London, Macmillan & Co.

We may set aside the temporary annexation of Aquitaine through the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor as forming no part of this process of absorption. In the plans of Louis VI. it was doubtless meant to be a very important part; but as a matter of fact, its historical importance proved to be of a wholly different kind. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor contributed to the final acquisition of Guienne and Gascony by the French Crown not a whit more than the marriage of Geoffrey Martel and Agnes had contributed to their acquisition by the house of Anjou. The Parisian king, like his Angevin follower of old, had work to do on his own side of the Loire before he might safely attempt the conquest of the south. By the middle of the century, the map of Gaul had undergone a marked transformation. Its eastern and central portions indeed remained unchanged; but the western half was utterly metamorphosed. Its four great divisions had been virtually swept away, and the whole land had become Angevin. In face of this altered state of things, the remaining powers of northern Gaul were of necessity driven into union, as a counterpoise to this enormous growth of Anjou; and the only possible centre of union, alike in a political and a geographical point of view, was the king of the French. He alone could claim to match in rank and dignity the crowned masters of the west; and under his leadership alone was it possible to face them all along the line from the mouth of the Somme to the source of the Cher with a front as unbroken as their own. The old Angevin march had ceased to be a marchland at all; its original character was now transferred to the counties of Chartres and Blois; while to north and south of these, from Nonancourt to Aumale and along the whole course of the Cher above Vierzon, the royal domain itself was the sole bulwark of north-eastern Gaul against the advancing power of Anjou. To secure Chartres and Blois was the first necessity for the king: but their counts needed his protection even more than he needed their fidelity, for the whole width of his domains parted them from Champagne, where the bulk of their strength lay. Accordingly Louis VII., by the matrimonial alliances which he formed first for his daughters and lastly for himself with the house of Blois and Champagne, easily succeeded in binding them to a community of personal interests with the royal house of France, whereby their subservience to the French Crown was for the future secured. The chain was too strong to be broken by the boyish wilfulness of Philip Augustus; and from the moment of his reconciliation with his mother and uncles in 1180, the whole military and political strength of Blois, Chartres and Champagne may be reckoned at his command as unreservedly as that of his own immediate domains.

Since that time, the royal power had made an important advance to the northward. At the opening of Philip’s reign the dominions of the count of Flanders stretched from the Channel to the borders of Champagne, covered the whole northern frontier of the royal domain, and touched that of Normandy at its junction with Ponthieu. Twelve years later, more than half this territory had passed, either by cession or by conquest, into the hands of the king. Vermandois was given up to him in 1186; and in 1191 the death of the Flemish count Philip made him master of all Flanders south of the river Lys, which had been promised to him as the dowry of his first queen, Elizabeth of Hainaut, niece of the dead count and daughter of his successor.[1805] This was in several respects a most valuable acquisition. Not only did it bring to the Crown a considerable accession of territory, including the whole upper valley of the Somme, the famous fortress of Péronne, and the flourishing towns of Amiens and Arras; but the power of Flanders, which a few years before had threatened to overshadow every other power in northern Gaul, was completely broken; and the effect upon the political position of Normandy was more important still. While Vermandois and Amiens were in Flemish hands, a league between the Flemish count and the ruler of Normandy would at any moment not only place the whole north-western border of France at their mercy, but would enable them to call in the forces of the imperial Crown to a junction which the French king could have no power to hinder, and which must almost certainly lead to his ruin. Now, on the other hand, such a junction was rendered well-nigh impossible; the whole territory between Normandy, Ponthieu and the German border was in the king’s own hands, and all that was left of Flanders lay in almost complete isolation between the Lys and the sea. In fine, as the dukes of Burgundy had for several generations been obedient followers of their royal kinsmen, now that Blois, Champagne and Vermandois were all secured, the power and influence of the French Crown north of the Loire was fully a match in territorial extent for that of the house of Anjou. South of the Loire the balance was less equal. The extensive possessions of the house of S. Gilles may indeed be left out of both scales; their homage for Toulouse was now secured to the dukes of Aquitaine, but it was a mere formality which left them practically still independent of both their rival overlords. It was indeed at the expense of Toulouse that the Angevin rulers of Poitou had made their last conquest, that of the Quercy. But since then the French king, too, had been gaining territory in Aquitaine; and his gains were made at the expense of the Poitevin duke. Richard had found it needful to buy Philip’s assent to his peaceful entrance upon his ancestral heritage after his father’s death by a renunciation of all claims upon Auvergne and a cession of two important lordships in Berry, Graçay and Issoudun.[1806] The sacrifice was trifling in itself, but it was significant. It marked Richard’s own consciousness that a turning-point had come in the career of his house. Hitherto they had gone steadily forward; now it was time to draw back. The aggressive attitude which had been habitual to the counts of Anjou for nearly three hundred years must be dropped at last. Henceforth they were to stand on the defensive in their turn against the advance of the French Crown.

