was asked to ratify a number of grants which Geoffrey the

chancellor assured him Henry had recently made or promised to make,

and he consented in every case save one, a grant of Châteauroux and

its heiress to Baldwin of Béthune, which he said must be cancelled

because he had himself, as duke of Aquitaine, granted the damsel

and her fief to Andrew of Chauvigny; but he promised to compensate

Baldwin.[363] One man only who had held high office under Henry

fell under Richard’s displeasure: Stephen the seneschal of Anjou,

who was not only deprived of the castles and the royal treasury

which he had in custody for the late king, but was also chained

hand and foot and put in prison. The cause of Stephen’s disgrace

is unknown; his previous history is obscure;[364] but the disgrace

was only temporary; within a few months he was once more free, and

reinstated in the king’s confidence and favour. On the other hand,

when three of the men who had deserted Henry and transferred their

allegiance to Richard asked for restitution of their lands of which

Henry had disseised them, Richard gave it, but disseised them again

immediately, “saying that such was the due reward of traitors who

in time of need forsake their lords and help others against them”;

and he treated with coldness and aversion all, save one, who had

thus acted. The exception was John, who when he presented himself

before his brother was “received with honour”[365] and “kindly

comforted.”[366]

[Sidenote: _July 8-20_]

Richard next proceeded into Normandy. At Séez the archbishops

of Rouen and Canterbury met him, and (acting doubtless under a

commission from the legate) absolved him from excommunication.[367]

On July 20 he received the ducal sword and banner of Normandy at

the high altar of Rouen cathedral, and immediately afterwards

the fealty of the Norman clergy and people.[368] He then went

to Gisors for a conference with the king of France. The French

historiographer-royal notes that as “the count of Poitou” set foot

in the great border-fortress about which he and his father had

wrangled so long with Philip, fire broke out within it, and that next

day as he rode forth the wooden bridge broke down under him and he

and his horse fell into [Sidenote: _July 22_] the ditch.[369] The

conference took place on the 22nd, between Chaumont and Trie.[370]

Philip began by renewing his original claim to Gisors, but waived

it on receiving an intimation that Richard still purposed to marry

Aloysia.[371] The French king seems to have further claimed a large

share of the castles and towns which he had taken from Henry,

including Châteauroux, Le Mans, and Tours. Submission to such a

demand would unquestionably have brought upon Richard, as an English

chronicler says, “shame and everlasting contempt”; indeed, he would

have been within his feudal right in refusing it entirely, on the

ground that no forfeiture on his father’s part could invalidate the

grant of all these fiefs which had been made to himself by Philip

in November 1188. He consented, however, to resign once for all his

rights in Auvergne, and two little fiefs in Aquitanian Berry that lay

close to the French Royal Domain—Graçay and Issoudun; and he bought

off Philip’s other demands by a promise of four thousand marks in

addition to the twenty thousand due from Henry under the convention

of Colombières.[372] These terms Philip accepted. Richard renewed

his homage to his overlord, and they agreed to set out on the Crusade

together in Lent of the next year.[373]

For three weeks longer Richard stayed in Normandy, winning all

hearts by his gracious and affable demeanour.[374] [Sidenote: _Aug.

12_] On August 12 he went to England.[375] Landing at Southampton

or Portsmouth,[376] he was received two or three days later with a

solemn procession at Winchester by his mother and the chief nobles

and prelates of the land.[377] As the archbishop of Canterbury had

previously returned from Normandy,[378] the coronation might have

taken place immediately, had the new king desired it. But, unlike

every other king of England since the Norman conquest, Richard was

in no haste to be crowned. There was no need for haste; he had no

rival; he had, in England, no enemies; and he had made for himself a

host of friends by a proclamation which during the last five weeks

“honourable men” sent out by Eleanor according to instructions from

him had been publishing and carrying into effect in every county.

All persons under arrest for offences against Forest Law were to be

discharged; those who were outlawed for a like cause were permitted

to return in peace. Other persons imprisoned “by the will of the

king or his justiciar,” not “by the common law of their county or

hundred, or on appeal,” were also to be discharged. Persons outlawed

“by common law without appeal by the justices” were to be re-admitted

to peace provided they could find sureties that they would come up

for trial if required; prisoners detained on appeal for any shameful

cause were to be released on the same terms. All persons detained

“on appeal by those who acknowledged themselves to be malefactors”

