CHAPTER IV.
ANJOU AND NORMANDY.
1044–1128.

The history of Anjou during the sixty years comprised in our last chapter groups itself around the figure of Fulk the Black. The period on which we are now to enter has no such personal centre of unity; its interest and its significance lie in the drama itself rather than in its actors; yet the drama has a centre which is living to this day. The city of Le Mans still stands, as it stood in Geoffrey Martel’s day and had stood for a thousand years before him, on the long narrow brow of a red sandstone rock which rises abruptly from the left bank of the Sarthe and widens out into the higher ground to the north and east:—a situation not unlike that of Angers on its black rock above the Mayenne. The city itself and the county of Maine, of which it was the capital, both took their names from a tribe known to the Romans as Aulerci Cenomanni, a branch of the great race of the Aulerci who occupied central Gaul in its earliest recorded days. Alike in legend and in history the Cenomanni are closely linked to Rome. One branch of them formed, according to Roman tradition, a portion of a band of Gallic emigrants who in the mythical days of the Tarquins wandered down through the Alpine passes into the valleys and plains of northern Italy, made themselves a new home on the banks of Padus, where afterwards grew up the towns of Brixia and Verona,[440] and became devoted allies of Rome.[441] When the last struggle for freedom was over in Gaul, few spots took the impress of Rome more deeply or kept it more abidingly than the home of their Transalpine brethren, the “Aulerci Cenomanni whose city to the east is Vindinum.”[442] The remains of the walls and gates of a Roman castrum which succeeded the primeval hill-fortress of Vindinum or Le Mans are only now at last giving way to the destruction, not of time, but of modern utilitarianism. Far into the middle ages, long after Le Mans had outgrown its narrow Roman limits and spread down to a second line of fortifications close to the water’s edge, one part of the city on the height still kept the name of “Ancient Rome.”[443] The wondrous cathedral which now rises in the north-eastern corner of the city, towering high above the river and the double line of walls, stands, if we may trust its foundation-legend, on the very site of the prætorium; when the Cross followed in the train of the eagles, Defensor, the governor of the city, gave up his palace for the site of a church whose original dedication to the Blessed Virgin and S. Peter has long been superseded by the name of its founder S. Julian, a missionary bishop ordained and sent to Gaul by S. Clement of Rome.[444] Defensor is probably only a personification of the official defensor civitatis, the local tribune of the people under the later Roman Empire; but the state of things of which the legend is an idealized picture left its traces on the real relations of Church and state at Le Mans. After the Frankish conquest bishop and people together formed a power which more than matched that of the local lieutenant of the Merovingian kings; a decree of Clovis, confirmed by his grandson Childebert III., enacted that no count of Le Mans should be appointed without their consent.[445] Under the early Karolingians Le Mans seems to have held for a short time the rank afterwards taken by Angers as the chief stronghold of the Breton border; local tradition claims as its first hereditary count that “Roland, prefect of the Breton march,” who is more generally known as the hero of Roncevaux.[446] However this may be, the “duchy of Cenomannia” figures prominently in various grants of territory on the western border made to members of the Imperial house.[447] In the civil wars which followed the death of Louis the Gentle it suffered much from the ravages of Lothar;[448] and it underwent a far worse ordeal a few years later, when the traitor count Lambert of Anjou led both Bretons and northmen into the heart of central Gaul. The sack of Le Mans by Lambert and Nomenoë in 850[449] was avenged some years later when the traitor fell by the sword of Count Gauzbert of Maine;[450] but in 851 Charles the Bald was compelled to cede the western part of the Cenomannian duchy to the Breton king Herispoë;[451] the northern foes who had first come in the train of the Bretons swept over Maine again and again; and it was in making their way back to the sea after one of these raids by the old Roman road from Le Mans to Nantes that they entrapped Robert the Brave to his death at the bridge of Sarthe. The treaty of Clair-sur-Epte left Maine face to face with the northman settled upon her northern border; and in 924 a grant of the overlordship of the county was extorted by Hrolf from King Rudolf of Burgundy. In the hands of Hrolf’s most famous descendant the claim thus given was to become a formidable reality; at the moment however its force was neutralized by another grant made in the same year by Charles the Simple, which placed Maine together with the rest of Neustria under the jurisdiction of Hugh the Great.