Baldwin II., who died in the year 918, was buried in the Abbey Church at Blandinium.
The circumstances which led to his interment there are sufficiently curious. They had at first laid him alongside his father at St. Omer, but when his widow Alfrida, who wished to share her lord’s grave, was informed by the abbot of that monastery that his rule forbade him to admit even a dead woman within the precincts of his cloister, she gave orders that Baldwin’s remains should be translated to Blandinium, where they buried him with much solemnity in ædicula Parentis Virginis, and where she herself was laid to rest eleven years later.
CHAPTER III
Arnulph the Great
SOME six years before the death of Baldwin Calvus, his suzerain, Charles the Mild, had endeavoured to buy off Rolf the Ganger, a pirate chief who about this time had carved out for himself ‘a sphere of influence’ along Seine, with an offer of Baldwin’s fief. But Baldwin meanwhile had got wind of the plot, had set his house in order, had strengthened his border towns. Rolf refused to exchange the land which his sword had won for a less advantageous holding, which perhaps he might never obtain, and the famous treaty of Claire-sur-Epte was the outcome of his common sense.