were to be set free unconditionally. Malefactors to whom “life and

limbs” had been granted as approvers were to abjure and depart

from the king’s land; those who without the concession of life and

limbs had of their own free will accused others were to be kept in

custody till further counsel should be taken. The ordinance concluded

by requiring every free man of the realm to swear fealty and liege

homage to the new lord of England, “and that they will submit to his

jurisdiction and lend him their aid for the maintenance of his peace

and justice in all things.”[379] We cannot ascertain how far Richard

was justified in the insinuation conveyed in this ordinance, that the

administration of criminal law in Henry’s latter days had been marked

not only by undue severity, but also by arbitrary interference on the

part of the Crown or its officers with the rights and liberties of

Englishmen. The most philosophic historian of the time, William of

Newburgh, evidently thought that however Henry might have erred on

the side of rigour, Richard at the outset of his reign erred no less

in the opposite direction. “At that time,” says William, “the gaols

were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment, but through

Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to

become bolder thieves in the future.”[380] But the people in general

were delighted to welcome a ruler who seemed to them bent upon

outdoing all that was good and undoing all that they considered evil

in the government of his predecessor.[381]

From Winchester Richard was moving on by leisurely stages towards

London when a report of a Welsh raid made him suddenly turn towards

the border, with the intention of punishing the raiders; but Eleanor,

who perhaps better understood the danger of plunging unnecessarily

and unwarily into a Welsh war, called him [Sidenote: _Sept. 1, 2_]

back, and as usual he obeyed her.[382] On September 1 or 2 he was

welcomed with a great procession in London;[383] on the 3rd he was

crowned at Westminster.[384] Three contemporary writers, one of whom

actually assisted in the most [Sidenote: _Sept. 3_] sacred detail

of the ceremony,[385] tell us how at its outset Duke Richard was

“solemnly and duly” elected by clergy and people; how he took the

threefold oath, to maintain the peace of the Church, to suppress

injustice, and to promote equity and mercy.[386] After receiving the

threefold anointing and being clothed with the symbolical vestments

of the kingly office, he was adjured by the Primate not to assume

it unless he were fully minded to keep his vow; he answered that by

God’s help he did intend so to do. He then took the crown from the

altar and handed it to the archbishop, and the archbishop set it on

his head.[387] Richard’s coronation is in one way the most memorable

in all English history, for it is the occasion on which the form and

manner of crowning a king of England were, in every essential point

and in most of the lesser particulars, fixed for all after-time.

The court festivities lasted three days,[388] and the manner in

which they were conducted presented a marked contrast to the

rough, careless, unceremonious ways of the court of Henry II. The

banquet each day was as stately and decorous as it was lavish and

splendid. Clergy and laity were seated apart, and the former had the

place of honour, being at the king’s own table.[389] Richard had

further emphasized the solemnity of the occasion by a proclamation

ordering that no Jew and no woman should be admitted to the palace.

Notwithstanding this, certain Jews did present themselves at the

doors on the evening of the coronation-day with gifts for the king.

The courtiers of lower rank and the people who crowded round robbed

them, beat them, and drove them away; some were mortally injured,

some slain on the spot.[390] The tumult reached the ears of the king

in the banqueting-hall, and he sent the justiciar and some of the

nobles to suppress it; but it was already beyond their control.[391]

A great wave of anti-Jewish feeling swept through the city; before

morning most of the Jews’ houses were sacked; and the number of

persons concerned in the riot was so large and public feeling so

strongly on their side that although some of them were arrested by

Richard’s orders and brought before him, he found it impossible to do

justice in the matter,[392] and only ventured to send three men to

the gallows—one who in the confusion had robbed a Christian, and two

who had kindled a fire which burned down a Christian’s house.[393]

For the rest he had to “condone what he could not avenge.”[394] He

tried, however, to prevent further disturbances of the same kind by

sending into every shire letters commanding that the Jews should be

left in peace and no one should do them wrong;[395] and so long as he

remained in England these orders were obeyed.