[452] In vain the counts of Le Mans strove to ignore or defy the house of France and that of Anjou, to which, as we have seen, the ducal claims over Maine were soon delegated. All their efforts were paralyzed by the opposing influence of that other officer in their state whose authority was of older date as well as loftier character than theirs, who held his commission by unbroken descent alike from the Cæsars and from the Apostles, and who had once at least been distinctly acknowledged as the equal, if not the superior, of his temporal colleague. The bishops were the nominees of the king, and therefore the champions of French and Angevin interests at Le Mans. In the last years of the tenth century and the early part of the eleventh, two of them in succession, an uncle and nephew named Sainfred and Avesgaud, were members of the house of Bellême who owned the borderlands of Perche, Séez and Alençon, between France and Normandy, who were never loyal to either neighbour, and whose name, as we have already seen, was one day to become a by-word for turbulent wickedness both in Normandy and in England. Sainfred was said to have owed his bishopric to Fulk Nerra’s influence with the king;[453] Avesgaud’s life was passed between building, hunting, and quarrelling with Count Herbert Wake-dog. Herbert’s military capacities, proved on the field of Pontlevoy, enabled him to stand his ground;[454] but very soon after his death Fulk’s dealings with Maine and its bishop began to bear fruit. Fulk survived both Herbert and Avesgaud. The count of Maine died in the prime of life in 1036,[455] leaving as his heir a son named Hugh, who, on pretext of his extreme youth, was set aside by a great-uncle, Herbert surnamed Bacco. Bishop Avesgaud, too, had died a few months before, and his office passed a second time from uncle to nephew in the person of his sister’s son, Gervase of Château-du-Loir.[456] The selection of a third prelate from the hated house of Bellême was in itself enough to excite the count’s wrath; Herbert Bacco moreover had a special reason for jealousy—the young nephew whose rights he had usurped was a godson of Gervase. For two years Herbert contrived to keep the new bishop out of Le Mans altogether; at the end of that time he admitted him, but no sooner were the rival rulers established side by side than their strife became as bitter and ceaseless as that of Herbert Wake-dog and Avesgaud. Gervase looked for help to the king, who, whether as king or as duke of the French, was patron and advocate of the see; but there was no help to be got from the feeble, selfish Henry I. of France. Despair hurried the bishop into a rasher step than any that his uncle had ever taken. Thinking that a less exalted protector, and one nearer to the spot and more directly interested, would be of more practical use, he besought King Henry to grant the patronage and advocacy of the see of Le Mans to Count Geoffrey of Anjou for his life.[457]

As soon as the grant was made, Gervase “took counsel with the people of the diocese and the brave men of the land,”[458] and headed a revolution by which Herbert Bacco was expelled and the boy Hugh set in his place. The bishop’s next step was to seek a wife for his godson. Twelve years before, a band of Bretons, called by Hugh’s father to aid him against Bishop Avesgaud and Fulk of Anjou, had made a raid upon Blois and carried off Count Odo’s daughter Bertha to become the wife of Duke Alan of Britanny.[459] It was this Bertha, now a widow and a fugitive from Rennes, whence she was driven by her brother-in-law after her husband’s death,[460] whom Gervase now wedded to Hugh. Such a choice was not likely to conciliate Geoffrey Martel; all the less if—as some words of a local historian seem to imply—the daughter of Odo of Blois was gifted with all the courage and energy that were lacking in her brothers.[461] By some of the usual Angevin arts Geoffrey entrapped Gervase into his power and cast him into prison,[462] where for the next seven years the luckless bishop was left to reflect upon the consequences of his short-sighted policy and to perceive that in striving to secure a protector against Herbert Bacco he had placed himself and his country at the mercy of an unscrupulous tyrant. During those years Maine, nominally ruled by the young Count Hugh, was really in the power of Geoffrey Martel, and it became the scene of a fierce warfare between Anjou and Normandy. In 1049 the Council of Reims threatened Geoffrey with excommunication unless he released the captive prelate,[463] and next year the excommunication was actually pronounced by the Pope;[464] but neither Council nor Pope could turn the Angevin from his prey. About 1051 Hugh died, and his death sealed the fate of Le Mans. Its count’s son was an infant, its bishop a captive in an Angevin dungeon; its citizens had no choice but to submit. The twice-widowed countess and her children were driven out at one gate as the Hammer of Anjou knocked at the other, and without striking a blow Geoffrey became acknowledged master of Maine from thenceforth till the day of his death.[465] Gervase, his spirit broken at last, purchased his release by the surrender of Château-du-Loir, and by a solemn oath never again to set foot in Le Mans so long as Geoffrey lived. He found a refuge at the court of Duke William of Normandy, till in 1057 he was raised to the metropolitan chair of Reims.[466] In his former episcopal city the oppressor triumphed undisturbed; but the day of retribution had already dawned.

