The cradle-land of our Angevin kings, the original county of Anjou, was a small territory in central Gaul, lying about the lower course of the river Loire and that of its affluent the Mayenne[233] or Maine. Its chief portion consisted of a wedge-shaped tract hemmed in between the right bank of the Loire, which bounded it on the south, and the streams of Loir, Sarthe and Mayenne, which flowed round it on the north and west; along its southern border stretched a belt of alluvial soil which in winter and in rainy seasons became a vast flood-drowned fen, swallowed up by the overflowing waters of the Loire; to the northward, the country consisted chiefly of level uplands broken here and there by patches of forest and tiny river-valleys, and rising in the west into a range of low hills, which again died down into a fringe of swampy meadow-land along the eastern bank of the Mayenne. A narrow strip of ground on the southern bank of the Loire, with a somewhat wider strip of hilly and wooded country beyond the Mayenne, completed the district to which its earliest known inhabitants, a Gallic tribe called Andes or Andegavi, have left their name. A few miles above the angle formed by the confluence of the two rivers, a lofty mass of black slate rock thrown out from the upland furnished a ready-made fortress important alike by its natural strength and by its geographical position, commanding the main lines of communication with central, northern and southern Gaul through the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. Under the Roman conquerors of Gaul the place was called Juliomagus; the hill was crowned by a lofty citadel, and strengthened by a circuit of rampart walls; while from its crest a road struck eastward along Loire-side into the heart of central Gaul, another followed the westward course of the river to its junction with the sea, and others struck southward and northward into Aquitania and across the upland into the basin of the Seine. In the middle of the fourth century a Christian bishop, probably one of a band of mission-preachers who shared with the famous S. Martin of Tours the work of evangelizing central Gaul, laid beside the citadel of Juliomagus the foundations of a church, which in after-time grew into the cathedral of S. Maurice; and it is from the extent of the diocese over which his successors ruled that we learn the extent of the civil jurisdiction of Juliomagus. A later bishop, Albinus, left his name to the great abbey of S. Aubin, founded in Merovingian days on the slope of the hill just outside the city wall; a monastery dedicated to S. Sergius grew up to the north, in a low-lying marshy meadow by the river-side; while the place of the Roman prefects was taken by a succession of Frankish counts, the delegates first of the Merovingian kings of Neustria and then of the Karolingian emperors; and the Roman name of Juliomagus itself gave way to a native appellation cognate with that of the district of which it was the head—“Andegavis,” Angers.[234]
City and county acquired a new importance through the political arrangements by which the Karolingian realms were divided between the three sons of the Emperor Louis the Gentle. By a treaty made at Verdun in 843, the original Frankish kingdom and its Saxon dependencies, answering roughly to what we call Germany now-a-days, fell to the second brother Louis; the Gallic conquests of the Franks, between the Moselle, the Rhone, the Pyrenees and the ocean, were the share of the youngest, Charles the Bald; while the necessity that the eldest brother Lothar, as Emperor, should hold the two capitals, Rome and Aachen, involved the creation in his favour of a middle kingdom consisting of a long narrow string of countries reaching from the Frisian to the Pontine marshes. Although the limits thus fixed were afterwards altered more than once, the main lines of this treaty left indelible traces, and from that day we may date the beginning of modern France and modern Germany. The tripartite division, however, was soon overthrown by the extinction of the elder or Lotharingian line; the incongruous middle kingdom fell asunder and became a bone of furious contention between its two neighbours, and the imperial crown itself was soon an object of rivalry no less fierce. On the other hand, the extent of territory actually subject to Charles the Bald fell far short of the limits assigned to him by the treaty. Even Charles the Great had scarcely been able to maintain more than a nominal sway over the vast region which stretched from the southern shores of the Loire to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea, and was known by the general name of Aquitania; its princes and its people, wrapped in the traditions of Roman culture and Roman greatness, held disdainfully aloof from the barbarian conquerors of the north, and remained utterly indifferent to claims of supremacy which each succeeding Karolingian found it more and more hopeless to enforce. To the west, again, in the peninsula of Britanny or Armorica, the ancient Celtic race preserved, as in the Welsh hills of our own island, its native tongue, its primitive laws and customs, and its separate political organization under a dynasty of native princes who owed, indeed, a nominal allegiance to the West-Frankish overlord at Laon, but whose subjection to him was scarcely more real than that of the princes of Aquitania, while their disaffection was far more active and far more threatening; for the pirate fleets of the northmen were now hovering about the coast of Gaul as about that of Britain; and the Celts of the Breton peninsula, like the West-Welsh of Cornwall, were ever ready to make common cause with these marauders against the Teutonic conquerors of the land.