The new king had now to make provision for his Crusade, and for the

carrying on of the government of England after his departure. There

was no reason to anticipate any difficulty in the latter half of

his task; but the other half of it presented a very serious cause

for anxiety—the want of money. The Angevin treasury was empty;[396]

the ducal revenues of Normandy and Aquitaine were not large enough,

at the best of times, to furnish more than a very insignificant

surplus for purposes external to the two duchies. Richard’s first

act on reaching Winchester had been to cause an exact account to

be taken of the contents of the royal treasury.[397] We have no

trustworthy statement of the result;[398] but it evidently proved

quite inadequate to supply his needs. The twenty-four thousand

marks due to Philip, the cost of equipping and maintaining his own

followers and of fitting out a transport fleet, were only a part

of those needs; there was another part which from Richard’s point

of view was incalculable and almost unlimited. A great effort for

the deliverance of Holy Land had been in contemplation throughout

western Europe for nearly five years; the form in which it had been

originally projected was that of an expedition to be led by the

Angevin king of England as head of the elder branch of the royal

house of Jerusalem, and composed chiefly of his subjects, although

since then circumstances had so altered and the scheme had so widened

out and developed that he was now only one of several monarchs who

were to lead their respective contingents as portions of one great

army. From 1184 onwards crowds of Englishmen of all ranks had taken

the Cross; most of them—very likely including the English-born

count of Poitou—without counting the cost, in any sense of that

word. Theoretically, the undertaking being not a national but a

personal and voluntary one, each Crusader was responsible for his own

equipment and expenses and those of his tenants or other followers.

The king, however, seems to have at once recognized that if the

English (or Angevin) contingent was to take such a share in the

Holy War as befitted its leader’s rank among the sovereigns and his

kingdom’s rank among the powers of Christendom, he must carry with

him a large reserve fund for the maintenance of the whole force under

his command in a state of efficiency on a service of which no one

could forecast the requirements, the difficulties, or the duration.

As we read the after-story, indeed, we are almost led to credit him

with a presentiment that his war-chest was destined to become the

war-chest of the whole crusading host. At any rate, his most pressing

anxiety was to fill the chest, and—since he expected to leave Europe

in the spring—to fill it as quickly as possible. He might impose a

special tax, or more than one; a tallage, or “donum,” or both at

once. But these would take many months to collect, and would bring

in, probably, scarcely enough to be worth collecting, from his point

of view; while his subjects, who were, or considered themselves,

already hard pressed by the financial administration of Henry, would

have felt or at least resented such taxes as an additional and

oppressive burden. Richard adopted quicker and easier methods.

Among the crowds who had taken the Cross in a moment of enthusiasm

there were many whose zeal had cooled during the months or years of

waiting, and who would now gladly be relieved of the obligation to

fulfil their vow. There was also among them a much larger number

of officers of the English court and government, and of other men

belonging to the classes from which such officers were usually

taken, than could well be spared from the work of administration at

home. Accordingly, Richard had asked and obtained from Pope Clement

letters patent granting release from their vow to all persons whom

the king should appoint to take part in the safe-keeping of the realm

during his absence.[399] Naturally such release was conditional on

compensation being made to the crusading cause by all who were thus

transferred from the service of the Cross to that of the Crown,

since they had taken the former upon themselves and the latter was

not compulsory; and this compensation necessarily took the form of

the payment to the king of a sum which could only be fixed in each

case by a bargain between him and the payer. From this it was not a

difficult step for the king to make similar bargains with men who had

not taken the Cross, but were suitable for and ambitious of office

in England, and able to pay for it. Neither the sale of public

offices nor the yet more general practice of requiring payment for

royal grants of land, privileges, and benefits of any kind—including

confirmations by a new king of grants made by his predecessors—was

condemned, in principle at least, by the ordinary code of political

morality in Richard’s day. He might fairly argue that men who

desired any of these things, and had means to pay for them, ought

to be made to contribute as largely as possible to the Treasury for

the furtherance of the Crusade; and he accordingly set himself to

drain, as it seemed, to the uttermost all these sources of revenue.

“He deposed from their bailiwicks nearly all the sheriffs and their

deputies, and held them to ransom to the uttermost farthing. Those

who could not pay were imprisoned.”[400] He “induced many persons to

vie with each other in spending money to purchase dignities or public

offices, or even royal manors.”[401] “All who were overburdened

with money the king promptly relieved of it, giving them powers and

possessions at their choice.”[402] “Whosoever would, bought of the

king his own rights as well as those of other men.” “All things were

for sale with him—powers, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles,

towns, manors, and suchlike”;[403] or as Roger of Howden sums it all

up, “the king put up to sale everything that he had.”[404]

