In this sentence of Gerald’s we have perhaps the earliest foreshadowing of the epithet which was to become attached exclusively to Richard’s name. The king of beasts has in all ages been a common simile for a king of men, whether the kingship be material or metaphorical.[117] But Gerald’s words seem, from their context, meant to carry a special significance which is more distinctly implied in the special form of Richard’s traditional surname. Richard is not the only hero whom poets and romancers, in the golden age of old French poetry and romance, credited with the possession of “a lion’s heart,”[118] but he is the only one who became known to the world for all time as pre-eminently and absolutely “The Lion-Heart.” We cannot tell precisely when the epithet came into general use; one writer used it within eight years after Richard’s death.[119] It had evidently fixed itself in popular tradition before a less high-souled generation of romancers sought to explain a surname, whose true meaning they were too far removed from the old epic spirit to appreciate or understand, by devising an origin for it in an impossible tale of their own clumsy invention.[120] Its 1179 true origin need be sought no further than the character of him who bore it.
“Among the virtues in which he excels, three especially distinguish him beyond compare: supereminent valour and daring;[121] unbounded liberality and bountifulness; stedfast constancy in holding to his purpose and to his word”—thus Gerald of Wales wrote of Richard some eight or nine years after the campaign of Taillebourg.[122] The young duke’s energy and daring had been proved before that expedition; and his lavish readiness to reward those who served him had contributed in no small degree to his military successes, by means of the crowd of highly trained soldiers whom it attracted to his standard. What medieval writers call “constancy” was one of the qualities most universally admired in the medieval world. Richard’s “constancy” had, as yet, shown itself chiefly in a form which compelled the admiration and respect of all his Aquitanian subjects, but was not likely to win him the love of the Aquitanian baronage. From the hour when his father laid on him, a lad of scarce sixteen years and a half, the task of restoring the ducal authority in Aquitaine, his aim was to rule and govern what Gerald truly calls “that hitherto untamed country” in such wise “that not only might he establish within its borders a far more complete and unbroken peace than was wont to reign there, but also, recovering what in time past had been lopped off and separated from it, restore all things to their pristine condition.”[123] The barons of the duchy were for the most part far from regarding “peace within its borders” as a thing to be desired; and 1179 Richard’s ideal of a well-ordered state, while thus differing from theirs, was not made more attractive in their eyes by the methods which he employed to realize it. Unlike his elder brother, he did not court popularity; he was indeed absolutely indifferent to it, if not contemptuous of it. “Strictness and firmness, gravity and constancy,” were the characteristics in him which men contrasted with the young king’s easy good-nature, indulgent temper, and pleasantness towards all who approached him. Richard’s generosity and graciousness were of a higher type than young Henry’s; they were displayed only where they were deserved.[124] With him everything was earnest. Even martial sports had no charm for a lad who, while other young knights of his day—his brothers among them—were acquiring the use of arms in an endless round of tournaments, was serving his military apprenticeship in real warfare; a warfare which he waged with tireless persistence and relentless severity for nearly ten years, “that he might quell the insubordination of an unruly people, and make innocence secure amid evildoers.”[125]
His zeal for public order and justice, his ruthless application of the utmost rigor of law to those who in his eyes deserved punishment, naturally provoked the hatred of his opponents, and laid him open to the charge of cruelty.[126] No instances, however, are recorded; the Aquitanian chroniclers say nothing on the subject, and there is no real ground for supposing that his sternness towards the barons who withstood his will was other than what Gerald represents it to have been—part of a wholesome and necessary 1179 discipline.[127] In 1183 they are said to have accused him of crimes of another kind;[128] but this accusation rests only upon an English writer’s report of the pleas by which they sought to justify their own treason. That some at least of the worst details of the charge were a product of that “recklessness of tongue” for which the men of the south were notorious, may with much probability be inferred from the silence of the Aquitanian chroniclers on this point also. The only comment made by a contemporary local writer on Richard’s character and conduct during these early years of storm and stress is a tribute of praise even more impressive, considering the period and the circumstances in which it was written, than the panegyrics that were lavished from all quarters upon his later achievements. Geoffrey of Breuil seems to have been a member of a junior branch of the knightly family of Breuil in Poitou; his father’s house was at Ste. Marie de Clairmont, near Excideuil in Périgord. He made his profession as a monk at S. Martial’s abbey at Limoges in 1160, was ordained priest in 1167, and ten years later was made Prior of Vigeois in the Limousin. His sketch of Aquitanian history ends abruptly at the year 1185. In that year he, as he says, decided to insert in his work “the names of the kings who are ruling the world in this our age.” After mentioning by name Prester John, the two Emperors, the kings of Jerusalem, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sicily, Morocco, Spain, and Hungary, he continues: “In the list of the kings let there be written down the duke of Aquitaine and Gascony, Richard, who has never been slack in deeds of prowess, and whose youth is distinguished by great strenuousness of life.”[129]
