THE BEGINNINGS OF ANJOU.
843–987.
The cradle-land of our Angevin kings, the original county of Anjou,
was a small territory in central Gaul, lying about the lower course of
the river Loire and that of its affluent the Mayenne[233] or Maine.
Its chief portion consisted of a wedge-shaped tract hemmed in between
the right bank of the Loire, which bounded it on the south, and the
streams of Loir, Sarthe and Mayenne, which flowed round it on the north
and west; along its southern border stretched a belt of alluvial soil
which in winter and in rainy seasons became a vast flood-drowned fen,
swallowed up by the overflowing waters of the Loire; to the northward,
the country consisted chiefly of level uplands broken here and there by
patches of forest and tiny river-valleys, and rising in the west into
a range of low hills, which again died down into a fringe of swampy
meadow-land along the eastern bank of the Mayenne. A narrow strip of
ground on the southern bank of the Loire, with a somewhat wider strip
of hilly and wooded country beyond the Mayenne, completed the district
to which its earliest known inhabitants, a Gallic tribe called Andes
or Andegavi, have left their name. A few miles above the angle formed
by the confluence of the two rivers, a lofty mass of black slate rock
thrown out from the upland furnished a ready-made fortress important
alike by its natural strength and by its geographical position,
commanding the main lines of communication with central, northern and
southern Gaul through the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries.
Under the Roman conquerors of Gaul the place was called Juliomagus;
the hill was crowned by a lofty citadel, and strengthened by a circuit
of rampart walls; while from its crest a road struck eastward along
Loire-side into the heart of central Gaul, another followed the
westward course of the river to its junction with the sea, and others
struck southward and northward into Aquitania and across the upland
into the basin of the Seine. In the middle of the fourth century a
Christian bishop, probably one of a band of mission-preachers who
shared with the famous S. Martin of Tours the work of evangelizing
central Gaul, laid beside the citadel of Juliomagus the foundations of
a church, which in after-time grew into the cathedral of S. Maurice;
and it is from the extent of the diocese over which his successors
ruled that we learn the extent of the civil jurisdiction of Juliomagus.
A later bishop, Albinus, left his name to the great abbey of S. Aubin,
founded in Merovingian days on the slope of the hill just outside the
city wall; a monastery dedicated to S. Sergius grew up to the north,
in a low-lying marshy meadow by the river-side; while the place of
the Roman prefects was taken by a succession of Frankish counts, the
delegates first of the Merovingian kings of Neustria and then of the
Karolingian emperors; and the Roman name of Juliomagus itself gave way
to a native appellation cognate with that of the district of which it
was the head--“Andegavis,” Angers.[234]
[233] From the point where the Sarthe joins it, this river is
now called the Maine. In the middle ages it had but one name,
_Meduana_, from its source to its junction with the Loire. The
old nomenclature is far more convenient for historical purposes.
[234] The ecclesiastical history of Angers is in _Gallia
Christiana_, vol. xiv. col. 543 _et seq._
City and county acquired a new importance through the political
arrangements by which the Karolingian realms were divided between the
three sons of the Emperor Louis the Gentle. By a treaty made at Verdun
in 843, the original Frankish kingdom and its Saxon dependencies,
answering roughly to what we call Germany now-a-days, fell to the
second brother Louis; the Gallic conquests of the Franks, between the
Moselle, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and the ocean, were the share of the
youngest, Charles the Bald; while the necessity that the eldest brother
Lothar, as Emperor, should hold the two capitals, Rome and Aachen,
involved the creation in his favour of a middle kingdom consisting of
a long narrow string of countries reaching from the Frisian to the
Pontine marshes. Although the limits thus fixed were afterwards altered
more than once, the main lines of this treaty left indelible traces,
and from that day we may date the beginning of modern France and modern
Germany. The tripartite division, however, was soon overthrown by the
extinction of the elder or Lotharingian line; the incongruous middle
kingdom fell asunder and became a bone of furious contention between
its two neighbours, and the imperial crown itself was soon an object
of rivalry no less fierce. On the other hand, the extent of territory
actually subject to Charles the Bald fell far short of the limits
assigned to him by the treaty. Even Charles the Great had scarcely been
able to maintain more than a nominal sway over the vast region which
stretched from the southern shores of the Loire to the Pyrenees and the
Mediterranean Sea, and was known by the general name of Aquitania; its
princes and its people, wrapped in the traditions of Roman culture and
Roman greatness, held disdainfully aloof from the barbarian conquerors
of the north, and remained utterly indifferent to claims of supremacy
which each succeeding Karolingian found it more and more hopeless to
enforce. To the west, again, in the peninsula of Britanny or Armorica,
the ancient Celtic race preserved, as in the Welsh hills of our own
island, its native tongue, its primitive laws and customs, and its
separate political organization under a dynasty of native princes who
owed, indeed, a nominal allegiance to the West-Frankish overlord at
Laon, but whose subjection to him was scarcely more real than that of
the princes of Aquitania, while their disaffection was far more active
and far more threatening; for the pirate fleets of the northmen were
now hovering about the coast of Gaul as about that of Britain; and
the Celts of the Breton peninsula, like the West-Welsh of Cornwall,
were ever ready to make common cause with these marauders against the
Teutonic conquerors of the land.
The work of the northmen in West-Frankland was a work both of union and
disunion. There, as in England, the need for organization and defence
against their attacks produced a new upgrowth of national life; but
while in England this life was moulded by the consolidation of the
earlier Engle and Saxon realms into a single state under the leadership
of the West-Saxon kings, in Frankland it was created through the
forcible breaking-up of an outward unity already threatened with the
doom which never fails sooner or later to overtake a kingdom divided
against itself. The West-Frankish king was not, like the king of
Wessex, the leader, the natural exponent, the impersonation almost, of
the dawning national consciousness; it was not he who led and organized
the struggle for existence against the northern foe; the nation had
to fight for itself, with but little help from its sovereign. This
difference was caused partly by the political circumstances of the
Karolingian realms, partly by geographical conditions. The brunt of
the battle necessarily fell, not upon the royal domains lying far from
the sea around the inland fortress of Laon, but on the coast, and
especially on the districts around the great river-inlets by which the
pirates made their entrance into the country. Of these, the estuary of
the Seine lay nearest to them, and was their first point of attack.
Between it and the other great inlet, the mouth of the Loire, lay the
Breton peninsula; once round that, and the broad lands of Aquitania,
rich with the natural wealth of a southern soil and with the remains
of a luxury and splendour in which its cities had almost outdone Rome
herself, would tempt the northmen with a fairer harvest of spoil than
they could find on the shores of the Channel. The desolate rocky coast
and barren moorlands of the intervening peninsula offered little
chance of booty; but if the pirates could secure the alliance or even
the neutrality of the Bretons, they had but to force an entrance
into the Loire, and not only Aquitaine, but the inmost heart of the
West-Frankish realm would be laid open to their attacks. Two barriers,
however, would have to be overcome before such an entrance could be
gained. The first was the city of Nantes, which stood on the northern
bank of the Loire, some thirty miles above its mouth. Politically,
Nantes was the extreme western outpost of the Karolingian power, for
its count held his fief directly of the king at Laon, not of the nearer
Breton under-king at Rennes; but by its geographical position and the
character of its people it was far more Breton than Frankish. The true
corner-stone of the West-Frankish realm lay on the other side of the
Mayenne. The county of Anjou or “Angevin march,” the border-land of
Neustria and Aquitaine, was for all practical purposes the border-land
also of Neustria and of Britanny. Angers, with its Roman citadel and
its Roman walls, perched on the crest of its black slate-rock, at once
guarding and guarded by the two rivers which flowed round its foot, was
a far mightier fortress than Nantes; Angers, rather than Nantes, was
the true key of the Loire valley, and the stronghold of the Neustrian
border against all attacks from the west, whether by land or by sea.
In the first days of Charles the Bald, when the new king was struggling
with his brothers, and the pirate ships were beginning again to strike
terror into the coasts of Gaul, Lambert, a Breton-born count of the
Angevin march, sought from Charles the investiture of the neighbouring
and recently-vacated county of Nantes. On the refusal of his demand,
he threw off his allegiance, offered his services to the Breton king
Nomenoë, and on failing to obtain the coveted prize by his help,
called in that of a pirate fleet which was cruising about the shores
of Britanny. It was thus at the invitation and under the guidance
of a man who had been specially intrusted with its defence that the
northmen made their first entrance into the hitherto peaceful estuary
of the Loire. Nantes was stormed and sacked;[235] the desolate city
was left in the hands of Lambert and the Bretons, and the ravagers
sailed away, probably to swell the forces and share the spoil of a
fleet which in the following year made its way to the estuary of the
Garonne, and pushed inland as far as Toulouse. Nearly ten years passed
away before the northmen repeated their dash upon central Gaul. The
valley of the Seine and the city of Paris were the victims of their
next great expedition, in 845; and a series of plundering raids upon
the Aquitanian coast were crowned in 848 by the conquest of Bordeaux.
For a moment, in 851, the fury of the pirates’ attack seemed to be
turning away from Gaul to spend itself on Britain; but a great victory
of the West-Saxons under Æthelwulf at Aclea threw them back upon
their old field of operations across the Channel, and in the terror
of their threatened onset Charles sought to detach the Bretons from
their alliance by a formal cession of the counties of Rennes and Nantes
and the district west of the Mayenne, which had passed into Breton
hands by the treason of Count Lambert.[236] His precautions failed to
avert the blow which he dreaded. Next year the pirates made their way
back again round the Armorican coast, up the mouth of the Loire, past
Nantes, and through the Angevin march--now shrunk to a little corner of
territory wedged in between the Mayenne and the Loire--as far inland as
Tours, where they sacked and burned the abbey of S. Martin and drove
its canons into exile with the hardly-rescued body of their patron
saint.[237]
[235] Chron. Namnet. in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. pp.
217, 218; Chronn. Rainald. Andeg., S. Serg., Vindoc., a. 843
(Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, pp. 5, 129–132, 158).
[236] Ann. Bertin. a. 851 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p.
68) mention the cession of Nantes, etc. That the Mayenne was
made the boundary of the two kingdoms appears from a charter
of the Breton king Herispoë, dated August 23, 852; “Erispoë
princeps Britanniæ provinciæ et usque ad Medanum fluvium....
Dominante Erispoë ... in totam Britanniam et usque ad Medanum
fluvium.” Lobineau, _Hist. de Bretagne_, vol. ii. p. 55.
[237] Ann. Bertin. a. 853 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p.
70).
In a breathing-space which followed upon this last attack, Charles
received from Æthelwulf of Wessex a personal visit and an overture of
mutual alliance against the common foe. The scheme was shattered by
a political revolution in Wessex which followed Æthelwulf’s return;
and meanwhile a new danger to the Karolingian power arose in the
threatening attitude of Robert the Brave, a warrior of obscure birth
who was now count of the Angevin march. Under pretext, as it seems, of
securing their aid against the northmen, Robert leagued himself with
the foes of the monarchy beyond his two frontier rivers, and made a
triple alliance with the revolted Bretons and the king’s rebel nephew,
Pepin of Aquitaine.[238] Charles, more and more hard pressed every year
by domestic and political difficulties, and haunted by the perpetual
horror of the pirate ships always in the background, felt that this
second wavering lord of the marchland must be won back at any cost. Two
years later, therefore, the count of the Angevin march was invested
with a vast duchy comprising the whole territory between Seine and
Loire as far as the sea and the Breton border; and with this grant the
special work of keeping out both Bretons and northmen was distinctly
laid upon his shoulders.[239]
[238] Ann. Bertin. a. 859 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._ vol. vii. p.
75).
[239] Regino a. 861 (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. i. p.
571). Ann. Mettens. a. 861 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p.
190).