The part of these proceedings which chiefly perturbed Richard’s

counsellors, it seems, was his reckless alienation of Crown demesne;

in his passionate eagerness to pile up treasure for the Crusade he

was, they considered, stripping himself of his proper means of living

as a king should live at home; it was as if he did not intend, or did

not expect, ever to come home again at all; and when some of them

ventured on a remonstrance he answered, “I would sell London if I

could find a buyer for it.”[405] He was in fact in a mood to, almost

literally, sell all that he had and give it to the Crusade. The means

which he employed to raise money undoubtedly served their purpose;

and they seem to have neither provoked any general discontent nor

inflicted any hardship on the people, or even upon more than a

very few individuals. The chronicler who speaks of a wholesale

“deposition” and “ransoming” of the sheriffs has considerably

exaggerated the king’s treatment of those officers. In the first

place, all sheriffs were always liable to be “deposed” at any moment,

since they were always appointed to hold their office “during the

king’s pleasure.” At Richard’s accession there were in England

twenty-eight sheriffs; two of these had each three counties under his

charge, seven had two counties each. When Richard’s redistribution

of offices was completed, six shires were by a special grant to John

withdrawn from the royal administration altogether; seven or eight

shires remained or were replaced under their former sheriffs; five

sheriffs were transferred to shires other than those which they had

previously administered; four—perhaps more—went on the Crusade; all

the rest seem to have been employed in some other capacity under the

Crown. In all likelihood most, if not all, of these men had taken the

Cross and their “ransom” was no more than they were justly bound and

could well afford to pay. One case does indeed present a different

aspect. Ranulf de Glanville, at this time sheriff of Yorkshire and

Westmorland, was also, and had been for nine years, Chief Justiciar

of England. He had taken the Cross in 1185.[406] One chronicler

asserts that Ranulf was now “stripped of his power,” put in ward, and

set free only on payment of fifteen thousand pounds to the king.[407]

According to other authorities, however, he asked to be relieved of

his functions that he might fulfil his vow.[408] He is said to have

had also another motive for his resignation: “he was of great age,

and saw that the new king, being a novice in government, was wont

to do many things without due deliberation and forethought.”[409]

Behind these words there may lurk a partial explanation of Richard’s

seemingly harsh and extortionate treatment of the Justiciar. It is

possible that the king really wished to retain Ranulf’s services

as his vicegerent in England, and persuaded or coerced him into

commuting his vow for that purpose, but that Ranulf, when he had

seen a little more of his new sovereign’s ways—which were indeed not

likely to meet with the approval of statesmen who had grown old under

Henry II—preferred to sacrifice the money as the price of Richard’s

consent to his departure. That the sacrifice was, after all, not a

ruinous one may be inferred from the fact that it left him still able

to make his expedition independently of the king, for he died at

Acre seven months or more before Richard’s arrival there.[410] Two

Chief Justiciars were appointed in his stead, of whom one, William de

Mandeville, was a trusted and faithful friend of King Henry, and the

other, Bishop Hugh of Durham, was a kinsman of the royal house and

a man of long experience in politics, untiring energy and ambition,

and great wealth, with the surplus of which he was quite willing to

purchase release from his vow of Crusade and as many other benefits

as Richard cared to bestow on him.[411]

Several other high offices, both in Church and State, had to be

filled anew, some from causes altogether beyond the king’s control,

some in fulfilment of his promise to carry into effect the grants

which his father had left uncompleted. There were five vacant

bishoprics, besides the metropolitan see of York. This last Henry had

destined for his son Geoffrey the Chancellor; to Geoffrey Richard

gave it,[412] and thereby the chancellorship was vacated. Two men

vied with each other as candidates for this important post; both

offered large sums for it; Richard in this instance showed that his

choice of men was not governed by his thirst for money, by accepting

the lower bid of the two, because it was made by a man whom he knew

and trusted;[413] and the person who received the largest share

of grants out of the royal domain received them absolutely free.

That person was John. Henry had (or was said to have) expressed the

intention of endowing John with the Norman county of Mortain and four

thousand pounds’ worth of land in England. As soon as Richard was

by investiture as duke of Normandy legally able to make grants in

that duchy, he put John in possession of Mortain.[414] The heritage

of the late Earl of Gloucester had been promised, with the hand

of his heiress, to John ever since 1176; Richard [Sidenote: _Aug.

