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]

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.

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.

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.

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]