Robert fulfilled his trust gallantly and successfully till he fell
in a Scandinavian ambush at Brissarthe in 866.[240] His territories
were given to a cousin of the king, Hugh of Burgundy, who was either
so incapable or so careless of their defence that before six years
had passed he suffered the very corner-stone of his duchy, the most
important point in the whole scheme of operations against the northmen
in central Gaul, to fall into the enemies’ hands. A band of pirates,
sailing unopposed up the Loire and the Mayenne after Robert’s death,
found Angers deserted and defenceless, and settling there with their
families, used it as a centre from which they could securely harry
all the country round. The bulk of the pirate forces, however, was
now concentrated upon a great effort for the conquest of Britain, and
while the invaders of Angers lay thus isolated from their brethren
across the Channel, Charles the Bald seized his opportunity to attempt
the recovery of the city. In concert with the Breton king, Solomon, he
gathered his forces for a siege; the Franks encamped on the eastern
side of the Mayenne, the Bretons on the opposite shore. Their joint
blockade proved unavailing, till one of the Bretons conceived the bold
idea of turning the course of the Mayenne, so as to leave the pirate
ships stranded and useless. The whole Breton army at once set to work
and dug such an enormous trench that the northmen saw their retreat
would be hopelessly cut off. In dismay they offered to purchase, at
a heavy price, a free withdrawal from Angers and its district; their
offer was accepted, and Angers was evacuated accordingly.[241]
[240] Ann. Bertin. a. 866 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. p.
94).
[241] Regino, a. 873 (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. i. pp.
585, 586). Ann. Bertin. and Mettens. and Chron. Namnet. a. 873
(_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. vii. pp. 117, 200, 220, 221).
Chron. Sigebert. a. 875 (_ib._ p. 252). Chron. S. Serg., a.
873. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 132, 133).
But the long keels sailed away only to return again. Amid the gathering
troubles of the Karolingian house, as years passed on, the cry rose up
ever louder and louder from the desolated banks of Seine, and at last
even from the inland cities of Reims and Soissons, perilously near the
royal abode at Laon itself: “From the fury of the northmen, good Lord,
deliver us!” It was not from Laon that deliverance was to come. The
success of Charles the Bald at Angers, the more brilliant victory of
his grandson Louis III. over Guthrum at Saucourt, were but isolated
triumphs which produced no lasting results. At the very moment when the
Karolingian empire was reunited under the sceptre of Charles the Fat
came the crisis of the struggle with the northmen in West-Frankland;
and the true national leader shewed himself not in the heir of Charles
the Great, but in Count Odo of Paris, the son of Robert the Brave. It
was Odo who saved Paris from the northmen when they besieged it with
all their forces throughout the winter of 885; and by saving Paris he
saved the kingdom. Before the siege was raised the possessions which
his father had held as duke of the French were restored to him by the
death of Hugh of Burgundy. A few months later the common consent of
all the Karolingian realms deposed their unworthy Emperor, and the
acclamations of a grateful people raised their deliverer Odo to the
West-Frankish throne.
The times, however, were not yet ripe for a change of dynasty, and the
revolution was followed by a reaction which on Odo’s death in 898 again
set a Karolingian, Charles the Simple, upon the throne; but though
the monarchy of Laon lingered on till the race of Charles the Great
became extinct, it was being gradually undermined and supplanted by the
dukes of the French, the rulers of the great duchy between Seine and
Loire. Paris was now, since the siege of 885, the chief seat of the
ducal power; and in the new feudal organization which grew up around
this centre, the cradle of the ducal house, the border-stronghold
of Angers, sank to a secondary position. The fiefs which the dukes
parcelled out among their followers fell to the share of men of the
most diverse origin and condition. In some cases, as at Chartres and
Tours, the Scandinavian settler was turned into a peaceful lieutenant
of the Frankish chief against whom he had fought. In others the reward
of valour was justly bestowed on men who had earned it by their prowess
against the invaders. It may be that the old alliance of Count Robert
the Brave with the Bretons had sowed the seeds of a mighty tree. In the
depths of a gloomy forest-belt which ran along the Breton border at the
foot of a range of hills that shelter the western side of the valley
of the Mayenne, there dwelt in Robert’s day--so the story went--a
valiant forester, Tortulf. He quitted the hardy, hazardous borderer’s
life--half hunter, half bandit--to throw himself into the struggle of
Charles the Bald and Robert the Brave against the northmen: Charles
set him to keep the pirates out of Touraine, and gave him a congenial
post as forester of a wooded district known as the “Nid-de-Merle”--the
Blackbird’s Nest. In its wild fastnesses Tortulf lay in wait for the
approach of the marauders, and sprang forth to meet them with a daring
and a success which earned him his sovereign’s favour and the alliance
of the duke of the French. His son, Ingelger, followed in his steps;
marriage came to the help of arms, and with the hand of Ælendis, niece
of the archbishop of Tours, Ingelger acquired her lands at Amboise.
The dowry was a valuable one; Amboise stood in the midst of one of the
most rich and fertile districts of central France, half way between
Tours and Blois, on the south bank of the Loire, which was spanned at
this point by a bridge said to have been built by Julius Cæsar; two
centuries later tradition still pointed out the site of Cæsar’s palace
on the banks of the little river Amasse, at the western end of the
town; while opposite the bridge a rocky brow, crowned to-day by the
shell of a magnificent castle of the Renascence, probably still kept
in Ingelger’s days some traces of a fortress built there by a Roman
governor in the reign of the Emperor Valens. A mightier stronghold
than Amboise, however, was to be the home of Ingelger’s race. His son,
a ruddy youth named Fulk, early entered the service of Count Odo of
Paris and remained firmly attached to him and his house; and one of
the earliest acts of Odo’s brother Robert, who succeeded him as duke
of the French--if indeed it was not rather one of the last acts of
King Odo himself--was to intrust the city of Angers to Fulk the Red
as viscount.[242] The choice was a wise one; for Fulk was gifted with
a sound political instinct which found and kept the clue to guide him
through all the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the next forty
years. He never swerved from his adherence to the dukes of the French;
and by his quiet tenacity he, like them, laid the foundation of his
house’s greatness. Preferments civil and ecclesiastical--the abbacies
of S. Aubin and S. Licinius at Angers, the viscounty of Tours, though
this was but a momentary honour--were all so many stepping-stones to
his final investiture, shortly before the death of Charles the Simple,
as count of the Angevin March.
[242] On the whole story of Tortulf, Ingelger and Fulk, see
note A at end of chapter.
[Illustration: Map I.
GAUL c. 909–941.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]
This little county of Anjou, of which Fulk thus became the first
hereditary count, ended by overshadowing in political importance
all the other divisions which made up the duchy of France. In point
of territorial extent Anjou, at its present stage, was one of the
smallest of the under-fiefs of the duchy. The dominions of Theobald
the Trickster, the first count of Blois and Chartres, were far larger
than those of Fulk; and so was the county of Maine or Cenomannia,
which lay to the north of Anjou on the right bank of the Loire. Yet in
a few generations Blois and Maine were both alike outstripped by the
little Angevin march. The proud independence of Maine proved her ruin
as well as her glory. She too was a border-land; her western frontier
marched with that of Britanny, her northern with that of a great
Scandinavian settlement which was growing into the duchy of Normandy.
But her political status was altogether undefined and insecure. France
and Normandy alike claimed the overlordship of Maine; Maine herself
acknowledged the claims of neither; and this uncertain condition placed
her at the mercy of her neighbours to north and south, and made her a
bone of contention between them and a battle-ground for their quarrels
till the day when all three were united. Blois and Chartres, on the
other hand, with their dependency Touraine, stood like Anjou on a
perfectly definite footing as recognised under-fiefs of the duchy of
France. In the extent of their territory, and in the natural resources
derived from the fertility of its soil and the number and wealth of
its towns, the counts of Blois had at starting a very considerable
advantage over the Angevins. But this seeming advantage proved in a
few years to be a disadvantage. The house of Blois grew too fast, and
soon outgrew its strength; its dominions became straggling; and when
they straggled out eastward into Champagne, what was gained at one end
was lost at the other, and Touraine, the most precious possession of
the counts of Blois, was absorbed in the gradual steady advance of the
Angevins.
Anjou’s position as a marchland marked her out for a special career.
Forming the extreme south-western corner of France properly so called,
divided from Aquitania by the Loire, from Britanny by the Mayenne,
she had the advantage of a strong and compact geographical situation
to start with. Her political position was equally favourable; she was
neither hindered and isolated like Maine by a desperate endeavour
to reclaim a lost independence, nor led astray by a multiplicity of
scattered interests like Blois. She had simply to take her choice
between the two alternatives which lie before every marchland. Such a
land must either submit to be swallowed up piecemeal by its neighbours,
or it must in sheer self-defence swallow up some of them; to keep
what it has got, it must get more. Anjou, as represented by Fulk the
Red and his successors, strongly embraced this latter alternative.
The growth of the Angevin power during the next two centuries was due
chiefly to the character of its rulers, working in a sphere which gave
exceptional scope for the exercise of their peculiar gifts. Whoever
Fulk’s real ancestors may have been, there can be no question that his
descendants were a very remarkable race. From first to last there is
a strong family likeness among them all. The first thing that strikes
one about them is their thoroughness; whatsoever their hands found to
do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might.
Nearly all of them were men of great and varied natural powers, gifted
with a lofty military capacity and a deep political insight, and with
a taste and a talent for all kinds of pursuits, into which they threw
themselves with the full ardour of their stirring, restless temper.
Daring, but not rash; persevering, watchful, tenacious; sometimes
seeming utterly unscrupulous, yet with an odd vein of irregular
piety running through the characters of many of them, and coming to
light in the strangest shapes and at the most unexpected moments;
passionate almost as madmen, but with a method in their madness--the
Angevin counts were patriots in their way; for their chief aim was
aggrandizement, but it was the aggrandizement of Anjou as well as of
themselves. They were not to be led away, like their rivals of Blois,
by visionary schemes of merely personal promotion involving neglect of
their own little home-county; they were proud and fond of their “black
Angers” on its steep above the Mayenne, and never forgot that there was
the centre whence their power was to spread to the ends of the earth.
It is easy to see how exactly such a race as this was fitted for its
post in Anjou. Given such men in such a place, we can scarcely wonder
at what they made of it.
The Angers in which Fulk came to rule as count, about the time when
Æthelstan succeeded Eadward the Elder as king of Wessex, was a town
not of dark slate walls as it is chiefly now, but of red flintstone
and redder brick, such as the medieval builders long copied from the
works of their Roman masters, and such as may still be found embedded
in the outer walls of the bishop’s palace and half hidden behind the
mighty black bastions of the later castle. That castle covers, or
rather encloses, the site of a hall which Count Odo, the successor of
the traitor Lambert, had built about the year 851 on ground acquired
by exchange with Bishop Dodo. For some time after Frankish counts
had been substituted for Roman prefects, the spiritual and temporal
rulers of Angers had continued to dwell side by side on the hill-top;
Odo, however, instead of again occupying the palace which Lambert had
deserted, made it over to the bishop in return for a plot of ground
lying just outside the south-west corner of the city wall. There he
built himself a house, with the river at its feet and a vine-clad hill
at its back; and there from that time forth was the dwelling-place of
the Angevin counts.[243] Fulk the Red took up his abode there in the
early days of a great political transition which was to change the
kingdom of the West-Franks into a kingdom of Parisian France. Half
a century had yet to elapse before the transition was accomplished;
at its present stage indeed few could foresee its ultimate issue. If
the ducal house of Paris had many friends, it had also many foes. The
old Karolingian nobility was slowly dying out or sinking into the
background before the new nobility of the sword; the great house of
Vermandois had thrown its weight into the scale with the advancing
power; but there were still many who looked with contempt and disgust
on the new order of things, on the house of Paris and all its
connexions. The count of Anjou was wedged in between powers anything
but favourably disposed towards him and his patrons. The princes of
Aquitania looked scornfully across the Loire at the upstarts on its
northern bank; little as they recked of any authority beyond their
river-barrier, the only one which they acknowledged at all was that
of the Karolingian king at Laon. The Bretons beyond the Mayenne were
as far from being subdued as ever. Within the duchy of France itself,
one little corner was equally scornful of the dukes and of their
partisans; Maine, although from its geographical position necessarily
reckoned part of the duchy “between Seine and Loire,” still refused to
acknowledge any such reckoning; its ruling house, as well as the great
nobles of the South, claimed to have inherited the traditions of the
Roman Empire and the blood of its Frankish conquerors. In the eyes of
the Cenomannian counts, who traced their pedigree from a nephew of
Charles the Great, the heirs of Tortulf the Forester were nothing but
upstart barbarians.
[243] See note B at end of chapter.
