This field Fulk determined to purchase for the site of his abbey. A bargain was struck; the count paid down the stipulated sum, carried the former owner on his shoulders from the middle of the field to the foot of the bridge, and there set him down, saying, “A man without wit his freehold must quit”—by which ceremony the contract was completed.[320] Despite his fiery haste, Fulk did all things with due method,[321] and his next anxiety was to decide upon the dedication of his intended minster. He found his best counsellor in his newly-married wife, the Lady Hildegard, and by her advice the church was placed under the direct invocation, not of saint or angel, but of the most Holy Trinity Itself.[322] By the time it stood ready for consecration the son of Fulk and Hildegard was nearly three years old:[323] he had been nursed by a blacksmith’s wife at Loches;[324] and many a time, as the count and countess went to inspect the progress of architect and builder in the meadow beyond the river, they must have lingered beside the forge to mark the growth of their little Geoffrey, the future conqueror of Tours. The consecration of the church proved a difficulty; the archbishop of Tours refused to perform it unless Fulk would restore to his see the stolen land of Montrichard.[325] Fulk swore—doubtless his customary oath, “by God’s souls”[326]—that he would get the better of the primate, and went straight off to Rome to lay his case before the Pope. After several years’ wrangling it was decided in his favour,[327] and one morning in May 1012 the abbey-church of the Holy Trinity at Beaulieu was hallowed with all due pomp and solemnity by a Roman cardinal-legate. But though Rome had spoken, the case was not ended yet. That very afternoon a sudden storm of wind blew up from the south, whirled round the church, and swept the whole roof completely off. Clergy and laity alike seized on the prodigy as an evident token of Heaven’s wrath against the insolence and presumption of Fulk;[328] not so the Black Count himself, who simply replaced the roof and pushed on the completion of the monastic buildings as if nothing had happened.[329] He had successfully defied the Church; he next ventured to defy the king and the count of Blois both at once. The divorced queen Bertha, mother of young Odo of Blois, still lived and was still loved by the king; Fulk, if he was not actually, as tradition relates, a kinsman of the new Queen Constance,[330] was at any rate fully alive to the policy of making common cause with her against their common rivals of Blois. He crushed King Robert’s last hope of reunion with Bertha by sending twelve armed men to assassinate at a hunting-party, before his royal master’s eyes, the king’s seneschal or comes palatii Hugh of Beauvais who was the confidant of his cherished scheme.[331] It is a striking proof not only of the royal helplessness but also of the independence and security which Fulk had already attained that his crime went altogether unpunished and even uncensured save by one bishop,[332] and almost immediately after its commission he could again venture on leaving his dominions under the regency of his brother Maurice, while he set off upon another long journey which the legendary writers of Anjou, by some strange confusion between their own hero and the Emperor Otto III., make into a mission of knight-errantry to deliver the Pope from a tyrant named Crescentius, but which seems really to have been a second pilgrimage to Holy Land.[333] He came back to find the storm which had so long been gathering on his eastern border on the point of breaking at last.

The adherents of the count of Blois, headed by Landry of Châteaudun, had profited by Fulk’s absence to concert a scheme for the expulsion of the Angevins from Touraine. In spite of a vigorous resistance made by Fulk’s lieutenant at Amboise, Sulpice, treasurer of S. Martin’s at Tours, they seemed in a fair way to succeed, when Fulk himself dropped like a thunderbolt in their midst, dashed right through the county of Blois into that of Chartres, punished Landry by sacking Châteaudun and harrying the surrounding district, and marched home in triumph to Amboise.[334] A raid such as this was a distinct declaration of war, not upon Landry, but upon Landry’s lord. Fulk had intended it as such, and he went home to set in action every possible means that could gain him help and support in a fight to the uttermost with Odo for the possession of Touraine. At that very moment the county of Maine was thrown virtually into his hands by the death of its aged count Hugh; with the alliance of Hugh’s youthful successor he secured the northern frontier of Touraine and the support of a body of valiant fighting-men whose co-operation soon proved to be of the highest value and importance. The rapid insight which singled out at a glance the most fitting instruments for his purpose, the gifts of attraction and persuasion by which he knew how to attach men to his service, and seemed almost to inspire them with some faint reflex of his own spirit, while making them devoted creatures of his will, were all brought into play as he cast about in all directions for aid in the coming struggle, and were strikingly shown in his choice of a lieutenant. The instinct of genius told him that he had found the man he wanted in young Lisoy, lord of the castle of Bazogers, in Maine. As prudent in counsel as he was daring in fight, Lisoy was a man after Fulk’s own heart; they understood each other at once; Lisoy was appointed to share with the now aged Sulpice the supreme command of Loches and Amboise; and while Sulpice provided for the defence of Amboise by building on his own land there a lofty tower of stone,[335] the burned and plundered districts of St.-Aignan, Chaumont and Blois soon had cause to know that the “pride of Cenomannian knighthood” had thrown himself heart and soul into the service of the count of Anjou.[336]