The work of the northmen in West-Frankland was a work both of union and disunion. There, as in England, the need for organization and defence against their attacks produced a new upgrowth of national life; but while in England this life was moulded by the consolidation of the earlier Engle and Saxon realms into a single state under the leadership of the West-Saxon kings, in Frankland it was created through the forcible breaking-up of an outward unity already threatened with the doom which never fails sooner or later to overtake a kingdom divided against itself. The West-Frankish king was not, like the king of Wessex, the leader, the natural exponent, the impersonation almost, of the dawning national consciousness; it was not he who led and organized the struggle for existence against the northern foe; the nation had to fight for itself, with but little help from its sovereign. This difference was caused partly by the political circumstances of the Karolingian realms, partly by geographical conditions. The brunt of the battle necessarily fell, not upon the royal domains lying far from the sea around the inland fortress of Laon, but on the coast, and especially on the districts around the great river-inlets by which the pirates made their entrance into the country. Of these, the estuary of the Seine lay nearest to them, and was their first point of attack. Between it and the other great inlet, the mouth of the Loire, lay the Breton peninsula; once round that, and the broad lands of Aquitania, rich with the natural wealth of a southern soil and with the remains of a luxury and splendour in which its cities had almost outdone Rome herself, would tempt the northmen with a fairer harvest of spoil than they could find on the shores of the Channel. The desolate rocky coast and barren moorlands of the intervening peninsula offered little chance of booty; but if the pirates could secure the alliance or even the neutrality of the Bretons, they had but to force an entrance into the Loire, and not only Aquitaine, but the inmost heart of the West-Frankish realm would be laid open to their attacks. Two barriers, however, would have to be overcome before such an entrance could be gained. The first was the city of Nantes, which stood on the northern bank of the Loire, some thirty miles above its mouth. Politically, Nantes was the extreme western outpost of the Karolingian power, for its count held his fief directly of the king at Laon, not of the nearer Breton under-king at Rennes; but by its geographical position and the character of its people it was far more Breton than Frankish. The true corner-stone of the West-Frankish realm lay on the other side of the Mayenne. The county of Anjou or “Angevin march,” the border-land of Neustria and Aquitaine, was for all practical purposes the border-land also of Neustria and of Britanny. Angers, with its Roman citadel and its Roman walls, perched on the crest of its black slate-rock, at once guarding and guarded by the two rivers which flowed round its foot, was a far mightier fortress than Nantes; Angers, rather than Nantes, was the true key of the Loire valley, and the stronghold of the Neustrian border against all attacks from the west, whether by land or by sea.