Their disdain, however, mattered little to Fulk. In those critical
times, he who had the keenest sword, the strongest arm, the clearest
head and the boldest heart, had the best title to nobility--a title
whose validity all were sooner or later compelled to acknowledge. Fulk
held Anjou by the grace of God, the favour of his lord the duke, and
the might of his own good sword. He was, however, no mere man of war;
he was quite willing to strengthen his position by peaceful means. One
method of so doing was suggested by his father’s example; it was one
which in all ages finds favour with ambitious men of obscure origin,
and which was to be specially characteristic of the Angevin house. As
Ingelger had married Ælendis of Amboise, so Fulk sought and won the
hand of another maiden of Touraine, Roscilla, the daughter of Warner,
lord of Loches, Villentras and Haye. It can only have been as the dowry
of his wife that Fulk came into possession of the most valuable portion
of her father’s lands, the township of Loches.[244] It lay some twenty
miles south of Amboise, on the left bank of the Indre, a little river
which takes its rise in the plains of Berry and winds along a wooded
valley, through some of the most romantic scenery of southern Touraine,
to fall into the Loire about half way between Amboise and Angers. In
a loop of the river, sheltered on the south and west by a belt of
woodland which for centuries to come was a favourite hunting-ground of
Roscilla’s descendants, rose a pyramidal height of rock on whose steep
sides the houses of the little township clustered round a church said
to have been built in the sixth century by a holy man from southern
Gaul, named Ursus, the “S. Ours” whom Loches still venerates as its
patron saint.[245] By the acquisition of Loches Fulk had gained in the
heart of southern Touraine a foot-hold which, coupled with that which
he already possessed at Amboise, might one day serve as a basis for the
conquest of the whole district.
[244] _Gesta Cons. Andeg._ (Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_), pp.
65, 66. The pedigree there given to Roscilla is impossible.
[245] The life of S. Ours is in Gregory of Tours, _Vitæ
Patrum_, c. xviii.
A few years before Fulk’s investiture as count of Anjou, the relations
between the West-Frankish kingdom and its northern foes had entered
upon a new phase. In 912 King Charles the Simple and Duke Hugh of
Paris, finding themselves unable to wrest back from a pirate leader
called Hrolf the Ganger the lands which he had won around the mouth
of the Seine, made a virtue of necessity, and by a treaty concluded
at St.-Clair-sur-Epte granted to Hrolf a formal investiture of his
conquest, on condition of homage to the king and conversion to the
Christian faith. Tradition told how a rough Danish soldier, bidden to
perform the homage in Hrolf’s stead, kissed indeed the foot of Charles
the Simple, but upset him and his throne in doing so; and although to
the declining Karolingian monarchy the new power thus established at
the mouth of the Seine was useful as a counterpoise to that of the
Parisian dukes, yet the story is not altogether an inapt parable of
the relations between the duchy of Normandy and its royal overlord
during several generations. The homage and the conversion of Hrolf and
his comrades were alike little more than nominal. His son, William
Longsword, strove hard to force upon his people the manners, the
tongue, the outward civilization of their French neighbours; but to
those neighbours even he was still only a “leader of the pirates.” The
plundering, burning, slaughtering raids did indeed become less frequent
and less horrible under him than they had been in his father’s heathen
days; but they were far from having ceased. Politically indeed it was
William’s support alone that enabled Charles the Simple to carry on
to his life’s end a fairly successful struggle with a rival claimant
of his crown, Rudolf of Burgundy, a brother-in-law of Hugh, duke of
the French. No sooner was Charles dead and Rudolf seated on his throne
than the hostility of the northmen to the new king broke out afresh
in a pirate-raid which swept across the Norman border, past Orléans
and through the Gâtinais, into the very heart of the kingdom, to the
abbey of S. Benedict at Fleury on the Loire. It was not the first time
the monastery had been ravaged by pirates; the abbot was now evidently
expecting their attack, for he had called to his aid Count Gilbald of
Auxerre and Ingelger of Anjou, Fulk’s eldest son, who, young as he was,
had already made himself a name in battle with the northmen. The fight
was a stubborn one; the defenders of Fleury had resolved to maintain
it to their last gasp, and when at length all was over there was
scarcely a man of them left to tell the tale. The young heir of Anjou,
taken prisoner by the pirates, was slaughtered beneath the shadow of
S. Benet’s abbey as Count Robert the Brave had been slaughtered long
ago at the bridge of Sarthe.[246] Fortunately, however, the future
of the Angevin house did not depend solely on the life thus cut off
in its promise. Two sons yet remained to Fulk. The duty of stepping
into Ingelger’s place fell upon the youngest, for the second, Guy, was
already in holy orders. Eight years later, in 937, Duke Hugh of Paris,
the great maker of kings and bishops, who had just restored Louis
From-over-sea to the throne of his father Charles the Simple, procured
Guy’s elevation to the see of Soissons.[247] The son’s promotion was
doubtless owed to the long and steady service of the father; but the
young bishop soon shewed himself worthy of consideration on his own
account. He played a conspicuous part in the politics of his time, both
ecclesiastical and secular; he adhered firmly to the party of Duke Hugh
and his brother-in-law Herbert of Vermandois, and even carried his
devotion to them so far as to consecrate Herbert’s little son Hugh, a
child six years old, to the archbishopric of Reims in 940;[248] and
through all the scandals and censures which naturally resulted from
this glaringly uncanonical appointment Guy stuck to his boy-archbishop
with a courage worthy of a better cause. He could, however, shew
zeal for the Karolingian king as well as for the Parisian duke. When
in 945 Louis From-beyond-sea fell a prisoner into the hands of the
Normans, they demanded as the condition of his release that his two
sons should be given them as hostages. On Queen Gerberga’s refusal to
trust them with her eldest boy, the bishop of Soissons offered himself
in the child’s stead, and the Normans, well knowing his importance in
the realm, willingly accepted the substitution.[249] The dauntless
Angevin was possibly more at home in the custody of valiant enemies
than amid the ecclesiastical censures which fell thick upon him for
his proceedings in connexion with Hugh of Reims, and from which he was
only absolved in 948 by the synod of Trier.[250] His father was then no
longer count of Anjou. A year after Hugh’s consecration, in the winter
of 941 or the early spring of 942, Fulk the Red died “in a good old
age,” leaving the marchland which his sword had won and guarded so well
to his youngest son, Fulk the Good.[251]
[246] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 239.
The true date is shewn by a charter of Fulk, in Mabille’s
Introd. to _Comtes d’Anjou, pièces justif._ no. vi., p. ci.
[247] Chron. Frodoard, a. 937 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol.
viii. p. 192).
[248] Richer, l. ii. c. 82.
[249] Richer, l. ii. c. 48; _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay,
_Comtes_), p. 66, where the king is miscalled Charles the
Simple.
[250] Chron. Frodoard, a. 948 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol.
viii. p. 204). Richer, l. ii. c. 82.
[251] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 67. The date is
proved by two charters, one dated August 941, signed by “Fulco
comes” and “Fulco filius ejus” (Mabille, _ibid._, introd.,
_pièces justif._, no. viii. p. cv); the other, dated May 942,
and signed by one Fulk only (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. ix. p.
723).
The reign of the second Count Fulk is the traditional golden age of
Anjou. Under him, she is the proverbially happy land which has no
history. While the name of the bishop of Soissons is conspicuous in
court and camp, that of his brother the count is never once heard; he
waged no wars,[252] he took no share in politics; the annalists of the
time find nothing to record of him. But if there is no history, there
is plenty of tradition and legend to set before us a charming picture
of the Good Count’s manner of life. The arts he cultivated were those
of peace; his gentle disposition and refined taste led him to pursuits
and habits which in those rough days were almost wholly associated
with the clerical profession. His favourite place of retirement,
the special object of his reverence and care, was the church of S.
Martin at Châteauneuf by Tours. There were enshrined the relics of the
“Apostle of the Gauls”; after many a journey to and fro, many a narrow
escape from the sacrilegious hands of the northmen, they had been
finally brought back to their home, so local tradition said, under the
care of Fulk’s grandfather Ingelger. The church was now a collegiate
foundation, served by a body of secular canons under the joint control
of a dean and--according to an evil usage of the period--a lay-abbot
who had only to enjoy his revenues on pretence of watching over the
temporal interests of the church. Since the time of Hugh of Burgundy
the abbacy of S. Martin’s had always been held by the head of the ducal
house of France; and it was doubtless their influence which procured
a canonry in their church for Fulk of Anjou. His greatest delight was
to escape from the cares of government and go to keep the festival
of S. Martin with the chapter of Châteauneuf; there he would lodge
in the house of one or other of the clergy, living in every respect
just as they did, and refusing to be called by his worldly title; not
till after he was gone did the count take care to make up for whatever
little expense his host might have incurred in receiving the honorary
canon.[253] While there he diligently fulfilled the duties of his
office, never failing to take his part in the sacred services. He was
not only a scholar, he was a poet, and had himself composed anthems in
honour of S. Martin.[254] One Martinmas eve King Louis From-beyond-sea
came to pay his devotions at the shrine of the patron saint of Tours.
As he and his suite entered the church at evensong, there they saw
Fulk, in his canon’s robe, sitting in his usual place next the dean,
and chanting the Psalms, book in hand. The courtiers pointed at him
mockingly--“See, the count of Anjou has turned clerk!” and the king
joined in their mockery. The letter which the “clerk” wrote to Louis,
when their jesting came round to his ears, has passed into a proverb:
“Know, my lord, that an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[255]
Fulk was indeed a living proof that it is possible to make the
contemplative life of the scholar a help and not a hindrance to the
active life of the statesman. The poet-canon was no mere dreamer; he
was a practical, energetic ruler, who worked hard at the improvement
and cultivation, material as well as intellectual, of his little
marchland, rebuilding the churches and the towns that had been laid
waste by the northmen, and striving to make up for the losses sustained
during the long years of war. The struggle was completely over now; a
great victory of King Rudolf, in the year after Ingelger’s death,[256]
had finally driven the pirates from the Loire; and there was nothing
to hinder Fulk’s work of peace. The soil had grown rich during the
years it had lain fallow, and now repaid with an abundant harvest the
labours of the husbandman; the report of its fertility and the fame of
Fulk’s wise government soon spread into the neighbouring districts; and
settlers from all the country round came to help in re-peopling and
cultivating the marchland.[257] This idyl of peace lasted for twenty
years, and ended only with the life of Fulk. In his last years he
became involved in the intricacies of Breton politics, and storm-clouds
began to gather on his western border; but they never broke over Anjou
itself till the Good Count was gone.
[252] “Iste Fulco nulla bella gessit.” _Gesta Cons._
(Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 69.
[253] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 70.
[254] _Ib._ pp. 71, 72.
[255] “Scitote, domine, quod rex illitteratus est asinus
coronatus.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 71. It
is curious that John of Salisbury, writing at the court of
Henry of Anjou some years before the compilation of the _Gesta
Consulum_, quotes the saying as coming from “literis quas
_Regem Romanorum_ ad Francorum regem transmisisse recolo”
(_Polycraticus_, l. iv. c. 6; Giles, vol. iii. p. 237). The
proverb was well known in the time of Henry I.; see Will. Malm.
_Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 390 (Hardy, p. 616).
[256] _Fragm. Hist. Franc._ in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol.
viii. p. 298.
[257] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 74, 75.
The old Breton kingdom had now sunk into a duchy which was constantly
a prey to civil war. The ruling house of the counts of Nantes were at
perpetual strife with their rivals of Rennes. Alan Barbetorte, count
of Nantes, had been compelled to flee the country and take shelter in
England, at the general refuge of all exiles, the court of Æthelstan,
till a treaty between Æthelstan’s successor Eadmund and Louis
From-over-sea restored him to the dukedom of Britanny for the rest of
his life. He died in 952, leaving his duchy and his infant son Drogo to
the care of his wife’s brother, Theobald, count of Blois and Chartres,
a wily, unscrupulous politician known by the well-deserved epithet
of “the Trickster,” who at once resolved to turn his brother-in-law’s
dying charge to account for purposes of his own. But between his own
territories and the Breton duchy lay the Angevin march; his first step
therefore must be to make a friend of its ruler. For this end a very
simple means presented itself. Fulk’s wife had left him a widower with
one son;[258] Theobald offered him the hand of his sister, the widow
of Alan, and with it half the city and county of Nantes, to have and
to hold during Drogo’s minority; while he gave the other half to the
rival claimant of the duchy, Juhel Berenger of Rennes, under promise of
obedience to himself as overlord.[259] Unhappily, the re-marriage of
Alan’s widow was soon followed by the death of her child. In later days
Breton suspicion laid the blame upon his step-father; but the story has
come down to us in a shape so extremely improbable that it can leave no
stain on the memory of the Good Count.[260] Two sons of Alan, both much
older than Drogo, still remained. But they were not sons of Drogo’s
mother; Fulk therefore might justly think himself entitled to dispute
their claims to the succession, and hold that, in default of lawful
heirs, the heritage of Duke Alan should pass, as the dowry of the
widow, to her second husband--a practice very common in that age. And
Fulk would naturally feel his case strengthened by the fact that part
at least of the debateable land--that is, nearly half the territory
between the Mayenne and Nantes itself--had once been Angevin ground.