29_] secured it for him by causing the marriage to take place a

fortnight after the brothers reached England.[415] Within the next

month the king further bestowed upon John a number of escheated

honours and other lands to the gross annual value of some five or six

hundred pounds. Within three more months he added the gift of six

whole counties, with the entire revenues and profits of every kind

which they were wont to render to the Crown, and the control of all

administration and justice within their limits.[416]

Of all Richard’s administrative arrangements this was unquestionably

the most imprudent and dangerous; it is indeed almost the only one

which can be clearly seen to have produced disastrous results. When

its motive is realized, however, criticism is almost disarmed; for

Richard’s act was not the spontaneous throwing away of an extravagant

fraternal benefaction, or of a wholly needless bribe to a brother to

whom he owed nothing and from whom, had he let him remain “Lackland,”

he could have had nothing to fear. It was simply a literal and exact

fulfilment of Henry’s latest design for completing his provision

for John by endowing him with lands in England to the value of four

thousand pounds a year.[417] This ill-advised project of Henry’s

might perhaps have been less unwisely carried out in some other

way, such as the bestowal of a number of small estates scattered

in various parts of the realm, instead of this solid block of

territories with so much political influence and power attached to

their possession; but the only safe mode of dealing with it would

have been to ignore it altogether. Richard’s share of responsibility

in the matter amounts simply to this, that he—in his father’s

lifetime a disobedient son—carried loyalty to his dead father’s

wishes beyond the limits of worldly wisdom and sound policy.

Some of Richard’s administrative arrangements and appointments

were made in a great council held in the middle of September at

Pipewell[418] in Northamptonshire, others at various times within the

next three months. Early in October the king spent a week in London;

thence he went to Arundel and afterwards to Winchester.[419] He had

meanwhile sent John with an armed force—which the Welsh called “the

host of all England”—against Rees of South Wales, who had laid siege

to Caermarthen castle. It was to John’s interest that there should

be peace with Rees, since the honour of Gloucester included a large

piece of Welsh territory. Accordingly John and Rees made an agreement

between themselves,[420] and Rees, with an escort furnished him by

John, came to Oxford in the hope of a meeting with the king; but

Richard “would not go to meet him.”[421] For Richard the chief gain

from this expedition against Rees was that it enabled him to collect

from those tenants in chivalry who did not personally take part in it

a “Scutage of Wales” which helped to finance the expedition to Holy

Land.

Early in November envoys from France brought letters from Philip

setting forth that he and his barons had sworn on the Gospels to

be at Vézelay ready to start on the Crusade at the close of Easter

(April 1, 1190), and begging that Richard would take an oath to the

same effect. Richard exacted from the envoys an oath “on the King of

France’s soul” that this pledge should be fulfilled on the French

side; then he called a great council in London and there caused

one of his chief counsellors to take a like oath on his behalf

in presence of the Frenchmen.[422] After this the king went on

pilgrimage to S. Edmund’s on the festival of its patron saint.[423]

Soon afterwards he was at Canterbury,[424] making peace between the

archbishop and the monks, who had long been at strife.[425] The

settlement was destined to be only temporary, but for the moment it

was a triumph both of Richard’s kingly power and of his personal

tact; the dispute had been a scandal which had baffled Henry II,

and a legate sent by the Pope to deal with it had landed at Dover

on November 20 (when Richard was at S. Edmund’s), but had been by

Eleanor’s order forbidden to proceed inland, his mission having

no sanction from the king.[426] Richard, however, wanted to make

use of him for two other purposes: the confirmation of Geoffrey’s

election to the see of York, and the raising of an Interdict laid by

Archbishop Baldwin on John’s lands in consequence of the marriage of

John and Isabel of Gloucester, who were cousins within the prohibited

degrees. Accordingly the legate was entertained at Canterbury for two

nights; he did what the king desired of him and then departed out of

the realm.[427]

A weightier matter was settled in that same council at Canterbury.

Shortly after the accession of Henry II to the English crown the

Scot king Malcolm had done homage to him “in the same manner as his

grandfather had been the man of King Henry the First.”[428] What were

the precise grounds and conditions of the homage due to the sovereign

of England from the rulers of the composite realm which was generally

known as Scotland, but would have been more correctly termed North

Britain—whether that homage was due for the whole realm, consisting

of the Highlands (or “Scotland” properly so called), the Lowlands,

and Galloway, as well as for the lands which the Scot kings held in

England, or only for the last three, or even for the English lands

alone—was a question which both parties had for many generations

found it prudent to evade by the use of some such formula as the

one adopted in 1157. But in 1175 Malcolm’s brother and successor,

William the Lion, having invaded England and been made prisoner,

purchased his release by definitely becoming Henry’s liegeman “for

Scotland and all his other lands,” promising that all his barons

should likewise do liege homage to Henry, and that his own heirs and

the heirs of his barons should do the same to Henry’s successors,

and giving up to the English king the castles of Roxburgh, Berwick,

Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling, with an annual payment from the

