With all these shiftings and changes of ownership the kings of France had never tried to interfere. Southern Gaul—“Aquitaine” in the wider sense—was a land whose internal concerns they found it wise to leave as far as possible untouched. It was, even yet, a land wholly distinct from the northern realm whose sovereign was its nominal overlord. The geographical barrier formed by the river Loire had indeed been long ago passed over, if not exactly by the French kings, at least by the Angevin counts. But a wider and deeper gulf than the blue stream of Loire stood fixed between France and Aquitaine. They were peopled by different races, they belonged to different worlds. There was little community of blood, there was less community of speech, thought and temper, of social habits or political traditions, between the Teutonized Celt of the north and the southern Celt who had been moulded by the influences of the Roman, the Goth and the Saracen. Steeped in memories of the Roman Empire in its palmiest days, and of the Gothic kingdom of Toulouse which had inherited so large a share of its power, its culture and its glory, Aquitania had never amalgamated either with the Teutonic empire of the Karolings or with the French kingdom of their Parisian supplanters. Her princes were nominal feudataries of both; but, save in a few exceptional cases, the personal and political relations between the northern lord paramount and his southern vassals began and ended with the formal ceremonies of investiture and homage. In the struggle of Anjou and Blois for command over the policy of the Crown, in the struggle of the Crown itself to maintain its independence and to hold the balance between Anjou and Normandy, the Aquitanian princes took no part; the balance of powers in northern Gaul was nothing to them; neither party ever seriously attempted to enroll them as allies; both seem to have considered them, as they considered themselves, totally unconcerned in the matter. Whatever external connexions and alliances they cultivated were in quite another direction—in the Burgundian provinces which lay around the mouth of the Rhône and the western foot of the Alps, and on the debateable ground of the Spanish March, the county of Barcelona, which formed a link between Gascony and Aragon. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor, however, altered the political position of Aquitaine with respect not only to the French Crown but to the world at large. She was suddenly dragged out of her isolation and brought into contact with the general political system of northern Europe, somewhat as England had been by its association with Normandy. The union of the king and the duchess was indeed dissolved before its full consequences had time to work themselves out. Its first and most obvious result was a change in the attitude of the Crown towards the internal concerns of Aquitaine. Whether the count of Toulouse paid homage to the count of Poitou, or both alike paid it immediately to the Crown—whether Toulouse and Poitiers were in the same or in different hands—mattered little or nothing to the earlier kings whose practical power over either fief was all bound up in the mere formal grant of investiture. But to Eleanor’s husband such questions wore a very different aspect. To him who was in his own person duke of Aquitaine as well as its overlord, they were matters of direct personal concern; the interests of the house of Poitou were identified with those of the house of France. For his own sake and for the sake of his posterity which he naturally hoped would succeed him in both kingdom and duchy, it was of the utmost importance that Louis should strive to make good every jot and tittle of the Poitevin claims throughout southern Gaul.

Four years after his marriage, therefore, Louis summoned his host for an expedition against the count of Toulouse.[1457] It tells very strongly against the justice of the Poitevin claims in that quarter that one of his best advisers—Theobald of Blois—so greatly disapproved of the enterprize that he refused to take any part in it at all;[1458] and it may be that his refusal led to its abandonment, for we have no record of its issue, beyond the fact that Alfonso Jordan kept Toulouse for the rest of his life, and dying in 1148 was succeeded without disturbance by his son Raymond V.[1459] Four years later the duchy of Aquitaine passed with Eleanor’s hand from Louis VII. to Henry Fitz-Empress. Once again the king of France became its overlord and nothing more:—his chance of enforcing his supremacy fainter than ever, yet his need to enforce it greater than ever, since Aquitaine, far from sinking back into her old isolation, was now linked together with Anjou and Normandy in a chain which encircled his own royal domain as with a girdle of iron. In these circumstances the obvious policy of France and Toulouse was a mutual alliance which might enable them both to stand against the power of Henry. It was cemented in 1154 by the marriage of Raymond V. with Constance, widow of Eustace of Blois and sister of Louis VII.[1460] Four more years passed away; Henry’s energies were still tasked to the uttermost by more important work than the prosecution of a doubtful claim of his wife against the brother-in-law of her overlord and former husband. Whether the suggestion at last came from Eleanor herself, during the Christmas-tide of 1158, we cannot tell; we only know that early in 1159 Henry determined to undertake the recovery of Toulouse.