In the first days of Charles the Bald, when the new king was struggling with his brothers, and the pirate ships were beginning again to strike terror into the coasts of Gaul, Lambert, a Breton-born count of the Angevin march, sought from Charles the investiture of the neighbouring and recently-vacated county of Nantes. On the refusal of his demand, he threw off his allegiance, offered his services to the Breton king Nomenoë, and on failing to obtain the coveted prize by his help, called in that of a pirate fleet which was cruising about the shores of Britanny. It was thus at the invitation and under the guidance of a man who had been specially intrusted with its defence that the northmen made their first entrance into the hitherto peaceful estuary of the Loire. Nantes was stormed and sacked;[235] the desolate city was left in the hands of Lambert and the Bretons, and the ravagers sailed away, probably to swell the forces and share the spoil of a fleet which in the following year made its way to the estuary of the Garonne, and pushed inland as far as Toulouse. Nearly ten years passed away before the northmen repeated their dash upon central Gaul. The valley of the Seine and the city of Paris were the victims of their next great expedition, in 845; and a series of plundering raids upon the Aquitanian coast were crowned in 848 by the conquest of Bordeaux. For a moment, in 851, the fury of the pirates’ attack seemed to be turning away from Gaul to spend itself on Britain; but a great victory of the West-Saxons under Æthelwulf at Aclea threw them back upon their old field of operations across the Channel, and in the terror of their threatened onset Charles sought to detach the Bretons from their alliance by a formal cession of the counties of Rennes and Nantes and the district west of the Mayenne, which had passed into Breton hands by the treason of Count Lambert.[236] His precautions failed to avert the blow which he dreaded. Next year the pirates made their way back again round the Armorican coast, up the mouth of the Loire, past Nantes, and through the Angevin march—now shrunk to a little corner of territory wedged in between the Mayenne and the Loire—as far inland as Tours, where they sacked and burned the abbey of S. Martin and drove its canons into exile with the hardly-rescued body of their patron saint.[237]
In a breathing-space which followed upon this last attack, Charles received from Æthelwulf of Wessex a personal visit and an overture of mutual alliance against the common foe. The scheme was shattered by a political revolution in Wessex which followed Æthelwulf’s return; and meanwhile a new danger to the Karolingian power arose in the threatening attitude of Robert the Brave, a warrior of obscure birth who was now count of the Angevin march. Under pretext, as it seems, of securing their aid against the northmen, Robert leagued himself with the foes of the monarchy beyond his two frontier rivers, and made a triple alliance with the revolted Bretons and the king’s rebel nephew, Pepin of Aquitaine.[238] Charles, more and more hard pressed every year by domestic and political difficulties, and haunted by the perpetual horror of the pirate ships always in the background, felt that this second wavering lord of the marchland must be won back at any cost. Two years later, therefore, the count of the Angevin march was invested with a vast duchy comprising the whole territory between Seine and Loire as far as the sea and the Breton border; and with this grant the special work of keeping out both Bretons and northmen was distinctly laid upon his shoulders.[239]
Robert fulfilled his trust gallantly and successfully till he fell in a Scandinavian ambush at Brissarthe in 866.[240] His territories were given to a cousin of the king, Hugh of Burgundy, who was either so incapable or so careless of their defence that before six years had passed he suffered the very corner-stone of his duchy, the most important point in the whole scheme of operations against the northmen in central Gaul, to fall into the enemies’ hands. A band of pirates, sailing unopposed up the Loire and the Mayenne after Robert’s death, found Angers deserted and defenceless, and settling there with their families, used it as a centre from which they could securely harry all the country round. The bulk of the pirate forces, however, was now concentrated upon a great effort for the conquest of Britain, and while the invaders of Angers lay thus isolated from their brethren across the Channel, Charles the Bald seized his opportunity to attempt the recovery of the city. In concert with the Breton king, Solomon, he gathered his forces for a siege; the Franks encamped on the eastern side of the Mayenne, the Bretons on the opposite shore. Their joint blockade proved unavailing, till one of the Bretons conceived the bold idea of turning the course of the Mayenne, so as to leave the pirate ships stranded and useless. The whole Breton army at once set to work and dug such an enormous trench that the northmen saw their retreat would be hopelessly cut off. In dismay they offered to purchase, at a heavy price, a free withdrawal from Angers and its district; their offer was accepted, and Angers was evacuated accordingly.[241]
But the long keels sailed away only to return again. Amid the gathering troubles of the Karolingian house, as years passed on, the cry rose up ever louder and louder from the desolated banks of Seine, and at last even from the inland cities of Reims and Soissons, perilously near the royal abode at Laon itself: “From the fury of the northmen, good Lord, deliver us!” It was not from Laon that deliverance was to come. The success of Charles the Bald at Angers, the more brilliant victory of his grandson Louis III. over Guthrum at Saucourt, were but isolated triumphs which produced no lasting results. At the very moment when the Karolingian empire was reunited under the sceptre of Charles the Fat came the crisis of the struggle with the northmen in West-Frankland; and the true national leader shewed himself not in the heir of Charles the Great, but in Count Odo of Paris, the son of Robert the Brave. It was Odo who saved Paris from the northmen when they besieged it with all their forces throughout the winter of 885; and by saving Paris he saved the kingdom. Before the siege was raised the possessions which his father had held as duke of the French were restored to him by the death of Hugh of Burgundy. A few months later the common consent of all the Karolingian realms deposed their unworthy Emperor, and the acclamations of a grateful people raised their deliverer Odo to the West-Frankish throne.