A cessation of war between duke and barons in Aquitaine was usually followed by trouble with the mercenary troops who were always employed by one party or the other, sometimes by both parties, and who when such employment was lacking fell to raiding on their own account. This occurred in the summer of 1179 during Richard’s absence in England after the fall of Taillebourg. Bordeaux was ravaged and burnt by some “Basques, Navarrese, or Brabantines,” evidently soldiers of this class.[130] With the barons Richard seems to have had no particular trouble for the next two years or more. On July 7, 1179, old Count William of Angoulême and his stepson Aimar of Limoges, “with many others,” set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[131] William died a month later at Messina; Vulgrin, who had surrendered the city to Richard, thus became head of the family, but the dignity and authority of count of Angoulême seems to have been shared between him and his brothers.[132]
The recent humiliation of Vulgrin and the absence of Aimar of Limoges and his fellow pilgrims may help to account for the fact that the year 1180 is almost a blank in the chronicles of Aquitaine. King Henry’s presence in Normandy from April 1180 to July 1181 may also have had a pacific effect throughout all his continental dominions. It is, moreover, probable that some of the pilgrims had come 1180 to an agreement with Richard before they started; it seems almost certain that Aimar had done so, for when he returned, in December 1180, he was solemnly welcomed at Limoges on Christmas Day[133] in a manner which implies that he had been reinstated in his former position of authority there, 1180 and we hear of no further hostilities between him and Richard for more than six months.[134] We hear indeed of no 1181 further military movements in Aquitaine till after King Henry’s return to England at the end of July 1181. Then Richard marched into Gascony and took possession of Lectoure, the chief town of the viscounty of Lomagne. He was seemingly on his way thence to Dax when Vézian of Lomagne, in the middle of August, came and submitted himself to him at S. Sever. Vézian was probably a very young man, for he was not yet a knight. His submission was not only accepted as frankly as it was offered, but it was rewarded by the bestowal of knighthood from Richard’s hand.[135] In November Richard joined his brothers in punishing the count of Sancerre for his rebellion against the young King Philip of France, whom Henry had charged his sons to protect and support during his own absence over-sea.[136]
It was probably in the interval between these two expeditions, to Gascony and to Sancerre, that a new strife arose in the Angoumois. Count Vulgrin Taillefer III had died on June 29[137] leaving an only child, a girl “who,” says Geoffrey of Vigeois, “was the cause of great calamity to her country.” Richard, as duke, took her into his wardship as heiress of Angoulême and claimed also the wardship of her land;[138] but her uncles, William and Aimar, tried to 1181 seize their dead brother’s heritage. Richard drove them out of Angoulême, whereupon they found a refuge at Limoges with their half-brother, viscount Aimar.[139] It was plain that Richard would soon be involved in a new war with them and with Aimar of Limoges; and meanwhile other influences were tending to develope that war into a general one. The comparative peace of the last eighteen months was almost ominous; it certainly did not imply contentment on the part of the barons of Aquitaine. They were all this while writhing under the iron rule of their young duke; many of them were plotting schemes for “doing their utmost to drive him out of the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou altogether.”[140] Strangely enough, the impulse which at length brought their plottings to a head seems to have sprung from a private quarrel between two brothers who did not rank among the great vassals of the duchy.
The castle of Hautefort, on the border of the Limousin and Périgord, was the joint patrimony of Constantine and Bertrand de Born. They lived in it together, but in continual discord, till Constantine drove Bertrand out, seemingly in the latter part of 1181 or early in 1182. Bertrand, however, soon made his way back, and expelled Constantine in his turn. Constantine appealed for help to their immediate feudal superior, the viscount of Limoges,[141] and also, it seems, to the duke. Both took up his cause; but at the moment they were at enmity with each other—probably about the Angoulême succession—so “Richard made war against Aimar, and Richard and Aimar made war against Bertrand and ravaged and burned his land.” Constantine was “a good knight as regards fighting”;[142] Bertrand was something more—“a good knight, and a good fighter, 1181 and a good squire of dames, and a good troubadour, and wise and well-spoken, knowing how to deal with bad and good—and all his time he was at war with all his neighbours.”[143] The condition of things described in these last words was to Bertrand an ideal condition: “I would that the great men should be always quarrelling among themselves,” he said.[144] It was the ideal of a typical Aquitanian baron; and that ideal had become much less easy of realization now that the young duke was master of the land than it had been while the ducal interests were represented only by a woman or left in charge of mere seneschals. Bertrand seems to have conceived a project of so working on the minds of the other malcontents as to band them together with himself in a conspiracy whose primary and ostensible object was to be the overthrow of the duke, but which by uniting all its members in a sworn alliance with each other and therefore with its originator, Bertrand, should enable him to maintain his position as master of Hautefort. If Aimar of Limoges could be bound to Bertrand in a sworn league against Richard, Bertrand would be at once rid of one of his present antagonists, and another and a greater one would—so at least the allies might hope—soon have 1181-2 his hands too full of other work to trouble himself further about Hautefort.[145]