[258] Her name was Gerberga, as appears by a charter of her
son, Geoffrey Greygown, quoted in _Art de vérifier les Dates_,
vol. xiii. p. 47.
[259] Chron. Brioc. in Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i.
cols. 29, 30. Chron. Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii.
p. 277.
[260] The Chron. Brioc. (Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol.
i. col. 30) tells how “ille comes Fulco Andegavensis, vir
diabolicus et maledictus,” bribed the child’s nurse to kill him
by pouring boiling water on his head when she was giving him
a bath. The fact that the Angevin count is further described
as “Fulco Rufus” (_ib._ col. 29), would alone throw some doubt
on the accuracy of the writer. Moreover, this Chronicle of S.
Brieuc is a late compilation, and such a circumstantial account
of a matter which, if it really happened, must have been
carefully hushed up at the time, is open to grave suspicion
when unconfirmed by any other testimony. The Angevin accounts
of Fulk’s character may fairly be set against it: they rest on
quite as good authority. But the sequel of the story furnishes
a yet stronger argument, for it shows that the murder would
have been what most of the Angevin counts looked upon as much
worse than a crime--a great blunder for Fulk’s own interest.
Just at this crisis the Normans made a raid upon Britanny, of which
their dukes claimed the overlordship. They captured the bishop of
Nantes, and the citizens, thus left without a leader of any kind, and
in hourly fear of being attacked by the “pirates,” sent an urgent
appeal to Fulk for help. Fulk promised to send them succour, but some
delay occurred; at the end of a week’s waiting the people of Nantes
acted for themselves, and succeeded in putting the invaders to flight.
Indignant at the Angevin count’s failure to help, they threw off all
allegiance to him and chose for their ruler Hoel, one of the sons of
Alan Barbetorte.[261]
[261] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i.
cols. 30, 31. Chron. Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii.
p. 277.
These clouds on the western horizon did not trouble the peace of Fulk’s
last hour. As he knelt to receive the holy communion in S. Martin’s
church on one of the feasts of the patron saint, a slight feeling of
illness came over him; he returned to his place in the choir, and
there, in the arms of his brother-canons, passed quietly away.[262]
We cannot doubt that they laid him to rest in the church he had loved
so well.[263] With him was buried the peace of the Marchland. Never
again was it to have a ruler who “waged no wars”; never again, till
the title of count of Anjou was on the eve of being merged in loftier
appellations, was that title to be borne by one whose character might
give him some claim to share the epithet of “the Good,” although
circumstances caused him to lead a very different life. Fulk the
Second stands all alone as the ideal Angevin count, and it is in this
point of view that the legends of his life--for we cannot call them
history--have a value of their own. The most famous of them all
is, in its original shape, a charming bit of pure Christian poetry.
One day--so the tradition ran--the count, on his way to Tours, was
accosted by a leper desiring to be carried to S. Martin’s. All shrank
in horror from the wretched being except Fulk, who at once took him on
his shoulders and carried him to the church-door. There his burthen
suddenly vanished; and at the midnight service, as the count-canon sat
in his stall, he beheld in a trance S. Martin, who told him that in
his charity he had, like another S. Christopher, unwittingly carried
the Lord Himself.[264] Later generations added a sequel to the story.
Fulk, they said, after his return to Angers, was further rewarded by a
second vision; an angel came to him and foretold that his successors to
the ninth generation should extend their power even to the ends of the
earth.[265] At the time when this prophecy appears in history, it had
already reached its fulfilment. In all likelihood it was then a recent
invention; in the legend to which it was attached it has obviously no
natural place. But its introduction into the story of Fulk the Good
was prompted by a significant instinct. At the height of their power
and their glory, the reckless, ruthless house of Anjou still did not
scorn to believe that their greatness had been foretold not to the
warrior-founder, not to the bravest of his descendants, but to the good
count who sought after righteousness and peace. Even they were willing,
in theory at least, to accept the dominion of the earth as the promised
reward not of valour but of charity.
[262] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 75. According to
_Gallia Christiana_ (vol. xiv. col. 808) the Norman attack on
Nantes took place about 960. It is probable that Fulk died soon
after; but no charters of his successor are forthcoming until
966.
[263] The _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 67, 75) say
that Ingelger, Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good were all buried
in S. Martin’s. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376) says
the place of their burial is unknown to him. The statement of
the later writers therefore is mere guess-work or invention;
but in the case of Fulk the Good it is probably right.
[264] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 73, 74.
[265] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 149.
Whatever may be the origin of the prophecy, however, it was in the
reign of Fulk’s son and successor Geoffrey Greygown that the first
steps were taken towards its realization. Legend has been as busy with
the first Geoffrey of Anjou as with his father; but it is legend of
a very different kind. The epic bards of the marchland singled out
Geoffrey for their special favourite; in their hands he became the hero
of marvellous combats, of impossible deeds of knightly prowess and
strategical skill, of marvellous stories utterly unhistoric in form,
but significant as indications of the character popularly attributed
to him--a character quite borne out by those parts of his career which
are attested by authentic history. Whatever share of Fulk’s more
refined tastes may have been inherited by either of his sons seems to
have fallen to the second, Guy, who early passed into the quiet life of
the monk in the abbey of S. Paul at Corméri in Touraine.[266] The elder
was little more than a rough, dashing soldier, whose careless temper
shewed itself in his very dress. Clad in the coarse grey woollen tunic
of the Angevin peasantry,[267] Geoffrey Greygown made himself alike by
his simple attire and by his daring valour a conspicuous figure in the
courts and camps of King Lothar and Duke Hugh.
[266] _Gall. Christ._, vol. xiv. col. 258.
[267] “Indutus tunicâ illius panni quem Franci Grisetum vocant,
nos Andegavi Buretum.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p.
81.
The receiver of Fulk’s famous letter had gone before him to the grave;
Louis From-over-sea, the grandson of Eadward the Elder, the last
Karolingian worthy of his race, had died in 954. His death brought the
house of France a step nearer to the throne; but it was still only one
step. Lothar, the son of Louis, was crowned in his father’s stead; two
years later the king-maker followed the king; and thenceforth his son,
the new duke of the French, Hugh Capet, steadily prepared to exchange
his ducal cap for a crown which nevertheless he was too prudent to
seize before the time. In the face of countless difficulties, Louis in
his eighteen years’ reign had contrived to restore the monarchy of Laon
to a very real kingship. His greatest support in this task had been his
wife’s brother, the Emperor Otto the Great. The two brothers-in-law,
who had come to their thrones in the same year, were fast friends
in life and death; and Otto remained the faithful guardian of his
widowed sister and her son. So long as he lived, Hugh’s best policy
was peace; and while Hugh remained quiet, there was little scope for
military or political action on the part of his adherent Geoffrey of
Anjou. In 973, however, the great Emperor died; and soon after he was
gone the alliance between the Eastern and Western Franks began to shew
signs of breaking. Lothar and Otto II. were brothers-in-law as well
as cousins, but they were not friends as their fathers had been. In
an evil hour Lothar was seized with a wild longing to regain the land
which bore his name,--that fragment of the old “Middle Kingdom,” known
as the duchy of Lotharingia or Lorraine, which after long fluctuating
between its attachment to the imperial crown and its loyalty to the
Karolingian house had finally cast in its lot with the Empire, with the
full assent of Louis From-over-sea. Lothar brooded over its loss till
in 978, when Otto and his queen were holding their court at Aachen,
his jealousy could no longer endure the sight of his rival so near
the border, and he summoned the nobles of his realm to an expedition
into Lorraine.[268] Nothing could better fall in with the plans of
Hugh Capet than a breach between Lothar and Otto; the call to arms was
readily answered by the duke and his followers, and the grey tunic of
the Angevin count was conspicuous at the muster.[269] The suddenness
of Lothar’s march compelled Otto to make a hasty retreat from Aachen;
but all that the West-Franks gained was a mass of plunder, and the
vain glory of turning the great bronze eagle on the palace of Charles
the Great towards the east instead of the west.[270] While they were
plundering Aachen Otto was preparing a counter-invasion.[271] Bursting
upon the western realm, he drove the king to cross the Seine and seek
help of the duke, and before Hugh could gather troops enough to stop
him he had made his way to the gates of Paris. For a while the French
and the Germans lay encamped on opposite banks of the river, the duke
waiting till his troops came up, and beguiling the time with skirmishes
and trials of individual valour.[272] But as soon as Otto perceived
that his adversaries were becoming dangerous he struck his tents and
marched rapidly homewards, satisfied with having inflicted on his rash
cousin a far greater alarm and more serious damage than he had himself
suffered from Lothar’s wild raid.[273]
[268] Richer, l. iii. c. 68.
[269] Chron. Vindoc. a. 954 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 163).
[270] Richer, l. iii. c. 71.
[271] The exact date of Lothar’s attack on Lotharingia seems to
be nowhere stated. That of Otto’s invasion of Gaul, however,
which clearly followed it immediately, is variously given as
977 (Chronn. S. Albin. and Vindoc., Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp.
21, 163) and 978 (Chronn. S. Flor. Salm. and S. Maxent., _ib._
pp. 186, 381). The later date is adopted by Mr. Freeman, _Norm.
Conq._, vol. i. p. 264.
[272] Among these the Angevin writers (_Gesta Cons._,
Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 79, 80) introduce Geoffrey Greygown’s
fight with a gigantic Dane, Æthelwulf. It seems to be only
another version, adorned with reminiscences of David and
Goliath, of Richer’s account (l. iii. c. 76) of a fight between
a German champion and a man named Ivo; and the whole story of
this war in the _Gesta_ is full of hopeless confusions and
anachronisms.
[273] Richer, l. iii. cc. 72–77.
From that time forth, at least, Geoffrey Greygown’s life was a busy and
a stirring one. It seems to have been in the year of the Lotharingian
raid that he married his second wife, Adela, countess in her own right
of Chalon-sur-Saône, and now the widow of Count Lambert of Autun.[274]
By his first marriage, with another Adela, he seems to have had only
a daughter, Hermengard, who had been married as early as 970[275] to
Conan the Crooked, count of Rennes. There can be little doubt that
this marriage was a stroke of policy on Geoffrey’s part, intended to
pave the way for Angevin intervention in the affairs of Britanny. The
claims of Fulk the Good to the overlordship of Nantes had of course
expired with him; whatever rights the widow of Duke Alan might carry
to her second husband, they could not pass to her stepson. Still
Geoffrey could hardly fail to cherish designs upon, at least, the
debateable ground which lay between the Mayenne and the original county
of Nantes. Meanwhile the house of Rennes had managed to establish,
by the right of the stronger, its claim to the dukedom of Britanny.
Hoel, a son of Alan Barbetorte, remained count of Nantes for nearly
twenty years after Fulk’s death; his career was ended at last by the
hand of an assassin;[276] and as his only child was an infant, his
brother Guerech, already bishop of Nantes, was called upon to succeed
him, as the only surviving descendant of Alan who was capable of
defending the state. Guerech was far better fitted for a secular than
for an ecclesiastical ruler; as bishop, his chief care was to restore
or rebuild his cathedral, and for this object he was so eager in
collecting contributions that he made a journey to the court of Lothar
to ask help of the king in person. His way home lay directly through
Anjou. Geoffrey felt that his opportunity had come; and he set the
first example of a mode of action which thenceforth became a settled
practice of the Angevin counts. He laid traps in all directions to
catch the unwary traveller, took him captive, and only let him go after
extorting homage not merely for the debateable land, but also for
Nantes itself; in a word, for all that part of Britanny which had been
held or claimed by Fulk as Drogo’s guardian.[277]
[274] See note C at end of chapter.