The times, however, were not yet ripe for a change of dynasty, and the revolution was followed by a reaction which on Odo’s death in 898 again set a Karolingian, Charles the Simple, upon the throne; but though the monarchy of Laon lingered on till the race of Charles the Great became extinct, it was being gradually undermined and supplanted by the dukes of the French, the rulers of the great duchy between Seine and Loire. Paris was now, since the siege of 885, the chief seat of the ducal power; and in the new feudal organization which grew up around this centre, the cradle of the ducal house, the border-stronghold of Angers, sank to a secondary position. The fiefs which the dukes parcelled out among their followers fell to the share of men of the most diverse origin and condition. In some cases, as at Chartres and Tours, the Scandinavian settler was turned into a peaceful lieutenant of the Frankish chief against whom he had fought. In others the reward of valour was justly bestowed on men who had earned it by their prowess against the invaders. It may be that the old alliance of Count Robert the Brave with the Bretons had sowed the seeds of a mighty tree. In the depths of a gloomy forest-belt which ran along the Breton border at the foot of a range of hills that shelter the western side of the valley of the Mayenne, there dwelt in Robert’s day—so the story went—a valiant forester, Tortulf. He quitted the hardy, hazardous borderer’s life—half hunter, half bandit—to throw himself into the struggle of Charles the Bald and Robert the Brave against the northmen: Charles set him to keep the pirates out of Touraine, and gave him a congenial post as forester of a wooded district known as the “Nid-de-Merle”—the Blackbird’s Nest. In its wild fastnesses Tortulf lay in wait for the approach of the marauders, and sprang forth to meet them with a daring and a success which earned him his sovereign’s favour and the alliance of the duke of the French. His son, Ingelger, followed in his steps; marriage came to the help of arms, and with the hand of Ælendis, niece of the archbishop of Tours, Ingelger acquired her lands at Amboise. The dowry was a valuable one; Amboise stood in the midst of one of the most rich and fertile districts of central France, half way between Tours and Blois, on the south bank of the Loire, which was spanned at this point by a bridge said to have been built by Julius Cæsar; two centuries later tradition still pointed out the site of Cæsar’s palace on the banks of the little river Amasse, at the western end of the town; while opposite the bridge a rocky brow, crowned to-day by the shell of a magnificent castle of the Renascence, probably still kept in Ingelger’s days some traces of a fortress built there by a Roman governor in the reign of the Emperor Valens. A mightier stronghold than Amboise, however, was to be the home of Ingelger’s race. His son, a ruddy youth named Fulk, early entered the service of Count Odo of Paris and remained firmly attached to him and his house; and one of the earliest acts of Odo’s brother Robert, who succeeded him as duke of the French—if indeed it was not rather one of the last acts of King Odo himself—was to intrust the city of Angers to Fulk the Red as viscount.[242] The choice was a wise one; for Fulk was gifted with a sound political instinct which found and kept the clue to guide him through all the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the next forty years. He never swerved from his adherence to the dukes of the French; and by his quiet tenacity he, like them, laid the foundation of his house’s greatness. Preferments civil and ecclesiastical—the abbacies of S. Aubin and S. Licinius at Angers, the viscounty of Tours, though this was but a momentary honour—were all so many stepping-stones to his final investiture, shortly before the death of Charles the Simple, as count of the Angevin March.