Scottish Crown revenue for their maintenance.[429] Edinburgh was

given back to William in 1186 to form part of the dower of his wife,

Henry’s cousin Ermengard of Beaumont.[430] In the summer of 1188 some

abortive negotiations concerning the restoration of the other castles

to the Scot king took place between him and Henry. According to one

account, Henry attempted to levy the Saladin tithe for the Crusade in

Scotland as well as in his own dominions; William refused to permit

this, but offered to give five thousand marks instead of the tithe

if his castles were restored to him; this, however, Henry “would not

do.”[431] Another version of the story is that William spontaneously

began negotiations by offering four thousand marks for the castles;

that Henry answered “the thing should be done if William would give

a tithe of his land” for the Crusade and that the Scot king was

willing to do this if he could obtain the consent of his barons, but

they refused emphatically, so the project came to nothing.[432] It

is not likely that Henry imagined himself to have by the settlement

made in 1175 finally disposed of the question about the homage. A

settlement which had been forced upon William the Lion when he was

powerless in the English king’s hands could not possibly be final on

such a matter; he, or the Scot kings after him, would be certain to

repudiate it at the first opportunity; and the opportunity came in

autumn 1189 when he was summoned to the English court to do homage

to Henry’s successor. It was imperatively necessary for Richard to

secure William’s homage before setting out on the Crusade. To go

without having done so would have been to leave northern England

without any safeguard against invasion and ravage during his absence.

He himself had neither time nor means to spare for an expedition

against Scotland. Had William chosen to delay indefinitely—as more

than one of his predecessors had done—his appearance at the English

court, he could easily, and probably with impunity, have put Richard

in a very awkward position. Most likely he would have done so but for

Richard’s tact in turning the difficulty. Overlord and vassal agreed

upon a bargain which was in all likelihood more profitable to both

parties than the one proposed a year before could ever have been to

either of them. William covenanted to give Richard a lump sum of ten

thousand marks;[433] Richard quit-claimed “all customs and agreements

which King Henry extorted from William by reason of his capture,

so that he shall fully and completely do to us what his brother

Malcolm King of Scots rightly did to our predecessors and what he

ought rightly to do”; he renounced the liege homage of William’s

men and restored all the charters given to Henry by William when he

was Henry’s prisoner; and he undertook to do to William “whatsoever

our predecessors rightly did and ought to have done to Malcolm

according to a recognition to be made by four English nobles chosen

by [Sidenote: _Dec. 5_] William and four Scottish nobles chosen by

ourself”; to make good any encroachments which had taken place on the

Scottish Marches since William’s capture; to confirm any grants made

to William by Henry; and finally, that William and his heirs for ever

should possess his English lands as fully and freely as Malcolm had

possessed or ought to have possessed them.[434]

Richard’s phrase about the conditions of release which Henry

had “extorted”[435] from the king of Scots seems to indicate a

consciousness that his father had, in forcing upon the caged Lion

of Scotland terms of such abject submission, taken a somewhat

dishonourable advantage of the lucky combination of accidents—for it

was really nothing more—which had placed William at his mercy.[436]

But policy, as well as chivalry, had a share in Richard’s agreement

with his royal vassal. Ten thousand marks, paid down in a lump and

almost immediately, was probably a much larger contribution than

could have been obtained from a country so poor as Scotland without

some very substantial concession in return. The retention of the

castles was quite unnecessary to the security of England; it must

inevitably be a source of constant irritation to the Scots, and

thus tend to endanger rather than to safeguard the tranquillity of

the border; and the restitution of them was the only real sacrifice

which the treaty involved. Richard’s charter is most cautiously

worded; he renounces nothing except the direct homage of the Scot

king’s subvassals and the explicit mention of “Scotland” by name

in William’s own act of homage on this occasion. The former would

have been extremely difficult to enforce at the moment, and of very

little practical value. As to the latter point, the form of words

chosen by Richard involved no recognition of the Scottish claim to a

partial independence, and no renunciation or abatement of the English

claim to the overlordship of all North Britain. It left Richard and

his successors quite free to re-assert that claim explicitly at any

future time, and to re-assert it as based not on a concession wrung

from a helpless prisoner in 1175, but on their acknowledged right to

“all” that William’s predecessors “had done and ought to have done”

to the predecessors of Richard in virtue of a series of agreements

going back from Henry II and Malcolm III to Eadward the Elder and

Donald IV; for the English theory on the subject was that those

ancient agreements included, or involved, the homage of the Scot

kings to the kings of England for the whole realm of Scotland. The

Scottish view was, of course, different; but these divergent views

were of little practical consequence so long as no necessity arose

for expressing them in words or carrying them out in action; no such

necessity had yet arisen, and none was destined to arise for another

hundred years. A formula capable of this double interpretation was

thus the only kind of formula on which the two parties could agree;

and the point of immediate importance was that they should agree so

that the Scot’s homage should be done and done quickly, not delayed

indefinitely or altogether refused at the eleventh hour. It was done

at Canterbury on December 5.[437]