The crisis came in the summer of 1016, when Odo of Blois gathered all his forces for an attack upon Montrichard. His rival was fully prepared to meet him. Before he set out from Blois, the allied hosts of Anjou and Maine had assembled at Amboise, and thence separated again to post themselves in such a manner as to render a battle unavoidable. Fulk turned eastward, and took up a position close to Pontlevoy, seemingly in a wood now known as the Bois-Royal, which in that day was skirted by the high road from Blois to Montrichard. Herbert of Maine rode down to the banks of the Cher, and pitched his camp just above Montrichard, at Bourré.[337] If Odo followed the high road he would be met by the Angevins; if he contrived to turn their position by taking a less direct route to the eastward, he must encounter the Cenomannians, with the garrison of Montrichard at their back; while whichever engaged him first, the distance between the two bodies of troops was so slight that either could easily come to the other’s assistance. It was well for Anjou and for her count that his strategical arrangements were so perfect, and so faithfully carried out by his young ally; for never in all his long life, save in the panic at Conquereux, was Fulk the Black so near to complete overthrow as on that Friday morning in July 1016, when he met Odo of Blois face to face in the battle-field.

Odo, who always trusted to be saved by the multitude of an host,[338] was greatly astonished, on arriving with all his forces opposite Pontlevoy, to find the Angevins drawn up against him in battle array. With a few hurried words he urged his men to the onset. Fortune seemed for a while to favour the stronger side; Fulk and his troops were sore bested; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse and severely stunned, and the fate of Anjou hung trembling in the balance, when the scale was turned by the sword of Herbert of Maine. A messenger hurried off to tell the Cenomannian count that his friend was defeated, nay, captured. Herbert and his knights flew to the rescue; they charged the left wing of the enemies with a vigour which changed the whole position of affairs, and snatched from the count of Blois the victory he had all but won; the chivalry of Blois fled in confusion, leaving the foot to be cut to pieces at will, and their camp to be plundered by the victorious allies, who returned in triumph to Amboise, laden with rich spoils and valuable prisoners.[339]

The victory of Pontlevoy was the turning-point of Fulk’s career. Nine years passed away before Odo recovered from the check enough to make any attempt to avenge it. It seems at first glance strange that Fulk did not employ the interval in pushing forward his conquest of Touraine. But in the eyes of both Fulk and Odo the possession of Touraine was in reality a means rather than an end; and a sort of armed truce, so long as Odo did not provoke him to break it, suited Fulk’s purpose better than a continued war. His western frontier had been secured by his first victory at Conquereux; his eastern frontier was now secured, at any rate for a time, by his victory at Pontlevoy; from the south there was nothing to fear, for the duke of Aquitaine, to whom he owed homage for Loudun, was his staunch friend, and presently gave proof of his friendship by bestowing on him the city of Saintes.[340] Fulk at once made use of the gift as a means of extorting something yet more valuable from a neighbour to whom he owed a far deeper obligation—Herbert of Maine. It may be that they had quarrelled since the days of Pontlevoy; it may be that Herbert had begun that career of nocturnal raids against the fortified towns of Anjou which scared men and beasts from their rest, and gained him his unclassical but expressive surname of “Wake-the-dog.”[341] If so, the wily Angevin took effectual measures to stop them. He enticed the count of Maine to pay him a visit at Saintes, proposing to grant him the investiture of that city. Suddenly, in the midst of conversation, Herbert was seized by Fulk’s servants and flung into prison, whence he was only released at the end of two years, and on submission to such conditions as Fulk chose to dictate.[342] What those conditions were history does not tell; but there can be little doubt that they included some acknowledgment of the suzerain rights of Anjou over Maine, with which Geoffrey Greygown had been invested by Hugh Capet, but which he had not had time to make good, and which Fulk had only enforced for a moment, at the sword’s point, when the aged count Hugh was dying.[343] Fulk’s dealings with Maine are only an episode in his life; but they led even more directly than his struggle with the house of Blois to consequences of the utmost importance. They paved the way for an Angevin conquest of Maine which extended the Angevin power to the Norman border, brought it into contact and collision with the Norman ducal house, and originated the long wars which were ended at last by the marriage of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Empress Matilda. The imprisonment of Herbert is really the first step in the path which leads from Anjou to England.