Map I.
GAUL circa 909–941.Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
This little county of Anjou, of which Fulk thus became the first hereditary count, ended by overshadowing in political importance all the other divisions which made up the duchy of France. In point of territorial extent Anjou, at its present stage, was one of the smallest of the under-fiefs of the duchy. The dominions of Theobald the Trickster, the first count of Blois and Chartres, were far larger than those of Fulk; and so was the county of Maine or Cenomannia, which lay to the north of Anjou on the right bank of the Loire. Yet in a few generations Blois and Maine were both alike outstripped by the little Angevin march. The proud independence of Maine proved her ruin as well as her glory. She too was a border-land; her western frontier marched with that of Britanny, her northern with that of a great Scandinavian settlement which was growing into the duchy of Normandy. But her political status was altogether undefined and insecure. France and Normandy alike claimed the overlordship of Maine; Maine herself acknowledged the claims of neither; and this uncertain condition placed her at the mercy of her neighbours to north and south, and made her a bone of contention between them and a battle-ground for their quarrels till the day when all three were united. Blois and Chartres, on the other hand, with their dependency Touraine, stood like Anjou on a perfectly definite footing as recognised under-fiefs of the duchy of France. In the extent of their territory, and in the natural resources derived from the fertility of its soil and the number and wealth of its towns, the counts of Blois had at starting a very considerable advantage over the Angevins. But this seeming advantage proved in a few years to be a disadvantage. The house of Blois grew too fast, and soon outgrew its strength; its dominions became straggling; and when they straggled out eastward into Champagne, what was gained at one end was lost at the other, and Touraine, the most precious possession of the counts of Blois, was absorbed in the gradual steady advance of the Angevins.
Anjou’s position as a marchland marked her out for a special career. Forming the extreme south-western corner of France properly so called, divided from Aquitania by the Loire, from Britanny by the Mayenne, she had the advantage of a strong and compact geographical situation to start with. Her political position was equally favourable; she was neither hindered and isolated like Maine by a desperate endeavour to reclaim a lost independence, nor led astray by a multiplicity of scattered interests like Blois. She had simply to take her choice between the two alternatives which lie before every marchland. Such a land must either submit to be swallowed up piecemeal by its neighbours, or it must in sheer self-defence swallow up some of them; to keep what it has got, it must get more. Anjou, as represented by Fulk the Red and his successors, strongly embraced this latter alternative. The growth of the Angevin power during the next two centuries was due chiefly to the character of its rulers, working in a sphere which gave exceptional scope for the exercise of their peculiar gifts. Whoever Fulk’s real ancestors may have been, there can be no question that his descendants were a very remarkable race. From first to last there is a strong family likeness among them all. The first thing that strikes one about them is their thoroughness; whatsoever their hands found to do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might. Nearly all of them were men of great and varied natural powers, gifted with a lofty military capacity and a deep political insight, and with a taste and a talent for all kinds of pursuits, into which they threw themselves with the full ardour of their stirring, restless temper. Daring, but not rash; persevering, watchful, tenacious; sometimes seeming utterly unscrupulous, yet with an odd vein of irregular piety running through the characters of many of them, and coming to light in the strangest shapes and at the most unexpected moments; passionate almost as madmen, but with a method in their madness—the Angevin counts were patriots in their way; for their chief aim was aggrandizement, but it was the aggrandizement of Anjou as well as of themselves. They were not to be led away, like their rivals of Blois, by visionary schemes of merely personal promotion involving neglect of their own little home-county; they were proud and fond of their “black Angers” on its steep above the Mayenne, and never forgot that there was the centre whence their power was to spread to the ends of the earth. It is easy to see how exactly such a race as this was fitted for its post in Anjou. Given such men in such a place, we can scarcely wonder at what they made of it.