[275] Morice, _Hist. Bret._, vol. i. p. 63. See note C at end
of chapter.
[276] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _preuves_, vol. i., p. 31. Chron.
Namnet., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 278. “C. 980,”
notes the editor in the margin.
[277] Chron. Brioc., Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i.
col. 32.
Geoffrey had gained his hold over Nantes; but in so doing he had
brought upon himself the wrath of his son-in-law. Conan, as duke of
Britanny, claimed for himself the overlordship of Nantes, and regarded
Guerech’s enforced homage to Geoffrey as an infringement of his own
rights. His elder sons set out to attack their step-mother’s father,
made a raid upon Anjou, and were only turned back from the very gates
of Angers by a vigorous sally of Geoffrey himself.[278] Conan next
turned his vengeance upon the unlucky count-bishop of Nantes. The
Angevin and his unwilling vassal made common cause against their common
enemy, who marched against their united forces, bringing with him a
contingent of the old ravagers of Nantes--the Normans.[279] The rivals
met not far from Nantes, on the _lande_ of Conquereux, one of those
soft, boggy heaths so common in Britanny; and the issue of the fight
was recorded in an Angevin proverb--“Like the battle of Conquereux,
where the crooked overcame the straight.”[280] Conan was, however,
severely wounded, and does not appear to have followed up his victory;
and the Nantes question was left to be fought out ten years later, on
the very same ground, by Geoffrey’s youthful successor.
[278] See note D at end of chapter.
[279] Chron. Brioc., as above.
[280] See note D at end of chapter.
The death of Lothar, early in March 986, brought Hugh Capet within
one step of the throne. The king’s last years had been spent in
endeavouring to secure the succession to his son by obtaining for him
the homage of the princes of Aquitaine and the support of the duke
of the French--two objects not very easy to combine, for the great
duchies north and south of the Loire were divided by an irreconcileable
antipathy. In 956 William “Tête-d’Etoupe,” or the “Shockhead,” strong
in his triple power as count of Poitou, count of Auvergne and duke
of Aquitaine--strong, too, in his alliance with Normandy, for he had
married a sister of his namesake of the Long Sword--had bidden defiance
not unsuccessfully to Lothar and Hugh the Great both at once.[281] In
961 Lothar granted the county of Poitiers to Hugh;[282] but all he
could give was an empty title; when William Shockhead died in 963,[283]
his son William Fierabras stepped into his place as count of Poitou,
duke of Aquitaine, and leader of the opposition to Hugh Capet.
[281] Richer, l. iii. cc. 3–5.
[282] _Ib._ c. 13.
[283] Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 381).
It was now evident that the line of Charles the Great was about
to expire in a worthless boy. While the young King Louis, as the
chroniclers say, “did nothing,”[284] the duke of the French and his
followers were almost openly preparing for the last step of all. The
count of Anjou, following as ever closely in the wake of his overlord,
now ventured on a bold aggression. Half by force, half by fraud, he
had already carried his power beyond the Mayenne; he now crossed the
Loire and attacked his southern neighbour the count of Poitou. Marching
boldly down the road which led from Angers to Poitiers, he took Loudun,
and was met at Les Roches by William Fierabras, whom he defeated in
a pitched battle and pursued as far as a place which in the next
generation was marked by the castle of Mirebeau. Of the subsequent
details of the war we know nothing; it ended however in a compromise;
Geoffrey kept the lands which he had won, but he kept them as the “man”
of Duke William.[285] They seem to have consisted of a series of small
fiefs scattered along the valleys of the little rivers Layon, Argenton,
Thouet and Dive, which furrow the surface of northern Poitou.[286] The
most important was Loudun, a little town some eighteen miles north-west
of Poitiers. Even to-day its gloomy, crooked, rough-paved streets,
its curious old houses, its quaintly-attired people, have a strangely
old-world look; lines within lines of broken wall wind round the hill
on whose slope the town is built, and in their midst stands a great
square keep, the work of Geoffrey’s successors. He had won a footing
in Poitou; they learned to use it for ends of which, perhaps, he could
as yet scarcely dream. Loudun looked southward to Poitiers, but it
looked northward and eastward too, up the valley of the Thouet which
led straight up to Saumur, the border-fortress of Touraine and Anjou,
and across the valley of the Vienne which led from the Angevin frontier
into the heart of southern Touraine. Precious as it might be in itself,
Loudun was soon to be far more precious as a point of vantage not so
much against the lord of Poitiers as against the lord of Chinon, Saumur
and Tours.
[284] “Ludovicus qui nihil fecit” is the original form of the
nickname usually rendered by “le Fainéant.”
[285] See note D at end of chapter.
[286] Fulk Nerra’s Poitevin castles, Maulévrier, Thouars, etc.,
must have been built on the ground won by Geoffrey.
The little marchland had thus openly begun her career of aggression on
the west and on the south. It seems that a further promise of extension
to the northward was now held by Hugh Capet before the eyes of his
faithful Angevin friend. Geoffrey’s northern neighbour was as little
disposed as the southern to welcome the coming king. The overlordship
of Maine was claimed by the duke of the Normans on the strength of a
grant made to Hrolf in 924 by King Rudolf; it was claimed by the duke
of the French on the strength of another grant made earlier in the same
year by Charles the Simple to Hugh the Great,[287] as well as in virtue
of the original definition of their duchy “between Seine and Loire”;
but the Cenomannian counts owned no allegiance save to the heirs of
Charles the Great, and firmly refused all obedience to the house of
France. Hugh Capet, now king in all but name, laid upon the lord of
the Angevin march the task of reducing them to submission. He granted
Maine to Geoffrey Greygown[288]--a merely nominal gift at the moment,
for Hugh (or David) of Maine was in full and independent possession
of his county; and generation after generation had to pass away before
the remote consequences of that grant were fully worked out to their
wonderful end. Geoffrey himself had no time to take any steps towards
enforcing his claim. Events came thick and fast in the early summer of
987. King Louis V. was seized at Senlis with one of those sudden and
violent sicknesses so common in that age, and died on May 22. The last
Karolingian king was laid in his grave at Compiègne; the nobles of
the realm came together in a hurried meeting; on the proposal of the
archbishop of Reims they swore to the duke of the French a solemn oath
that they would take no steps towards choosing a ruler till a second
assembly should be held, for which a day was fixed.[289] Hugh knew
now that he had only a few days more to wait. He spent the interval
in besieging a certain Odo, called “Rufinus”--in all likelihood a
rebellious vassal--who was holding out against him at Marson in
Champagne; and with him went his constant adherent Geoffrey of Anjou.
At the end of the month the appointed assembly was held at Senlis.
Passing over the claims of Charles of Lorraine, the only surviving
descendant of the great Emperor, the nobles with one consent offered
the crown to the duke of the French. From his camp before Marson Hugh
went to receive, at Noyon on the 1st of June,[290] the crown for which
he had been waiting all his life. Geoffrey, whom he had left to finish
the siege, fell sick and died before the place, seven weeks after his
patron’s coronation;[291] and his body was carried back from distant
Champagne to be laid by his father’s side in the church of S. Martin at
Tours.[292]
[287] Chron. Frodoard, a. 924 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol.
viii. p. 181).
[288] See note E at end of chapter.
[289] Richer, l. iv. cc. 5 and 8.
[290] Richer, l. iv. c. 12. On this Kalckstein (_Geschichte
des französischen Königthums unter den ersten Capetingern_,
vol. i. p. 380, note 2), remarks: “Aus Rich. iv. 12 wäre zu
schliessen, dass Hugo in Noyon gekrönt wurde ... aber eine
gleichzeitige Urkunde von Fleury entscheidet für Reims. Richer
gibt wohl in Folge eines Gedächtnissfehlers den 1 Juli (wie für
Juni zu verbessern seine wird) als Krönungstag. Hist. Francica
um 1108 verfasst, Aimoin Mirac. S. Bened. ii. 2 (Bouq., x. 210
u. 341).” The _Hist. Franc. Fragm._ here referred to places
the crowning at Reims on July 3. Aimoin, however, places it at
Noyon and gives no date. The question therefore lies really
between Richer and the Fleury record referred to, but not
quoted, by Kalckstein; for the two twelfth century writers
are of no authority at all in comparison with contemporaries.
We must suppose that the Fleury charter gives the same date
as the _Hist. Franc. Fragm._ But is it not possible that Hugh
was really crowned first at Noyon on 1st June, and afterwards
recrowned with fuller state at Reims a month later?
[291] Chronn. S. Albin., S. Serg., and Vindoc., a. 987; Rain.
Andeg. a. 985; S. Maxent. a. 986 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 21,
134, 164, 9, 382). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 376.
[292] Fulk Rechin, as above, and _Gesta Cons._ (_ib._), p. 89,
say he was buried in S. Martin’s. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p.
165) buries him in S. Aubin’s at Angers.
The century of preparation and transition was over; the great change
was accomplished, not to be undone again for eight hundred years.
The first period of strictly French history and the first period of
Angevin history close together. The rulers of the marchland had begun
to shew that they were not to be confined within the limits which
nature itself might seem to have fixed for them; they had stretched
a hand beyond their two river-boundaries, and they had begun to cast
their eyes northward and dream of a claim which was to have yet more
momentous results. In the last years of Geoffrey Greygown we trace a
foreshadowing of the wonderful career which his successor is to begin.
From the shadow we pass to its realization; with the new king and the
new count we enter upon a new era.
NOTE A.
ON THE SOURCES AND AUTHENTICITY OF EARLY ANGEVIN HISTORY.
Our only detailed account of the early Angevins, down to Geoffrey
Greygown, is contained in two books: the _Gesta Consulum
Andegavensium_, by John, monk of Marmoutier, and the _Historia Comitum
Andegavensium_, which goes under the name of Thomas Pactius, prior of
Loches. Both these works were written in the latter part of the twelfth
century; and they may be practically regarded as one, for the latter
is in reality only an abridgement of the former, with a few slight
variations. The _Gesta Consulum_ is avowedly a piece of patchwork. The
author in his “Proœmium” tells us that it is founded on the work of a
certain Abbot Odo which had been recast by Thomas Pactius, prior of
Loches, and to which he himself, John of Marmoutier, had made further
additions from sundry other sources which he enumerates (Marchegay,
_Comtes d’Anjou_, p. 353. This “Proœmium” is there printed at the
head of the _Historia Abbreviata_ instead of the _Gesta Consulum_,
to which, however, it really belongs; see M. Mabille’s introduction,
_ib._ p. xxxi.). The _Historia Comitum Andegavensium_ (_ib._ p. 320)
bears the name of Thomas of Loches, and thus professes to be the
earlier version on which John worked. But it is now known that the work
of Thomas, which still exists in MS., is totally distinct from that
published under his name (see M. Mabille’s introduction to _Comtes
d’Anjou_, pp. xviii., xix.), and, moreover, that the printed _Historia
Comitum_ is really a copy of a series of extracts from Ralf de Diceto’s
_Abbreviationes Chronicorum_--extracts which Ralf himself had taken
from the _Gesta Consulum_ (see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to R. Diceto,
vol. ii. pp. xxiii.–xxix). There is, however, one other source of
information about the early Angevins which, if its author was really
what he professed to be, is of somewhat earlier date and far higher
value, although of very small extent. This is the fragment of the
_Angevin History_ which goes under the name of Count Fulk Rechin. Its
authorship has been questioned, but it has never been disproved; and
one thing at least is certain--the writer, whoever he may have been,
had some notion of historical and chronological possibilities, whereas
John of Marmoutier had none. Fulk Rechin (as we must for the present
call him, without stopping to decide whether he has a right to the
name) gives a negative testimony against all John’s stories about the
earlier members of the Angevin house. He pointedly states that he knows
nothing about the first three counts (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376),
and he makes no mention of anybody before Ingelger. Now, supposing he
really was Count Fulk IV. of Anjou, it is fairly safe to assume that if
anything had been known about his own forefathers he would have been
more likely to know it than a monk who wrote nearly a hundred years
later. On the other hand, if he was a twelfth-century forger, such a
daring avowal of ignorance, put into the mouth of such a personage,
shews the writer’s disregard of the tales told by the monk, and can
only have been intended to give them the lie direct.
