It was probably about the same time that the treaty with Flanders, the corner-stone of the league which Richard was forming against the king of France, was signed within the walls of the new fortress.[1903] Yet, as has been already seen, the coalition was not fully organized till late in the following summer; and even then the complicated weapon hung fire. Want of money seems to have been Richard’s chief difficulty, now as ever—a difficulty which after Hubert Walter’s defeat in the council at Oxford and his resignation in the following July must have seemed well-nigh insurmountable. At last, however, in the spring of 1199, a ray of hope came from a quarter where it was wholly unexpected. Richard was leading his mercenaries through Poitou to check the viscount of Limoges and the count of Angoulême in a renewal of their treasonable designs[1904] when he was met by rumours of a marvellous discovery at Châlus in the Limousin. A peasant working on the land of Achard, the lord of Châlus, was said to have turned up with his plough a treasure[1905] which popular imagination pictured as nothing less than “an emperor with his wife, sons and daughters, all of pure gold, and seated round a golden table.”[1906] In vain did Achard seek to keep his secret and his prize to himself. Treasure-trove was a right of the overlord, and it seems to have been at once claimed by the viscount Ademar of Limoges, as Achard’s immediate superior. His claim, however, had to give way to that of his own overlord, King Richard; but when he sent to the king the share which he had himself wrung from Achard, Richard indignantly rejected it, vowing that he would have all. This Achard and Ademar both refused, and the king laid siege to Châlus.[1907]

This place, not far from the western border of the Limousin, is now represented by two villages, known conjointly as Châlus-Chabrol, and built upon the summits of two low hills, at whose foot winds the little stream of Tardoire. Each hill is crowned by a round tower of late twelfth-century work; the lower one is traditionally said to be the keep of the fortress besieged by Richard with all his forces at Mid-Lent 1199.[1908] In vain did Achard, who was utterly unprepared to stand a siege, protest his innocence and offer to submit to the judgement of the French king’s court, as supreme alike over the duke of Aquitaine and over his vassals; in vain did he beg for a truce till the holy season should be past; in vain, when the outworks were almost wholly destroyed and the keep itself undermined,[1909] did he ask leave to surrender with the honours of war for himself and his men. Richard was inexorable; he swore that he would hang them all.[1910] With the courage that is born of despair, Achard, accompanied by six knights and nine serving-men, retired into the keep, determined to hold it until death.[1911] All that day—Friday, March 26[1912]—Richard and his lieutenant Mercadier, the captain of his mercenaries,[1913] prowled vainly round the walls, seeking for a point at which they could assault them with safety.[1914] Their sappers were all the while undermining the tower.[1915] Its defenders, finding themselves short of missiles, began throwing down beams of wood and fragments of the broken battlements at the miners’ heads.[1916] They were equally short of defensive arms; one of the little band stood for more than half the day upon a turret, with nothing but a frying-pan for a shield against the bolts which flew whistling all around him, yet failed to drive him from his post.[1917] At last the moment came for which he had been waiting so long and so bravely. Just as Richard, unarmed save for his iron head-piece, paused within bow-shot of the turret, this man caught sight of an arrow which had been shot at himself from the besieging ranks—seemingly, indeed, by Richard’s own hand—and had stuck harmlessly in a crevice of the wall within his reach. He snatched it out, fitted it to his cross-bow, and aimed at the king.[1918] Richard saw the movement and greeted it with a shout of defiant applause; he failed to shelter himself under his buckler; the arrow struck him on the left shoulder, just below the joint of the neck, and glancing downwards penetrated deep into his side.[1919] He made light of the wound,[1920] gave strict orders to Mercadier to press the assault with redoubled vigour,[1921] and rode back to his tent as if nothing was amiss.[1922] There he rashly tried to pull out the arrow with his own hand.[1923] The wood broke off, the iron barb remained fixed in the wound; a surgeon attached to the staff of Mercadier was sent for, and endeavoured to cut it out; unluckily, Richard was fat like his father, and the iron, buried deep in his flesh, was so difficult to reach that the injuries caused by the operator’s knife proved more dangerous than that which had been inflicted by the shaft of the hostile crossbow-man.[1924] The wounded side grew more swollen and inflamed day by day; the patient’s constitutional restlessness, aggravated as it was by pain, made matters worse;[1925] and at last mortification set in.[1926]

Then Richard, face to face with death, came to his better self once more, and prepared calmly and bravely for his end. Until then he had suffered no one to enter the chamber where he lay save four barons whom he specially trusted, lest the report of his sickness should be bruited about,[1927] to discourage his friends or to rejoice his foes. Now, he summoned all of his followers who were within reach to witness his solemn bequest of all his dominions to his brother John, and made them swear fealty to John as his successor.[1928] He wrote to his mother, who was at Fontevraud, requesting her to come to him;[1929] he bequeathed his jewels to his nephew King Otto, and a fourth part of his treasures to be distributed among his servants and the poor.[1930] By this time Châlus was taken and its garrison hung, according to his earlier orders—all save the man who had shot him, and who had apparently been reserved for his special judgement. Richard ordered the man to be brought before him. “What have I done to thee,” he asked him, “that thou shouldest slay me?” “Thou hast slain my father and two of my brothers with thine own hand, and thou wouldst fain have killed me too. Avenge thyself upon me as thou wilt; I will gladly endure the greatest torments which thou canst devise, since I have seen thee upon thy death-bed.” “I forgive thee,” answered Richard, and he bade the guards loose him and let him go free with a gift of a hundred shillings.[1931] The story went that Richard had not communicated for nearly seven years, because he could not put himself in charity with Philip.[1932] Now, on the eleventh day after his wound—April 6, the Tuesday in Passion-week[1933]—he made his confession to one of his chaplains, and received the Holy Communion. His soul being thus at peace, he gave directions for the disposal of his body. It was to be embalmed; the brain and some of the internal organs were to be buried in the ancient Poitevin abbey of Charroux; the heart was to be deposited in the Norman capital, where it had always found a loyal response; the corpse itself was to be laid, in token of penitence, at his father’s feet in the abbey-church of Fontevraud.[1934] Lastly, he received extreme unction; and then, “as the day drew to its close, his day of life also came to its end.”[1935] His friends buried him as he had wished. S. Hugh of Lincoln, now at Angers on his way to protest against a fresh spoliation of his episcopal property, came to seal his forgiveness by performing the last rites of the Church over this second grave at Fontevraud,[1936] where another Angevin king was thus “shrouded among the shrouded women”—his own mother, doubtless, in their midst.[1937] He was laid to sleep in the robes which he had worn on his last crowning-day in England, five years before.[1938] His heart was enclosed in a gold and silver casket, carried to Rouen, and solemnly deposited by the clergy among the holy relics in their cathedral church;[1939] and men saw in its unusual size[1940] a fit token of the mighty spirit of him whom Normandy never ceased to venerate as Richard Cœur-de-Lion.

CHAPTER IX.
THE FALL OF THE ANGEVINS.
1199–1206.