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]

The century of preparation and transition was over; the great change was accomplished, not to be undone again for eight hundred years. The first period of strictly French history and the first period of Angevin history close together. The rulers of the marchland had begun to shew that they were not to be confined within the limits which nature itself might seem to have fixed for them; they had stretched a hand beyond their two river-boundaries, and they had begun to cast their eyes northward and dream of a claim which was to have yet more momentous results. In the last years of Geoffrey Greygown we trace a foreshadowing of the wonderful career which his successor is to begin. From the shadow we pass to its realization; with the new king and the new count we enter upon a new era.

Note A.
ON THE SOURCES AND AUTHENTICITY OF EARLY ANGEVIN HISTORY.

Our only detailed account of the early Angevins, down to Geoffrey Greygown, is contained in two books: the Gesta Consulum Andegavensium, by John, monk of Marmoutier, and the Historia Comitum Andegavensium, which goes under the name of Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches. Both these works were written in the latter part of the twelfth century; and they may be practically regarded as one, for the latter is in reality only an abridgement of the former, with a few slight variations. The Gesta Consulum is avowedly a piece of patchwork. The author in his “Proœmium” tells us that it is founded on the work of a certain Abbot Odo which had been recast by Thomas Pactius, prior of Loches, and to which he himself, John of Marmoutier, had made further additions from sundry other sources which he enumerates (Marchegay, Comtes d’Anjou, p. 353. This “Proœmium” is there printed at the head of the Historia Abbreviata instead of the Gesta Consulum, to which, however, it really belongs; see M. Mabille’s introduction, ib. p. xxxi.). The Historia Comitum Andegavensium (ib. p. 320) bears the name of Thomas of Loches, and thus professes to be the earlier version on which John worked. But it is now known that the work of Thomas, which still exists in MS., is totally distinct from that published under his name (see M. Mabille’s introduction to Comtes d’Anjou, pp. xviii., xix.), and, moreover, that the printed Historia Comitum is really a copy of a series of extracts from Ralf de Diceto’s Abbreviationes Chronicorum—extracts which Ralf himself had taken from the Gesta Consulum (see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to R. Diceto, vol. ii. pp. xxiii.–xxix). There is, however, one other source of information about the early Angevins which, if its author was really what he professed to be, is of somewhat earlier date and far higher value, although of very small extent. This is the fragment of the Angevin History which goes under the name of Count Fulk Rechin. Its authorship has been questioned, but it has never been disproved; and one thing at least is certain—the writer, whoever he may have been, had some notion of historical and chronological possibilities, whereas John of Marmoutier had none. Fulk Rechin (as we must for the present call him, without stopping to decide whether he has a right to the name) gives a negative testimony against all John’s stories about the earlier members of the Angevin house. He pointedly states that he knows nothing about the first three counts (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376), and he makes no mention of anybody before Ingelger. Now, supposing he really was Count Fulk IV. of Anjou, it is fairly safe to assume that if anything had been known about his own forefathers he would have been more likely to know it than a monk who wrote nearly a hundred years later. On the other hand, if he was a twelfth-century forger, such a daring avowal of ignorance, put into the mouth of such a personage, shews the writer’s disregard of the tales told by the monk, and can only have been intended to give them the lie direct.

The two first members of the Angevin house, then—Tortulf of Rennes and his son Tertullus—rest solely on the evidence of these two late writers. Their accounts are not recommended by intrinsic probability. We are roused to suspicion by the very first sentence of the Gesta Consulum:—“Fuit vir quidam de Armoricâ Galliâ, nomine Torquatius. Iste a Britonibus, proprietatem vetusti ac Romani nominis ignorantibus, corrupto vocabulo Tortulfus dictus fuit” (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 35). When one finds that his son is called Tertullus, it is impossible not to suspect that “Torquatius” and “Tertullus” are only two different attempts to Latinize a genuine Teutonic “Tortulf.” For the lives of these personages John of Marmoutier gives no distinct dates; but he tells us that Torquatius was made Forester of Nid-de-Merle by Charles the Bald, “eo anno quo ab Andegavis et a toto suo regno Normannos expulit” (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 35). Now this is rather vague, but it looks as if the date intended were 873. We are next told that Tertullus went to seek his fortune in France “circa id temporis quo Karolus Calvus ... ex triarcho monarchus factus, non longo regnavit spatio” (ib. pp. 36, 37), whatever that may mean. The next chronological landmark is that of the “reversion” of S. Martin, which John copies from the Cluny treatise De Reversione B. Martini, and copies wrong. Then comes Fulk the Red, on whom he says the whole county of Anjou was conferred by Duke Hugh of Burgundy, guardian of Charles the Simple, the county having until then been divided in two parts; and he also says that Fulk was related to Hugh through his grandmother (ib. pp. 64, 65).

There are several unmanageable points in this story. 1. The pedigree cannot be right. It is clear that John took Hugh the Great (“Hugh of Burgundy,” as he calls him) to be a son of the earlier Hugh of Burgundy (one copy of the Gesta, that printed by D’Achéry in his Spicilegium, vol. iii. p. 243, actually adds “filius alterius Hugonis”), and this latter to have been the father of Petronilla, wife of Tertullus.

The chronology of the life of Fulk the Red, long a matter of mingled tradition and guess-work, has now been fairly established by the investigations of M. E. Mabille. This gentleman has examined the subject in his introduction to MM. Marchegay and Salmon’s edition of the Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou, and in an article entitled “Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire,” in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194; to each of these works is appended by way of pièces justificatives a series of charters of the highest importance for establishing the facts of the early history of Anjou and Touraine. The first appearance of Fulk is as witness to a charter given at Tours by Odo, as abbot of S. Martin’s, in April 886. (Mabille, introd. Comtes, p. lxix. note). Now if Fulk the Red was old enough to be signing charters in 886, his parents must have been married long before the days of Louis the Stammerer—in 870 at the very latest, and more likely several years earlier still. His grandparents therefore (i.e. Tertullus and Petronilla) must have been married before 850. It is possible that Hugh the Abbot who died in 887 may have had a daughter married as early as this; but it does not seem very likely.

2. The story of Ingelger’s investiture with Orleans and the Gâtinais is suspicious. His championship of the slandered countess of Gâtinais (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 40–45) is one of those ubiquitous tales which are past confuting. Still the statement that he somehow acquired lands in the Gâtinais is in itself not impossible. But the coupling together of Gâtinais and Orléans is very suspicious. Not one of the historical descendants of Ingelger had, as far as is known, anything to do with either place for nearly two hundred years. There is documentary proof (see the signatures to a charter printed in Mabille’s introd. Comtes, p. lxiv, note 1; the reference there given to Salmon is wrong) that in 942, the year after the death of Fulk the Red, the viscount of Orléans was one Geoffrey; and he belonged to a totally different family—but a family which, it seems, did in time acquire the county of Gâtinais, and in the end became merged in the house of Anjou, when the son of Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou succeeded his uncle Geoffrey Martel in 1061. It is impossible not to suspect that the late Angevin writers took up this story at the wrong end and moved it back two hundred years.