The two first members of the Angevin house, then--Tortulf of Rennes
and his son Tertullus--rest solely on the evidence of these two late
writers. Their accounts are not recommended by intrinsic probability.
We are roused to suspicion by the very first sentence of the _Gesta
Consulum_:--“Fuit vir quidam de Armoricâ Galliâ, nomine Torquatius.
Iste a Britonibus, proprietatem vetusti ac Romani nominis ignorantibus,
corrupto vocabulo Tortulfus dictus fuit” (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 35).
When one finds that his son is called Tertullus, it is impossible not
to suspect that “Torquatius” and “Tertullus” are only two different
attempts to Latinize a genuine Teutonic “Tortulf.” For the lives of
these personages John of Marmoutier gives no distinct dates; but he
tells us that Torquatius was made Forester of Nid-de-Merle by Charles
the Bald, “eo anno quo ab Andegavis et a toto suo regno Normannos
expulit” (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 35). Now this is rather vague, but it
looks as if the date intended were 873. We are next told that Tertullus
went to seek his fortune in France “circa id temporis quo Karolus
Calvus ... ex triarcho monarchus factus, non longo regnavit spatio”
(_ib._ pp. 36, 37), whatever that may mean. The next chronological
landmark is that of the “reversion” of S. Martin, which John copies
from the Cluny treatise _De Reversione B. Martini_, and copies wrong.
Then comes Fulk the Red, on whom he says the whole county of Anjou was
conferred by Duke Hugh of Burgundy, guardian of Charles the Simple, the
county having until then been divided in two parts; and he also says
that Fulk was related to Hugh through his grandmother (_ib._ pp. 64,
65).
There are several unmanageable points in this story. 1. The pedigree
cannot be right. It is clear that John took Hugh the Great (“Hugh
of Burgundy,” as he calls him) to be a son of the earlier Hugh of
Burgundy (one copy of the _Gesta_, that printed by D’Achéry in his
_Spicilegium_, vol. iii. p. 243, actually adds “filius alterius
Hugonis”), and this latter to have been the father of Petronilla, wife
of Tertullus.
The chronology of the life of Fulk the Red, long a matter of mingled
tradition and guess-work, has now been fairly established by the
investigations of M. E. Mabille. This gentleman has examined the
subject in his introduction to MM. Marchegay and Salmon’s edition of
the _Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou_, and in an article entitled “Les
Invasions normandes dans la Loire,” in the _Bibliothèque de l’Ecole
des Chartes_, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194; to each of these works
is appended by way of _pièces justificatives_ a series of charters of
the highest importance for establishing the facts of the early history
of Anjou and Touraine. The first appearance of Fulk is as witness to a
charter given at Tours by Odo, as abbot of S. Martin’s, in April 886.
(Mabille, introd. _Comtes_, p. lxix. note). Now if Fulk the Red was
old enough to be signing charters in 886, his parents must have been
married long before the days of Louis the Stammerer--in 870 at the very
latest, and more likely several years earlier still. His grandparents
therefore (_i.e._ Tertullus and Petronilla) must have been married
before 850. It is possible that Hugh the Abbot who died in 887 may have
had a daughter married as early as this; but it does not seem very
likely.
2. The story of Ingelger’s investiture with Orleans and the Gâtinais
is suspicious. His championship of the slandered countess of Gâtinais
(Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 40–45) is one of those ubiquitous tales which
are past confuting. Still the statement that he somehow acquired lands
in the Gâtinais is in itself not impossible. But the coupling together
of Gâtinais and Orléans is very suspicious. Not one of the historical
descendants of Ingelger had, as far as is known, anything to do with
either place for nearly two hundred years. There is documentary proof
(see the signatures to a charter printed in Mabille’s introd. _Comtes_,
p. lxiv, note 1; the reference there given to Salmon is wrong) that in
942, the year after the death of Fulk the Red, the viscount of Orléans
was one Geoffrey; and he belonged to a totally different family--but
a family which, it seems, did in time acquire the county of Gâtinais,
and in the end became merged in the house of Anjou, when the son of
Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou succeeded his uncle
Geoffrey Martel in 1061. It is impossible not to suspect that the late
Angevin writers took up this story at the wrong end and moved it back
two hundred years.
3. Comes the great question of Ingelger’s investiture with half the
county of Anjou.
In not one of the known documents of the period does Ingelger’s name
appear. The only persons who do appear as rulers of the Angevin march
are Hugh the Abbot and his successor Odo, till we get to Fulk the
Viscount. Fulk’s first appearance in this capacity is in September 898,
when “Fulco vicecomes” signs a charter of Ardradus, brother of Atto,
viscount of Tours (Mabille, Introd. _Comtes_, p. xciii). He witnesses,
by the same title, several charters of Robert the Abbot-Count during
the next two years. In July 905 we have “signum Fulconis Turonorum et
Andecavorum vicecomitis” (_ib._ p. xcv); in October 909 “signum domni
Fulconis Andecavorum comitis” (_ib._ p. xcviii); and in October 912
he again signs among the counts (_ib._ p. lxi, note 4). But in May
914, and again as late as August 924, he resumes the title of viscount
(_ib._ pp. c and lxii, note 2). Five years later, in the seventh year
of King Rudolf, we find a charter granted by Fulk himself, “count of
the Angevins and abbot of S. Aubin and S. Licinius” (_ib._ p. ci); and
thenceforth this is his established title.
These dates at once dispose of R. Diceto’s statement (Stubbs, vol. i.
p. 143) that Fulk succeeded his father Ingelger as second count in
912. They leave us in doubt as to the real date of his appointment as
count; but whether we adopt the earlier date, in or before 909, or the
later one, between 924 and 929, as that of his definite investiture, we
cannot accept the _Gesta’s_ story that it was granted by Hugh the Great
on behalf of Charles the Simple. For in 909 the duke of the French
was not Hugh, but his father Robert; and in 924–929 the king was not
Charles, but Rudolf of Burgundy.
But the chronology is not the only difficulty in the tale of Count
Ingelger. The _Gesta_-writers admit that “another count” (_i.e._ the
former count, Duke Hugh) went on ruling beyond the Mayenne. This at
once raises a question, very important yet very simple--Did the Angevin
March, the March of Robert the Brave and his successors, extend on both
sides of the Mayenne? For the assumption that it did is the ground of
the whole argument for the “bipartite” county.
The old territory of the Andes certainly spread on both sides of
the river. So also, it seems, did the march of Count Lambert. The
commission of a lord marcher is of necessity indefinite; it implies
holding the border-land and extending it into the enemy’s country if
possible. It appears to me that when Lambert turned traitor he carried
out this principle from the other side; when Nantes became Breton,
the whole land up to the Mayenne became Breton too. This view is
distinctly supported by a charter in which Herispoë, in August 852,
styles himself ruler of Britanny and up to the river Mayenne (Lobineau,
_Hist. Bretagne_, vol. ii. col. 55); and it gives the most rational
explanation of the Breton wars of Fulk the Good, Geoffrey Greygown and
Fulk Nerra, which ended in Anjou’s recovery of the debateable ground.
If it is correct, there is an end at once of the “bipartite county”
and of Count Ingelger; “the other count” cannot have ruled west of the
Mayenne, therefore he must have ruled east of it, and there is no room
for any one else.
The one writer whose testimony seems to lend some countenance to that
of the _Gesta_ need not trouble us much. Fulk Rechin (Marchegay,
_Comtes_, p. 374) does call Ingelger the first count; but his own
confession that he knew nothing about his first five ancestors beyond
their names gives us a right to think, in the absence of confirmatory
evidence, that he may have been mistaken in using the title. He says
nothing about the county having ever been bipartite, and his statement
that his forefathers received their honours from Charles the Bald,
not from the house of Paris (_ib._ p. 376), may be due to the same
misconception, strengthened by a desire, which in Fulk Rechin would
be extremely natural, to disclaim all connexion with the “genus impii
Philippi,” or even by an indistinct idea of the investiture of Fulk I.
For, if this is regarded as having taken place between 905 and 909, it
must fall in the reign of Charles the Simple, and might be technically
ascribed to him, though there can be no doubt that it was really owing
to the duke of the French. Every step of Fulk’s life, as we can trace
it in the charters, shows him following closely in the wake of Odo,
Robert and Hugh; and the dependance of Anjou on the duchy of France is
distinctly acknowledged by his grandson.
The latter part of the account of Ingelger in the _Gesta_ (Marchegay,
_Comtes_, pp. 47–62) is copied bodily from the _Tractatus de reversione
B. Martini a Burgundiâ_, which professes to have been written by S. Odo
of Cluny at the request of his foster-brother, Count Fulk the Good.
The wild anachronisms of this treatise have been thoroughly exposed by
its latest editor, M. A. Salmon (_Supplément au Recueil des Chroniques
de Touraine_, pp. xi–xxviii), and M. Mabille (“Les Invasions normandes
dans la Loire et les pérégrinations du corps de S. Martin,” in _Bibl.
de l’Ecole des Chartes_, ser. vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194). It is certain,
from the statement of S. Odo’s own biographer John, that the saint was
born in 879 and entered religion in 898; at which time it is evident
that Fulk the Good, the Red Count’s youngest son, must have been quite
a child, if even he was in existence at all. The letters in which he
and the abbot address each other as foster-brothers are therefore
forgeries; and the treatise which these letters introduce is no better.
The only part of it which directly concerns our present subject is
the end, recounting how the body of the Apostle of the Gauls, after a
thirty years’ exile at Auxerre, whither it had been carried to keep it
safe from the sacrilegious hands of Hrolf and his northmen when they
were ravaging Touraine, was brought back in triumph to its home at
Tours on December 13, 887, by Ingelger, count of Gâtinais and Anjou,
and grandson of Hugh, duke of Burgundy. Now there is no doubt at all
that the relics of S. Martin were carried into Burgundy and afterwards
brought back again, and that the feast of the Reversion of S. Martin
on December 13 was regularly celebrated at Tours in commemoration of
the event; but the whole history of the adventures of the relics as
given in this treatise is manifestly wrong in its details; _e.g._ the
statements about Hrolf are ludicrous--the “reversion” is said to have
taken place after his conversion. M. Salmon has gone carefully through
the whole story: M. Mabille has sifted it still more thoroughly. These
two writers have shewn that the body of S. Martin really went through
a great many more “peregrinations” than those recounted in the Cluny
treatise, that the real date of the reversion is 885, and in short that
the treatise is wrong in every one of its dates and every one of the
names of the bishops whom it mentions as concerned in the reversion,
save those of Archbishop Adaland of Tours and his brother Raino, who,
however, was bishop of Angers, not of Orléans as the treatise says. The
passages in the Tours chronicle where Ingelger is described as count of
Anjou are all derived from this source, and therefore prove nothing,
except the writer’s ignorance about counts and bishops alike.
The mention of Archbishop Adaland brings us to another
subject--Ingelger’s marriage. Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 139)
says that he married Ælendis, niece of Archbishop Adaland and of Raino,
bishop of Angers, and that these two prelates gave to the young
couple their own hereditary estates at Amboise, in Touraine and in the
Orléanais. The _Gesta Consulum_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 45) say the
same, but afterwards make Raino bishop of Orléans. This story seems to
be a bit of truth which has found its way into a mass of fiction; at
any rate it is neither impossible nor improbable. The author of the
_De Reversione_ is quite right in saying that Archbishop Adaland died
shortly after the return of the relics; his statement, and those of the
Tours Chronicle, that Adaland was consecrated in 870 and died in 887,
are borne out by the same charters which enable us to track the career
of Fulk the Red. As to Raino--there was a Raino ordained bishop of
Angers in 881 (Chron. Vindoc. ad ann. in Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_,
p. 160). The version which makes Orléans his see is derived from the
false Cluny treatise.
Fulk the Red was witnessing charters in 886 and died in 941 or 942. He
must have been born somewhere between 865 and 870; as the traditional
writers say he died “senex et plenus dierum, in bonâ senectute,” it
may have been nearer the earlier date. There is thus no chronological
reason why these two prelates should not have been his mother’s uncles;
and as the house of Anjou certainly acquired Amboise somehow, it may
just as well have been in this way as in any other.
NOTE B.
THE PALACE OF THE COUNTS AT ANGERS.