[Sidenote: _Dec. 5_]

On the same day Richard proceeded to Dover;[438] about [Sidenote:

_Dec. 11, 14_] a week later he went to Normandy.[439] He kept

Christmas[440] [Sidenote: _Dec. 25_] in great state, “but,” adds a

poet-chronicler, “there was little singing of _gestes_”; Richard,

who usually revelled in that kind of entertainment, was now too

busy and in too grave a mood for minstrelsy.[441] On December 30

he and [Sidenote: _Dec. 30_] Philip, after holding a conference at

the Gué St. Rémi, issued a joint proclamation setting forth their

arrangements for going together on the Crusade and for the safety

and mutual protection of each other’s subjects and dominions during

their absence, and bidding all their Crusader subjects either to

precede them or be ready to set out with them from Vézelay within the

octave of Easter (March 25-April 1).[442] [Sidenote: 1190 _Jan._]

By the middle of January, however, both kings had discovered that

they could not be ready by April. The date of departure was again

postponed, to S. John the Baptist’s day; and at a third conference

held in the middle of March the delay was further prolonged to the

octave of that festival.[443] Richard meanwhile had made a visit

to Aquitaine; on February 2-4 he was at La Réole,[444] on February

12 at Londigny on the border of the Angoumois and Poitou,[445]

moving back towards Normandy to meet certain persons whom he had

summoned thither from England soon after Candlemas. One of the two

men whom he had appointed as joint chief justiciars, William de

Mandeville, had died on November 14.[446] For a time, it seems,

the king put no one formally into Mandeville’s place, and thus

left Hugh of Durham legally sole chief justiciar; but he gave the

custody of the Tower of London, which usually appertained to that

officer, to the chancellor, Bishop William of Ely, whom he also,

before leaving England, intrusted with one of the royal seals “to

carry out the king’s orders in the realm,” thus making him virtually

independent of Hugh.[447] In February, however, the king summoned

his mother, his betrothed, his brothers John and Geoffrey (the

archbishop-elect of York), Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, and

seven bishops, among whom were Hugh of Durham and William of Ely, to

join him in Normandy. “And when he had taken counsel with them, he

appointed his chancellor, Bishop William of Ely, chief justiciar of

[Sidenote: _Feb._] England, and granted to Bishop Hugh of Durham the

justiciarship from the river Humber to the Scot king’s border.”[448]

He also made both his brothers swear that they would not enter

England for three years “from that hour” except by leave from

him.[449] At the end of March or early in April[450] he sent the new

chief justiciar, William of Ely, back to England “to prepare things

necessary for him”—that is, for the king—“and for his journey.”[451]

The chief item in this commission was the requisitioning of a supply

of horses; William “took for the king’s use from every city in

England two palfreys and two additional sumpter horses, and from

every manor of the king’s own [Sidenote: _March to April_] one

palfrey and one sumpter horse.”[452] These horses were doubtless

shipped across to Normandy, being, it seems, for the use of the king

and his immediate companions, who, together with his continental

followers, were going overland with Philip to meet the English fleet

at Marseille. [Sidenote: 1189] Immediately on reaching England

Richard had set about collecting a transport fleet, by sending his

bailiffs to “all the sea-ports of England, Normandy, Poitou, and

his other lands” to choose for him the largest and best of all the

ships they found there and the fittest to carry heavy burdens. Some

of these he gave to certain of his familiar friends who were bound

on Crusade; some he retained for his own use, and had them loaded

with arms and victuals.[453] The terms on which these ships were

acquired seem to have varied considerably; in some cases the Crown

paid half their value, in others the whole; a few were gifts from

wealthy individuals.[454] In addition to all these the king already

had some “smacks” (_esneccae_) in ordinary use for the transport of

himself and his treasure between England and Normandy; these were now

put in repair to fit them for a longer and more dangerous voyage.