The tide of fortune which had borne Geoffrey Martel on from victory to victory spent its last wave in carrying him to the brow of the Cenomannian hill. The acquisition of Le Mans was the last outward mark of his success; the height of his real security had been passed three years before. The turning-point of Geoffrey’s life was the year 1044. The settlement of Poitou, the winning of Tours, the capture of Bishop Gervase, all followed close upon each other; and for the next four years the count of Anjou was beyond all question the second power in the kingdom. No one save the duke of Normandy could claim to stand on a level with the lord of the Angevin march, of Touraine and Saintonge, the step-father and guardian of the boy-duke of Aquitaine, the virtual master of Maine. It was with the duke of Normandy that Geoffrey’s last conquest now brought him into collision. His head had been turned by his easy and rapid successes; in 1048, on his return from an expedition to Apulia in company with his wife’s son-in-law the Emperor,[467] he set himself up against King Henry with a boastful insolence which threatened to disturb the peace of the whole realm.[468] Five years earlier, Henry had profited by the feud between Anjou and Blois to win Geoffrey’s help in putting down the rebellion of Theobald; now he profited by the jealousy which the state of Cenomannian affairs was just beginning to create between Anjou and Normandy to win the help of the Norman Duke William in putting down the rebellion of Geoffrey. The king’s own operations against Anjou seem to have extended no further than a successful siege of the castle of Moulinières;[469] after this his conduct towards William seems to have been copied from that of his parents towards Fulk the Black three and twenty years before. William, like Fulk, was left to fight the royal battles single-handed; and to William, as to Fulk, the task was welcome, for the battle was in truth less the king’s than his own. Geoffrey Martel, in the pride of his heart, had openly proclaimed his ambition to crown all his previous triumphs by an encounter with the only warrior whom he deigned to regard as a foeman worthy of his steel,[470] and had diligently used all the opportunities for provoking a quarrel with the Norman which the dependent position of Maine furnished but too readily. Either by force or guile, or that judicious mixture of both in which the Angevin house excelled, he had managed to get into his own hands the two keys of Normandy’s southern frontier, the castles of Alençon and Domfront, which guarded the valleys of the Sarthe and the Mayenne;[471] and thence, across the debateable lands of Bellême, he was now carrying his raids into undisputed Norman territory.[472]

In the autumn of 1048 William set out to dislodge the intruder from Domfront. It was no light undertaking. The ruined keep which still stands, a splendid fragment, on the top of a steep wall-like pile of grey rock, the last spur of a ridge of hills sweeping round from the east, with the town and the dark woods at its back and the little stream of Varenne winding close round its foot, may tell something of what the castle was when its walls stood foursquare, fresh from the builder’s hand, and manned by the fierce moss-troopers of Bellême, reinforced by a band of picked soldiers from Anjou.[473] The rock itself was an impregnable fortress of nature’s own making. To horsemen it was totally inaccessible; foot-soldiers could only scale it by two narrow and difficult paths. Assault was hopeless; William’s only chance lay in a blockade, and even this was an enterprise of danger as well as difficulty, for Domfront stood in the heart of a dense woodland amid which the Normans were continually exposed to the ambushes and surprises of the foe. To William however the forest was simply a hunting-ground through which he rode day after day, with hawk on wrist, in scornful defiance of its hidden perils, while the siege was pressed closer and closer all through the winter’s snows, till at last the garrison were driven to call upon Geoffrey Martel for relief.[474] What followed reads like an anticipation of the story of Prestonpans as told in Jacobite song. If we may trust the Norman tale, Geoffrey not only answered the call, but sent his trumpeter with a formal challenge to the young duke of the Normans to meet him on the morrow at break of day beneath the walls of Domfront. But when the sun rose on that morrow, Geoffrey and all his host were gone.[475] Duke William’s chaplain, who tells the tale, could see but one obvious explanation of their departure; and it is impossible to contradict him, for the whole campaign of 1048 is a blank in the pages of the Angevin chroniclers. The Hammer of Anjou stands charged with having challenged Duke William at eventide and run away from him before sunrise, and no Angevin voice seems ever to have been lifted to deny or palliate the charge. He had scarcely turned his back when Alençon fell; and its fall was quickly followed by that of Domfront. William carried away his engines of war to set them up again on undisputed Cenomannian ground, at Ambrières on the Mayenne: still Geoffrey made no movement; William laid the foundations of a castle on the river-bank at Ambrières, and leaving it securely guarded marched home unmolested to Rouen.[476]