Not only ordinary English tourists, but English historical scholars
have been led astray in the topography of early Angers by an obstinate
local tradition which long persisted in asserting that the counts and
the bishops of Angers had at some time or other made an exchange of
dwellings; that the old ruined hall within the castle enclosure was
a piece of Roman work, and had served, before this exchange, as the
synodal hall of the bishops. The date adopted for this exchange, when
I visited Angers in 1877 (I have no knowledge of the place since that
time) was “the ninth century”; some years before it was the twelfth
or thirteenth century, and the synodal hall of the present bishop’s
palace, with its undercroft, was shown and accepted as the home of
all the Angevin counts down to Geoffrey Plantagenet at least. The
whole history of the two palaces--that of the counts and that of the
bishops--has, however, been cleared up by two local archæologists, M.
de Beauregard (“Le Palais épiscopal et l’Eglise cathédrale d’Angers,”
in _Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-Loire_, 1855, vol. i. pp. 246–256),
and M. d’Espinay, president of the Archæological Commission of
Maine-et-Loire (“Le Palais des Comtes d’Anjou,” _Revue historique de
l’Anjou_, 1872, vol. viii. pp. 153–170; “L’Evêché d’Angers,” _ib._ pp.
185–201). The foundation and result of their arguments may be briefly
summed up. The first bit of evidence on the subject is a charter
(printed by M. de Beauregard, _Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-Loire_,
as above, vol. i. pp. 248, 249; also in _Gallia Christiana_, vol.
xiv. instr. cols. 145, 146) of Charles the Bald, dated July 2,
851, and ratifying an exchange of lands between “Dodo venerabilis
Andegavorum Episcopus et Odo illustris comes.” The exchange is thus
described:--“Dedit itaque præfatus Dodo episcopus antedicto Odoni
comiti, ex rebus matris ecclesiæ S. Mauricii, æquis mensuris funibusque
determinatam paginam terræ juxta murum civitatis Andegavensis, in quâ
opportunitas jam dicti comitis mansuræ sedis suorumque successorum
esse cognoscitur. Et, e contra, in compensatione hujus rei, dedit idem
Odo comes ex comitatu suo terram S. Mauricio æquis mensuris similiter
funibus determinatam prænominato Dodoni episcopo successoribusque suis
habendam in quâ predecessorum suorum comitum sedes fuisse memoratur.”
As M. de Beauregard points out, the traditionary version--whether
placing the exchange in the ninth century or in the twelfth--is based
on a misunderstanding of this charter. The charter says not a word of
the bishop giving up his own actual abode to the count; it says he gave
a plot of ground near the city wall, and suitable for the count to
build himself a house upon. Moreover the words “sedes fuisse memoratur”
seem to imply that what the count gave was not his own present dwelling
either, but only that which had been occupied by his predecessors.
There can be little doubt that the Merovingian counts dwelt on the site
of the Roman citadel of Juliomagus; and this was unquestionably where
the bishop’s palace now stands. That it already stood there in the
closing years of the eleventh century is proved by a charter, quoted by
M. d’Espinay (_Revue historique de l’Anjou_, vol. viii. p. 200, note 2)
from the cartulary of S. Aubin’s Abbey, giving an account of a meeting
held “in domibus episcopalibus _juxta S. Mauricium Andegavorum matrem
ecclesiam_,” in A.D. 1098.
So much for the position of the bishop’s dwelling from 851 downwards.
Of the position of the count’s palace--the abode of Odo and his
successors, built on the piece of land near the city wall--the first
indication is in an account of a great fire at Angers in 1132: “Flante
Aquilone, accensus est in mediâ civitate ignis, videlicet apud S.
Anianum; et tanto incendio grassatus est ut ecclesiam S. Laudi et
omnes officinas, deinde comitis aulam et omnes cameras miserabiliter
combureret et in cinerem redigeret. Sicque per Aquariam descendens,”
etc. (Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132, Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 144). The
church of S. Laud was the old chapel of S. Geneviève,--“capella B.
Genovefæ virginis, infra muros civitatis Andegavæ, ante forum videlicet
comitalis aulæ posita,” as it is described in a charter of Geoffrey
Martel (_Revue Hist. de l’Anjou_, 1872, vol. viii. p. 161)--the exact
position of a ruined chapel which was still visible, some twenty years
ago, within the castle enclosure, not far from the hall which still
remains. A fire beginning in the middle of the city and carried by a
north-east wind down to S. Laud and the Evière would not touch the
present bishop’s palace, but could not fail to pass over the site of
the castle. The last witness is Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. pp.
291, 292), who distinctly places the palace of the counts in his own
day--the day of Count Henry Fitz-Empress--in the south-west corner
of the city, with the river at its feet and the vine-clad hills at
its back; and his description of the “thalami noviter constructi”
just fits in with the account of the fire, the destruction thereby
wrought having doubtless been followed by a rebuilding on a more regal
scale. It seems impossible to doubt the conclusion of these Angevin
archæologists, that the dwelling of the bishops and the palace of the
counts have occupied their present sites ever since the ninth century.
In that case the present synodal hall, an undoubted work of the early
twelfth century, must have been originally built for none other than
its present use; and to a student of the history of the Angevin
counts and kings the most precious relic in all Angers is the ruined
hall looking out upon the Mayenne from over the castle ramparts. M.
d’Espinay denies its Roman origin; he considers it to be a work of the
tenth century or beginning of the eleventh--the one fragment, in fact,
of the dwelling-place of Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk the Black which has
survived, not only the fire of 1132, but also the later destruction in
which the apartments built by Henry have perished.
NOTE C.
THE MARRIAGES OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.
The marriages of Geoffrey Greygown form a subject at once of some
importance and of considerable difficulty. It seems plain that Geoffrey
was twice married, that both his wives bore the same name, Adela
or Adelaide, and that the second was in her own right countess of
Chalon-sur-Saône, and widow of Lambert, count of Autun. There is no
doubt about this second marriage, for we have documentary evidence
that a certain Count Maurice (about whom the Angevin writers make
great blunders, and of whom we shall hear more later on) was brother
at once to Hugh of Chalon, son of Lambert and Adela, and to Fulk, son
of Geoffrey Greygown, and must therefore have been a son of Geoffrey
and Adela. A charter, dated between 992 and 998 (see Mabille, Introd.
_Comtes_, pp. lxx–lxxi), wherein Hugh, count of Chalon, describes
himself as “son of Adelaide and Lambert who was count of Chalon in
right of his wife,” is approved by “Adelaide his mother and Maurice his
brother.” Now as R. Glaber (l. iii. c. 2; _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol.
x. p. 27) declares that Hugh had no brother, Maurice must have been his
half-brother, _i.e._ son of his mother and her second husband; and that
that second husband was Geoffrey Greygown appears by several charters
in which Maurice is named as brother of Fulk Nerra.
It is by no means clear who this Adela or Adelaide of Chalon was. Perry
(_Hist. de Chalon-sur-Saône_, p. 86) and Arbois de Jubainville (_Comtes
de Champagne_, vol. i. p. 140) say she was daughter of Robert of
Vermandois, count of Troyes, and Vera, daughter of Gilbert of Burgundy
and heiress of Chalon, which at her death passed to Adela as her only
child. But the only authority for this Vera, Odorannus the monk of S.
Peter of Sens, says she was married in 956, and Lambert called himself
count of Chalon in 960 (Perry, _Hist. Chalon, preuves_, p. 35. See
also Arbois de Jubainville as above), so that if he married Vera’s
daughter he must have married a child only three years old. And to
add to the confusion, Robert of Troyes’s wife in 959 signs a charter
by the name of “Adelais” (Duchesne, _Maison de Vergy, preuves_, p.
36). What concerns us most, however, is not Adela’s parentage, but the
date of her marriage with Geoffrey Greygown; or, which comes to much
the same thing, the date of her first husband’s death. The cartulary
of Paray-le-Monial (Lambert’s foundation) gives the date of his death
as February 22, 988. If that were correct, Geoffrey, who died in July
987, could not have married Adela at all, unless she was divorced and
remarried during Lambert’s life. This idea is excluded by a charter
of her grandson Theobald, which distinctly says that Geoffrey married
her after Lambert’s death (Perry, _Hist. Chalon, preuves_, p. 39);
therefore the _Art de vérifier les Dates_ (vol. xi. p. 129) proposes
to omit an x and read 978. Adela and Geoffrey, then, cannot have
married earlier than the end of 978. Geoffrey, however, must have been
married long before this, if his daughter Hermengard was married in
970 to Conan of Britanny (Morice, _Hist. Bret._, vol. i. p. 63. His
authority seems to be a passage in the Chron. S. Michael. a. 970,
printed in Labbe’s _Bibl. Nova MSS. Librorum_, vol. i. p. 350, where,
however, the bride is absurdly made a daughter of Fulk Nerra instead
of Geoffrey Greygown). And in Duchesne’s _Maison de Vergy, preuves_,
p. 39, is the will, dated March 6, 974, of a Countess Adela, wife of a
Count Geoffrey, whereby she bequeathes some lands to S. Aubin’s Abbey
at Angers; and as the Chron. S. Albin. a. 974 (Marchegay, _Eglises_,
p. 20) also mentions these donations, there can be little doubt that
she was the wife of Geoffrey of Anjou. M. Mabille (Introd. _Comtes_,
p. lxx) asserts that this Adela, Geoffrey Greygown’s first wife, was
Adela of Vermandois, sister of Robert of Troyes, and appeals to the
will above referred to in proof of his assertion; the will, however,
says nothing of the sort. He also makes the second Adela sister-in-law
instead of daughter to Robert (_ib._ p. lxxi). It seems indeed hopeless
to decide on the parentage of either of these ladies; that of their
children is, however, the only question really important for us.
Hermengard, married in 970 to the duke of Britanny, was clearly a child
of Geoffrey’s first wife; Maurice was as clearly a child of the second;
but whose child was Fulk the Black? Not only is it a matter of some
interest to know who was the mother of the greatest of the Angevins,
but it is a question on whose solution may depend the solution of
another difficulty:--the supposed, but as yet unascertained, kindred
between Fulk’s son Geoffrey Martel and his wife Agnes of Burgundy. If
Fulk was the son of Geoffrey Greygown and Adela of Chalon, the whole
pedigree is clear, and stands thus:
1 2
Lambert = Adela = Geoffrey
| |
Adalbert = Gerberga Fulk
of Lombardy | |
| |
Otto William |
| |
Agnes = Geoffrey.
The two last would thus be cousins in the third degree of kindred
according to the canon law. The only apparent difficulty of this
theory is that it makes Fulk so very young. The first child of Adela
of Chalon and Geoffrey cannot have been born earlier than 979, even if
Adela remarried before her first year of widowhood was out; and we find
Fulk Nerra heading his troops in 992, if not before. But the thing is
not impossible. Such precocity would not be much greater than that of
Richard the Fearless, or of Fulk’s own rival Odo of Blois; and such a
wonderful man as Fulk the Black may well have been a wonderful boy.
NOTE D.
THE BRETON AND POITEVIN WARS OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.
The acts of Geoffrey Greygown in the _Gesta Consulum_ are a mass of
fable. The fight with the Dane Æthelwulf and that with the Saxon
Æthelred are mythical on the face of them, and the writer’s habitual
defiance of chronology is carried to its highest point in this
chapter. From him we turn to the story of Fulk Rechin. “Ille igitur
Gosfridus Grisa Gonella, pater avi mei Fulconis, cujus probitates
enumerare non possumus, excussit Laudunum de manu Pictavensis comitis,
et in prœlio superavit eum super Rupes, et persecutus est eum usque ad
Mirebellum. Et fugavit Britones, qui venerant Andegavim cum prædatorio
exercitu, quorum duces erant filii Isoani (Conani). Et postea fuit cum
duce Hugone in obsidione apud Marsonum, ubi arripuit eum infirmitas
quâ exspiravit; et corpus illius allatum est Turonum et sepultum in
ecclesiâ B. Martini” (Fulk Rechin, Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376).
Whoever was the author of this account, he clearly knew or cared
nothing about the stories of the monkish writers, but had a perfectly
distinct source of information unknown to them. For their legends he
substitutes two things: a war with the count of Poitou, and a war with
the duke of Britanny. On each of these wars we get some information
from one other authority; the question is how to make this other
authority tally with Fulk.
1. As to the Breton war, which seems to be the earlier in date.
No one but Fulk mentions the raid of Conan’s sons upon Angers; and M.