A summons to Raymond to give back the county to its heiress was of course met with a refusal.[1461] It was a mere formal preliminary, and so was also a conference between Henry and Louis at Tours, where they discussed the matter and failed to agree upon it,[1462] but parted, it seems, without coming to any actual breach; Henry indeed was evidently left under the impression that his undertaking would meet with no opposition on the part of France.[1463] Early in Lent he went to Poitiers and there held council with the barons of Aquitaine. The upshot of their deliberations was an order for his forces to meet him at Poitiers on Midsummer-day, ready to march against the count of Toulouse.[1464]

A question now arose of what those forces were to consist. The feudal levies of Eleanor’s duchy might fairly be called upon to fight for the supposed rights of their mistress; those of Anjou and Maine might perhaps be expected to do as much for the aggrandizement of their count; but to demand the services of the Norman knighthood for an obscure dynastic quarrel in southern Gaul—still more, to drag the English tenants-in-chivalry across sea and land for such a purpose—would have been both unjust and impolitic, if not absolutely impracticable. On the other hand, the knights of Aquitaine were of all Henry’s feudal troops those on whom he could least depend; and they would be moreover, even with the addition of those whom he could muster in his paternal dominions, quite insufficient for an expedition which was certain to require a large and powerful host, and whose duration it was impossible to calculate. In these circumstances the expedient which had been tentatively and in part adopted three years before was repeated, and its application this time was sweeping and universal. The king gave out that in consideration of the length and hardship of the way which lay before him, and desiring to spare the country-knights, citizens and yeomen, he would receive instead of their personal services a certain sum to be levied as he saw fit upon every knight’s fee in Normandy and his other territories.[1465] This impost, which afterwards came to be known in English history as the “Great Scutage,” was, as regards England, the most important matter connected with the war of Toulouse. It marks a turning-point in the history of military tenure. It broke down the old exemption of “fiefs of the hauberk” from pecuniary taxation, in such a way as to make the encroachment upon their privilege assume the shape of a favour. To the bulk of the English knighthood the boon was a real one; military service beyond sea was a burthen from which they would be only too glad to purchase their release; the experiment, so far as it concerned them, succeeded perfectly, and made a precedent which was steadily followed in after-years. From that time forth the word “scutage” acquired its recognized meaning of a sum paid to the Crown in commutation of personal attendance in the host; and the specially cherished privilege of the tenants-in-chivalry came to be not as formerly exemption from money-payment on their demesne lands, but, by virtue of their payment, exemption from service beyond sea.

The sums thus raised in 1159 are however entered in the Pipe Roll of the year not as scutage but under the vaguer and more comprehensive title of donum. The reason doubtless is that they were assessed, as the historians tell us and as the roll itself shews, not only upon those estates from which services of the shield were explicitly due, but also upon all lands held in chief of the Crown, and all Church lands without distinction of tenure:[1466]—the basis of assessment in all cases being the knight’s fee, in its secondary sense of a parcel of land worth twenty pounds a year. Whatever the laity might think of this arrangement, the indignation of the clergy was bitter and deep. The wrong inflicted on them by the scutage of 1156 was as nothing compared with this, which set at naught all ancient precedents of ecclesiastical immunity, and actually wrung from the Church lands even more than from the lay fiefs.[1467] Their wrath however was not directed solely or even chiefly against the king. A large share of the blame was laid at the chancellor’s door; for the scheme had his active support, if it was not actually of his contriving. Its effects on English constitutional developement were for later generations to trace; the men of the time saw, or thought they saw, its disastrous consequences in the after-lives of its originators. In the hour of Thomas’s agony Gilbert Foliot raked up as one of the heaviest charges against him the story of the “sword which his hand had plunged into the bosom of his mother the Church, when he spoiled her of so many thousand marks for the army of Toulouse”;[1468] and his own best and wisest friend, John of Salisbury, who had excused the scutage of 1156, sorrowfully avowed his belief that the scutage of 1159 was the beginning of all Henry’s misdoings against the Church, and that the chancellor’s share in it was the fatal sin which the primate had to expiate so bitterly.[1469]