It was not the strength of that advance itself which made it so formidable to Richard; it was the knowledge that, side by side with the process of consolidation in France, there had been and still was going on in the Angevin dominions a process of disintegration which his father had been unable to check, and against which he himself was well-nigh helpless. The French monarchy was built up around one definite centre, a centre round which all the subordinate parts of the structure grouped themselves unquestioningly as a matter of course. Paris and its king, even when his practical authority was at the lowest ebb, had always been in theory the accepted rallying-point of the whole kingdom, the acknowledged head of the body politic, none of whose members had ever dreamed of establishing any other in its place. But the empire of Richard Cœur-de-Lion had no centre; or rather, it had three or four rival ones. In Angevin eyes its centre was Angers; in Norman eyes it was Rouen; to the men of the south, it was Poitiers. Even Henry Fitz-Empress had felt at times the difficulty of fulfilling two such opposite parts as those of duke of Normandy and count of Anjou without rousing the jealous resentment of either country against himself as the representative of the other; while as for Britanny and Aquitaine, he had only been able to keep an uncertain hold over them by sheer force, until Britanny was appeased by the marriage of Constance, and Aquitaine subdued by the vigour of Richard. But for Richard in his father’s place the difficulty was far greater. Chafe as they might against the yoke which bound them together—dispute as they might over their respective shares in their common ruler and their respective claims upon him—neither Angevin nor Norman could fail to recognize his own natural sovereign and national representative in the son of Geoffrey and Matilda. But the chances of this recognition being extended to the next generation expired with the young king. If the two Henrys were strangers in Britanny and in Aquitaine, yet on the banks of the Seine, the Loire and the Mayenne they were felt to be at home. But Richard was at home nowhere, though he was master everywhere, from the Solway to the Pyrenees. His Aquitanian subjects for the most part, if they counted him as a fellow-countryman, counted him none the less as an enemy; his subjects north of Loire counted him as a southern stranger. Normans and Angevins still saw in him, as they had been taught to see in him for the first twenty-six years of his life, the representative not of Hrolf and William or of Fulk the Red and Geoffrey Martel, but simply of his mother’s Poitevin ancestors. The Bretons saw in him the son of their conqueror, asserting his supremacy over them and their young native prince only by the right of the stronger. As Suger had laid it down as an axiom, more than half a century ago, that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen nor French over English,” so now we begin to discern growing up in Richard’s continental dominions a feeling that Normans should not rule over Angevins, nor Angevins over Normans, nor either over Bretons and Poitevins, nor Poitevins over any of the rest; and that if one and all must needs submit to the loss of their ancient independence, it would be more natural and less humiliating to lay it down at the feet of the prince who had always been acknowledged in theory as the superior of all alike, the king of the French.

This feeling, however, had scarcely come into existence, much less risen to the surface of politics, when Philip Augustus came home from the Crusade at Christmas 1191. It is scarcely probable that any plan of actual conquest had as yet taken shape in Philip’s mind. But the very audacity of the demand which he made upon the credulity of the Norman constables when in the following spring he asked them to believe that Richard had ceded to him not only the whole Vexin, but also the counties of Aumale and Eu—a cession for which there was not a shadow of reason either in past history or in present circumstances, and which if carried into effect would have cut off the Norman communications with Ponthieu and Flanders, and given him at once a foothold upon the Channel and an invaluable coign of vantage for an attempt upon Rouen—seems to indicate that he was already forming some more definite design against the Angevins’ power than the simple system of lying in wait to steal from them any territorial or political advantage that could be stolen with impunity, with which he, like his father, had hitherto been content. The terms of his treaty with John in the following year point still more strongly in the same direction. As the price of John’s investiture with the rest of his brother’s dominions, Philip reserved to himself the whole Norman territory on the right bank of the Seine, except the city of Rouen; on the left bank, nearly half the viscounty of Evreux, including the castles of Vaudreuil, Verneuil and Ivry; and from the older Angevin patrimony, all that was most worth having in Touraine—Tours itself, Azay, Montbazon, Montrichard, Amboise and Loches—besides the transfer of the Angevin fiefs in the Vendômois from the count of Anjou to the count of Blois.[1807] Owing to the disorganized state of Richard’s dominions caused by his captivity, Philip’s endeavours to carry this bargain into effect by conquering Normandy in John’s interest and his own met for a while with considerable success. His first attempt at invasion was indeed repulsed by the Norman barons under the leadership of Earl Robert of Leicester;[1808] but a few weeks later treason opened to him the gates of Gisors and Neaufle; the rest of the Vexin was easily won,[1809] and secured thus against attack in his rear, he marched northward to the capture of Aumale and Eu.[1810] Thence he turned back to besiege Rouen, but soon retreated again into his own territories,[1811] taking Pacy and Ivry on his way.[1812] In July, finding that, according to his own phrase, the Angevin demon was after all to be let loose upon him once more, he thought it advisable to accept Richard’s overtures of peace; and Richard on his part—being still in prison—deemed it wise for the moment to sanction the French king’s recent conquests in Normandy and the liberation of Ademar of Angoulême, and also to let Philip have temporary possession of Loches, Châtillon-sur-Indre, Driencourt and Arques, as pledges for the payment of twenty thousand marks, due within two years of his own release.[1813]