The crews and captains of the other ships were of course taken over

together with the vessels, and were paid by the king [Sidenote:

1190] from Michaelmas 1189.[455] Some time in March or early in

April (1190) Richard held a council at Chinon and thence issued an

ordinance for the maintenance of discipline in the fleet, in the form

of a charter which he delivered into the hands of the archbishop of

Auch, the bishop of Bayonne, Robert de Sabloil, Richard de Camville,

and William de Fors of Oléron, appointing them justiciars over “his

whole navy of England, Normandy, Poitou, and Britanny, about to sail

for Holy Land.” The regulations which they had to administer were

drastic. Any man who slew another on board ship was to be tied to the

corpse and cast with it into the sea; one who slew a man ashore to

be tied to the corpse and buried with it. A man convicted of drawing

knife on another or striking him so that blood flowed was to lose

his hand. If he only struck with his palm, so that no blood flowed,

he was to be ducked three times in the sea. Anyone who insulted or

cursed a comrade was to forfeit an ounce of silver for every such

offence. A convicted thief was to be “shorn like a professional

champion, then tarred and feathered so as to be known,” and cast

ashore on the first land at which the ship touched.[456] Another

writ from the king bade all those of his subjects who were going to

Jerusalem by sea, as they valued their lives “and their return home,”

swear to keep these “assizes” and obey the justiciars of the fleet,

who were further bidden to set out on the voyage as soon as possible;

which they did shortly after Easter.[457]

The next step in Richard’s preparations for departure was of a very

different kind. Of all the country seats belonging to the counts

of Poitou the one in which for many generations they seem to have

most delighted was Talmont. The lordship of which this castle was

the head included a territory known as “the Land of the Countess,”

because it had formed part of the dower of the successive countesses

of Poitou ever since the middle of the eleventh century. Here, “on

the sea-shore, in the wood of La Roche, and not far from the mouth of

the Jard”—a little stream which falls into the sea some few miles

south-east of the castle of Talmont—Richard now founded a house of

Augustinian canons. Its dedication was to “our Lord and the glorious

Virgin Mary His Mother”; its name was to be “God’s Place,” _Locus

Dei_, _Lieu-Dieu_; and its endowment consisted of the whole “Land of

the Countess” with all its appurtenances, “including everything that

his mother, as well as himself, had or might have in that place,”

with the addition of other gifts and privileges.[458] Eleanor had no

need of “the Countess’s Land,” for Richard before leaving England had

granted to her, in addition to the dowry given her by his father, the

whole of that which Henry I had given to his queen and that which

Stephen had given to Maud of Boulogne.[459] Evidently it was with

his mother’s sanction that the king now dedicated to higher uses

this large share of a cherished possession of her forefathers which

was also a favourite pleasure-resort of his own. In God’s Place at

Talmont we may surely see an offering made with special intention by

the offerer and his mother for his safety and welfare in his great

adventure and for the success of the enterprise on which his heart

was set.

On May 6 Richard issued, at Fontenay, a charter for the foundation of

another religious house, a small minster dedicated to S. Andrew, at

Gourfaille, in the same neighbourhood.[460] [Sidenote: _May 8_] Two

days later he was at Cognac;[461] a month [Sidenote: _June 6_] later,

at Bayonne,[462] and it seems to have been about this time that he

besieged and took the castle of Chis in the county of Bigorre and

hanged its lord for the crime of having robbed pilgrims to S. James

and other persons who passed through his lands.[463] By June 20

Richard was again at Chinon;[464] thence he went to Tours, where he

held a final conference with Philip,[465] and received his pilgrim’s

scrip and staff from the hands of Archbishop Bartholomew.[466] He

seems to have characteristically proved the staff by leaning on it

with all his gigantic strength, for a chronicler adds: “When the

king leaned on the staff, it broke.”[467] Never before, probably

never again, was there seen at Tours such a muster as that of the

Crusaders who followed the banner of Richard the Lion Heart. City and

suburbs were overcrowded; “there were many good knights and famous

crossbowmen; and dames and damsels were sorrowful and heavy-hearted

for their friends who were going away, and all the people were in

sadness because of their valiant lord’s departure” when he and his

host set out [Sidenote: _June 27_] “with a good courage”[468] on June

27 for Vézelay. Whether the two kings actually kept their tryst on

the appointed day, July 1, is doubtful. Richard was certainly at the

meeting-place on the 3rd, but according to one account Philip did not

arrive till the 4th.[469] When they did meet, they took a reciprocal

oath that they would loyally divide between them whatever conquests

they should make together, and that whichever of them reached Messina

first should wait there for the other.[470] They spent two days at

Vézelay together,[471] and then at last the united host began its

march towards the Holy Land, “the two kings riding in front and

discoursing of their great journey.”[472]