Aimar and his three half-brothers,[146] being already banded together against the duke for the preservation of Angoulême to the male line of Taillefer, were naturally quite ready to 1181-2 embrace Bertrand’s project—if indeed the project had originated with Bertrand. It seems to have first taken shape in a meeting at Limoges: “in an ancient minster of S. Martial,” says Bertrand, “many rich men swore to me on a missal.”[147] They seem to have sworn that no individual among them should make terms with Richard for himself independently of his allies.[148] Among the earliest members of the league thus formed were, besides the brothers of Angoulême and their half-brother of Limoges, the three other viscounts of the Limousin—Ventadour, Comborn, and Turenne—the count of Périgord, and William of Gourdon in Quercy.[149] To these were soon added “other barons of Périgord and of the Limousin and Quercy whom Richard was disinheriting.”[150] In one of his most vigorous sirventes Bertrand made a stirring appeal to the great nobles of Gascony, Gaston of Béarn, Vézian of Lomagne, Bernard of Armagnac, Peter of Dax, Centol of Bigorre: “if they will it, the count [of Poitou] will have enough to do in those parts; and then, since he is so valiant, let him come with his great host this way and measure himself with us!” The effect of Richard’s repressive measures in Saintonge and in Poitou are indirectly acknowledged in the poet’s next words: “If Taillebourg and Pons and Lusignan and Mauléon and Tonnay were fit for action, and if there were a stirring and stalwart viscount at Sivray, I will never believe that they would not help us. He of Thouars, too, whom the count has threatened, should join us if he be not a dastard.”[151] Of Richard’s relations at this period with Aimeric of Thouars, Ralf of Mauléon, and the lords of Tonnay and Sivray, we know nothing. The head of the house of Lusignan was that same Geoffrey who had been a prominent leader in the Poitevin rising of 1167, and had also 1181-2 joined in the revolt of 1173. Since then a new cause of strife had arisen between him and the Angevin rulers of Aquitaine. At the time when Adalbert of La Marche sold his county, according to his own statement, there was “no one protesting and indeed no one existing who had a right to protest” against the sale.[152] But on the actual annexation of La Marche to the ducal domain Geoffrey of Lusignan “with his brothers”—he had five—did more than protest; he “resisted, saying that La Marche belonged to him as heir—and,” adds Geoffrey of Vigeois, “he got it.”[153] How and when he got it we do not know, but it was probably not earlier than the autumn of 1182, since Bertrand de Born shortly before that time evidently did not regard the Lusignans as being in a position to afford much practical help to the league, and in June of that year Henry was still sufficiently master of the county to make a peaceful visit to Grandmont for the third time within sixteen months.[154] Obviously, however, the league would have the sympathies of the claimant of La Marche and his brothers. It seems to have also had those of some at least of the towns; “the burghers are shutting themselves in all round”—that is, rebuilding or strengthening their town walls—said Bertrand.[155]
Concerted action was, however, so difficult to men accustomed by lifelong habit to fighting each for his own hand that before the allies were ready for a simultaneous rising their project seems to have become known to the duke. On Sunday, April 11, 1182, he “with a few of his people manfully captured” the Puy-St.-Front, a stronghold which stood in much the same relation to the city of Périgueux as that of the “castle of S. Martial” to the city of Limoges. The capture was evidently a surprise, characteristically planned and executed by Richard on the spur of the moment 1182 when he discovered that Elias of Périgord, with whom he does not seem to have had any previous trouble, “was favouring his enemies.” He then marched upon Excideuil 1182 and ravaged the Limousin border from that fortress to Corgnac. By the middle of May the rebel leaders were apparently so disheartened that they were ready to discuss terms of peace, not indeed with Richard, but with his father. Soon after Whitsuntide (May 16) the counts of Angoulême and Périgord and the viscount of Limoges met the king at Grandmont, but no agreement was reached. Henry then went to support Richard in the Limousin. Richard suddenly attacked Excideuil, and took the town, though not the castle; Henry went to St. Yrieix, placed a garrison there, and then laid siege to Pierre-Buffière, which surrendered after twelve days. At midsummer he was back at Grandmont. Richard meanwhile had gone from Excideuil back to Périgueux. It seems that in his absence Elias had recovered Puy-St.-Front, and this time it was well prepared for defence. Richard “girded it all round about with a very great host”; in a few days he was rejoined by his father, and at the end of the month by his elder brother. The result was that in the first week of July both Elias of Périgord and Aimar of Limoges submitted. The peace was sworn in S. Augustine’s abbey at Limoges; Aimar promised that his half-brothers should have no further help from him, and placed two of his sons in Richard’s hands as hostages; Elias surrendered Périgueux to the young duke, who thereupon made peace with him, but took the precaution of destroying all the towers of the city wall.[156] 1181 Twelve months earlier, he had ordered a more complete destruction of the defences of Limoges. There, the walls of the castle of S. Martial, which Henry had ordered to be razed thirty years before, had been hurriedly rebuilt by the burghers during the war of 1174, “lest when peace was restored the duke should forbid it.”[157] The duke seems to have let them alone for seven years; it may have been 1181-2 some recent addition to the fortifications which made him issue at midsummer 1181 an order that they should again be pulled down; and the burghers dared not disobey him.[158]