Whether he intended to keep or to break these engagements is practically no matter; for, if he meant to break them, Philip took care to anticipate him. Seven months after the treaty was signed he again crossed the Norman border, took Evreux,[1814] which he handed over to John’s custody,[1815] and marched up by way of Neubourg and Vaudreuil, both of which he captured, to besiege Rouen. Thence, however, he again retired—scared, it may be, by tidings of Richard’s approach—and hurrying back to the southern border laid siege to Verneuil on May 10.[1816] Two days later Richard landed at Barfleur,[1817] and by the end of another fortnight he was encamped at L’Aigle,[1818] within a few miles of Verneuil. His presence there, coupled with the defection of John who had contrived to join him on the road,[1819] and the surprise and slaughter of the French garrison of Evreux by a body of Norman troops,[1820] alarmed Philip so much that on Whitsun Eve, May 28, he again fled into his own dominions.[1821] Richard was busy strengthening the walls of Verneuil when tidings came to him that “the Angevins and Cenomannians” were besieging Montmirail,[1822] a castle on the borders of Perche and Maine, famous as the scene of a stormy conference between Henry II. and S. Thomas. Who the besiegers actually were, or what was the ground of their hostility either to William of Montmirail[1823] or to his overlord King Richard, must remain undecided. It is plain, however, that in Richard’s ears the tidings sounded as a warning of disaffection in his patrimonial dominions. He hurried to the relief of Montmirail, but found it levelled with the ground.[1824] He wasted no time in pursuit of its destroyers, but pushed on direct to Tours, took up his quarters in Châteauneuf,[1825] and shewed his suspicions concerning the origin of the new mischief by driving the canons of S. Martin out of the abbey where they dwelt under the special protection of the French king.[1826] The burghers, on the other hand, made proof of their loyalty by a free-will offering of two thousand marks.[1827] Determined now to redeem his pledges to Philip not with gold but with steel, Richard marched on to Beaulieu,[1828] to join a body of Navarrese and Brabantines, sent by his brother-in-law Sancho of Navarre, in blockading the castle of Loches;[1829] a few days after his arrival, on June 13, it was surrendered by its French garrison.[1830] He was however standing between two fires. Bertrand de Born was again stirring up the south, singing and fighting ostensibly in Richard’s interest against his disaffected neighbours in the Limousin, but in reality kindling into a fresh blaze all the reckless passions and endless feuds which had been smouldering too long for the warrior-poet’s pleasure.[1831] Philip meanwhile was again threatening Rouen;[1832] the Norman archbishop and seneschal attempted to negotiate with him in Richard’s name, but without result;[1833] and at the end of the month he marched southward to meet Richard himself. On July 4 the two kings were within a few miles of each other—Richard at Vendôme, Philip at Fréteval.[1834] What followed is told so diversely by the English and French historians of the time that it seems impossible to reconcile the rival accounts or to decide between them. All that we know for certain is that Philip suddenly struck his tents and withdrew into the territories of the count of Blois; that Richard set off in pursuit, missed Philip himself, but fell at unawares upon the troops who were convoying his baggage towards Blois, routed them, and captured all the French king’s most precious possessions, including his royal seal and the treasury-rolls of the whole kingdom, besides a number of valuable horses, an immense quantity of money and plate, and—what would be scarcely less useful to Richard for political purposes—the charters of agreement between Philip and all the Norman, Angevin and Poitevin rebels who had plotted treason with him and John against their lord.[1835]