Mabille (Introd. _Comtes_, p. xlviii) objects to it on the ground that
Conan’s sons were not contemporaries of Geoffrey.
Conan of Rennes was killed in 992 in a battle with Geoffrey’s son. He
had been married in 970 to Geoffrey’s daughter Hermengard (see above,
pp. 121, 135). Now a daughter of Geoffrey in 970 must have been almost
a child, but it by no means follows that her husband was equally young.
On the contrary, he seems to have been sufficiently grown up to take
a part in politics twenty years before (Morice, _Hist. Bret._ vol. i.
p. 62). It is certain that he had several sons; it is certain that two
at least of them were not Hermengard’s; it is likely that none of them
were, except his successor Geoffrey. Supposing Conan was somewhat over
fifty when killed (and he may have been older still) that would make
him about thirty when he married Hermengard; he might have had sons ten
years before that, and those sons might very easily head an attack upon
their stepmother’s father in 980 or thereabouts. Surely M. Mabille here
makes a needless stumbling-block of the chronology.
If no other writer confirms Fulk’s story, neither does any contradict
it. But in the _Gesta Consulum_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 91–93) an
exactly similar tale is told, only in much more detail and with this
one difference, that Fulk Nerra is substituted for Geoffrey Greygown,
and the raid is made to take place just before that other battle of
Conquereux, in 992, in which Conan perished. The only question now is,
which date is the likeliest, Fulk’s or John’s? in other words, which of
these two writers is the better to be trusted? Surely there can be no
doubt about the choice, and we must conclude that, for once, the monk
who credits Greygown with so many exploits that he never performed has
denied him the honour of one to which he is really entitled.
Fulk Rechin’s account of Geoffrey’s Breton war ends here. The Breton
chroniclers ignore this part of the affair altogether; they seem
to take up the thread of the story where the Angevin drops it. It
is they who tell us of the homage of Guerech, and of the battle of
Conquereux; and their accounts of the latter are somewhat puzzling.
The Chron. Britann. in Lobineau (_Hist. Bret._, vol. ii. col. 32)
says: “982. Primum bellum Britannorum et Andegavorum in Concruz.”
The Chron. S. Michael. (Labbe, _Bibl. Nova_, vol. i. p. 350; _Rer.
Gall. Scriptt._, vol. ix. p. 98) says: “981. Conanus Curvus contra
Andegavenses in Concurrum optime pugnavit.” But in the other two
Breton chronicles the Angevins do not appear. The Chron. Namnetense
(_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. viii. p. 278) describes the battle as
one between Conan and Guerech; the Chron. Briocense (Morice, _Hist.
Bret., preuves_, vol. i. col. 32) does the same, and moreover adds
that Conan was severely wounded in the right arm and fled defeated.
This last is the only distinct record of the issue of the battle;
nevertheless there are some little indications which, taken together,
give some ground for thinking its record is wrong. 1st. There is the
negative evidence of the silence of the Angevin writers about the whole
affair; they ignore the first battle of Conquereux as completely as
the Bretons ignore the unsuccessful raid of Conan’s sons. This looks
as if each party chronicled its own successes, and carefully avoided
mentioning those of its adversaries. 2d. In the _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._
(Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 260) is a proverb “Bellum Conquerentium quo
tortum superavit rectum”--an obvious pun on Conan’s nickname, “Tortus”
or “Curvus.” It is there quoted as having arisen from the battle of
Conquereux in 992--the only one which it suits the Angevin writers
to admit. But this is nonsense, for the writer has himself just told
us that in that battle Conan was defeated and slain. Therefore “the
crooked overcame the straight,” _i.e._ Conan won the victory, in an
earlier battle of Conquereux.
But how then are we to account for the Chronicle of St. Brieuc’s very
circumstantial statement of Conan’s defeat?--This chronicle--a late
compilation--is our only authority for all the details of the war; for
Guerech’s capture and homage, and in short for all matters specially
relating to Nantes. The tone of all this part of it shews plainly
that its compiler, or more likely the earlier writer whom he was here
copying, was a violently patriotic man of Nantes, who hated the Rennes
party and the Angevins about equally, and whose chief aim was to
depreciate them both and exalt the house of Nantes in the person of
Guerech. So great is his spite against the Angevins that he will not
even allow them the credit of having slain Conan at the second battle
of Conquereux, but says Conan fell in a fight with some rebel subjects
of his own! He therefore still more naturally ignores the Angevin share
in the first battle of Conquereux, and makes his hero Guerech into a
triumphant victor. The cause of his hatred to Anjou is of course the
mean trick whereby Geoffrey obtained Guerech’s homage. There can be
little doubt that the battle was after this homage--was in fact caused
by it; but the facts are quite enough to account for the Nantes writer
putting, as he does, the battle first, before he brings the Angevins in
at all, and giving all the glory to Guerech.
2. As to the Poitevin war. “Excussit Laudunum,” etc. (Fulk Rechin,
Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376. See above, p. 137).
The only other mention of this war is in the Chron. S. Maxent.
(Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 384), which says: “Eo tempore gravissimum
bellum inter Willelmum ducem et Gofridum Andegavensem comitem peractum
est. Sed Gaufridus, necessitatibus actus, Willelmo duci se subdidit
seque in manibus præbuit, et ab eo Lausdunum castrum cum nonnullis
aliis in Pictavensi pago beneficio accepit.” M. Mabille pronounces
these two accounts incompatible; but are they? The Poitevin account,
taken literally and alone, looks rather odd. William and Geoffrey
fight; Geoffrey is “compelled by necessity” to make submission to
William--but he is invested by his conqueror with Loudun and other
fiefs. That is, the practical gain is on the side of the beaten party.
On the other hand, Fulk Rechin, taken literally and alone, gives no
hint of any submission on Geoffrey’s part. But why cannot the two
accounts be made to supplement and correct each other, as in the case
of the Breton war? The story would then stand thus: Geoffrey takes
Loudun and defeats William at Les Roches, as Fulk says. Subsequent
reverses compel him to agree to terms so far that he holds his
conquests as fiefs of the count of Poitou.
The case is nearly parallel to that of the Breton war; again the
Angevin count and the hostile chronicler tell the story between them,
each telling the half most agreeable to himself, and the two halves fit
into a whole.
M. Mabille’s last objection is that the real Fulk Rechin would have
known better than to say that Geoffrey pursued William as far as
Mirebeau, a place which had no existence till the castle was built by
Fulk Nerra in 1000. Why should he not have meant simply “the place
where Mirebeau now stands”? And even if he did think the name existed
in Greygown’s day, what does that prove against his identity? Why
should not Count Fulk make slips as well as other people?
The date of the war is matter of guess-work. The S. Maxentian
chronicler’s “eo tempore” comes between 989 and 996, _i.e._ after
Geoffrey’s death. One can only conjecture that it should have come just
at the close of his life.
NOTE E.
THE GRANT OF MAINE TO GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.
That a grant of the county of Maine was made by Hugh Capet to a count
of Anjou is pretty clear from the later history; that the grant was
made to Geoffrey Greygown is not so certain. The story comes only from
the Angevin historians; and they seem to have systematically carried
back to the time of Greygown all the claims afterwards put forth by
the counts of Anjou to what did not belong to them. They evidently
knew nothing of his real history, so they used him as a convenient lay
figure on which to hang all pretensions that wanted a foundation and
all stories that wanted a hero, in total defiance of facts and dates.
They have transferred to him one exploit whose hero, if he was an
Angevin count at all, could only have been Fulk Nerra--the capture of
Melun in 999. An examination of this story will be more in place when
we come to the next count; but it rouses a suspicion that after all
Geoffrey may have had no more to do with Maine than with Melun.--The
story of the grant of Maine in the _Gesta Consulum_ (Marchegay,
_Comtes_, pp. 77, 78) stands thus: David, count of Maine, and Geoffrey,
count of Corbon, refuse homage to king Robert. The king summons his
barons to help him, among them the count of Anjou. The loyal Geoffrey
takes his rebel namesake’s castle of Mortagne and compels him to submit
to the king; David still holds out, whereupon Robert makes a formal
grant of “him and his Cenomannia” to Greygown and his heirs for ever.
On this M. l’abbé Voisin (_Les Cénomans anciens et modernes_, p. 337)
remarks: “Cette chronique renferme avec un fonds de vérité des détails
évidemment érronés; le Geoffroy d’Anjou, dont il est ici question,
n’est pas suffisamment connu. C’est à lui que Guillaume de Normandie
fait rendre hommage par son fils Robert; c’est lui, sans doute, qui,
suivant les historiens de Mayenne, fut seigneur de cette ville et
commanda quelque temps dans le Maine et l’Anjou, sous Louis d’Outremer;
au milieu d’une assemblée des comtes et des barons de son parti, Robert
l’aurait investi de ce qu’il possédait alors dans ces deux provinces.”
The Abbé’s story is quite as puzzling as the monk’s. His mention of
Robert of Normandy is inexplicable, for it can refer to nothing but
the homage of Robert Curthose to Geoffrey the Bearded in 1063. His
meaning, however, seems to be that the Geoffrey in question was not
Greygown at all, but another Geoffrey of whom he says in p. 353 that
he was son of Aubert of Lesser Maine, and “gouverneur d’Anjou et du
Maine, sous Louis IV. roi de France; il avait épousé une dame de la
maison de Bretagne, dont on ignore le nom; il eu eut trois fils; Juhel,
Aubert et Guérin; il mourut l’an 890.” This passage M. Voisin gives
as a quotation, but without a reference. He then goes on: “Nous avons
cherché précédemment à expliquer de quelle manière ce Geoffroi se
serait posé en rival de Hugues-David;” and he adds a note: “D’autres
aimeront peut-être mieux supposer une erreur de nom et de date dans la
Chronique” [what chronicle?] “et dire qu’il s’agit de Foulques-le-Bon.”
There is no need to “suppose”; a man who died in 890 could not be
count of anything under Louis IV. But where did M. Voisin find this
other Geoffrey, and how does his appearance mend the matter? He seems
to think the Gesta-writers have transferred this man’s doings to
their own hero Greygown, by restoring them to what he considers their
rightful owner he finds no difficulty in accepting the date, _temp._
King Robert. But the Abbé’s King Robert is not the Gesta-writers’ King
Robert. _He_ means Robert I., in 923; _they_ mean Robert II., though
no doubt they have confused the two. In default of evidence for M.
Voisin’s story we must take that of the _Gesta_ as it stands and see
what can be made of it.
In 923, the time of Robert I., Geoffrey Greygown was not born, and
Anjou was held by his grandfather Fulk the Red. In 996–1031, the time
of Robert II., Geoffrey was dead, and Anjou was held by his son Fulk
the Black. Moreover, according to M. Voisin, David of Maine died at
latest in 970, and Geoffrey of Corbon lived 1026–1040.
From all this it results:
1. If Maine was granted to a count of Anjou by Robert I., it was not to
Geoffrey Greygown.
2. If it was granted by Robert II., it was also not to Geoffrey.
3. If it was granted to Geoffrey, it can only have been by Hugh Capet.
There is one writer who does bring Hugh into the affair: “Electo
autem a Francis communi consilio, post obitum Lotharii, Hugone
Capet in regem ... cum regnum suum circuiret, Turonisque descendens
_Cenomannensibusque consulem imponeret_,” etc. (_Gesta Ambaz. Domin._,
Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 160). He does not say who this new count was,
but there can be little doubt it was the reigning count of Anjou; and
this, just after Hugh’s accession, would be Fulk Nerra. On the other
hand, the writer ignores Louis V. and makes Hugh succeed Lothar. Did
he mean to place these events in that year, 986–7, when Hugh was king
_de facto_ but not _de jure_? In that case the count would be Geoffrey
Greygown.
The compilers of the _Gesta_, however, simplify all these old claims
by stating that the king (_i.e._ the duke) gave Geoffrey a sort
of carte-blanche to take and keep anything he could get: “dedit
Gosfrido comiti quidquid Rex Lotarius in episcopatibus suis habuerat,
Andegavensi scilicet et Cenomannensi. Si qua vero alia ipse vel
successores sui adquirere poterant, eâ libertate quâ ipse tenebat sibi
commendata concessit.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 76.
[Illustration: Map II.
GAUL c. 1027.
Key: _Fulk the Black_
_Odo II._
_Royal Domain_
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]