The Angers in which Fulk came to rule as count, about the time when Æthelstan succeeded Eadward the Elder as king of Wessex, was a town not of dark slate walls as it is chiefly now, but of red flintstone and redder brick, such as the medieval builders long copied from the works of their Roman masters, and such as may still be found embedded in the outer walls of the bishop’s palace and half hidden behind the mighty black bastions of the later castle. That castle covers, or rather encloses, the site of a hall which Count Odo, the successor of the traitor Lambert, had built about the year 851 on ground acquired by exchange with Bishop Dodo. For some time after Frankish counts had been substituted for Roman prefects, the spiritual and temporal rulers of Angers had continued to dwell side by side on the hill-top; Odo, however, instead of again occupying the palace which Lambert had deserted, made it over to the bishop in return for a plot of ground lying just outside the south-west corner of the city wall. There he built himself a house, with the river at its feet and a vine-clad hill at its back; and there from that time forth was the dwelling-place of the Angevin counts.[243] Fulk the Red took up his abode there in the early days of a great political transition which was to change the kingdom of the West-Franks into a kingdom of Parisian France. Half a century had yet to elapse before the transition was accomplished; at its present stage indeed few could foresee its ultimate issue. If the ducal house of Paris had many friends, it had also many foes. The old Karolingian nobility was slowly dying out or sinking into the background before the new nobility of the sword; the great house of Vermandois had thrown its weight into the scale with the advancing power; but there were still many who looked with contempt and disgust on the new order of things, on the house of Paris and all its connexions. The count of Anjou was wedged in between powers anything but favourably disposed towards him and his patrons. The princes of Aquitania looked scornfully across the Loire at the upstarts on its northern bank; little as they recked of any authority beyond their river-barrier, the only one which they acknowledged at all was that of the Karolingian king at Laon. The Bretons beyond the Mayenne were as far from being subdued as ever. Within the duchy of France itself, one little corner was equally scornful of the dukes and of their partisans; Maine, although from its geographical position necessarily reckoned part of the duchy “between Seine and Loire,” still refused to acknowledge any such reckoning; its ruling house, as well as the great nobles of the South, claimed to have inherited the traditions of the Roman Empire and the blood of its Frankish conquerors. In the eyes of the Cenomannian counts, who traced their pedigree from a nephew of Charles the Great, the heirs of Tortulf the Forester were nothing but upstart barbarians.
Their disdain, however, mattered little to Fulk. In those critical times, he who had the keenest sword, the strongest arm, the clearest head and the boldest heart, had the best title to nobility—a title whose validity all were sooner or later compelled to acknowledge. Fulk held Anjou by the grace of God, the favour of his lord the duke, and the might of his own good sword. He was, however, no mere man of war; he was quite willing to strengthen his position by peaceful means. One method of so doing was suggested by his father’s example; it was one which in all ages finds favour with ambitious men of obscure origin, and which was to be specially characteristic of the Angevin house. As Ingelger had married Ælendis of Amboise, so Fulk sought and won the hand of another maiden of Touraine, Roscilla, the daughter of Warner, lord of Loches, Villentras and Haye. It can only have been as the dowry of his wife that Fulk came into possession of the most valuable portion of her father’s lands, the township of Loches.[244] It lay some twenty miles south of Amboise, on the left bank of the Indre, a little river which takes its rise in the plains of Berry and winds along a wooded valley, through some of the most romantic scenery of southern Touraine, to fall into the Loire about half way between Amboise and Angers. In a loop of the river, sheltered on the south and west by a belt of woodland which for centuries to come was a favourite hunting-ground of Roscilla’s descendants, rose a pyramidal height of rock on whose steep sides the houses of the little township clustered round a church said to have been built in the sixth century by a holy man from southern Gaul, named Ursus, the “S. Ours” whom Loches still venerates as its patron saint.[245] By the acquisition of Loches Fulk had gained in the heart of southern Touraine a foot-hold which, coupled with that which he already possessed at Amboise, might one day serve as a basis for the conquest of the whole district.
A few years before Fulk’s investiture as count of Anjou, the relations between the West-Frankish kingdom and its northern foes had entered upon a new phase. In 912 King Charles the Simple and Duke Hugh of Paris, finding themselves unable to wrest back from a pirate leader called Hrolf the Ganger the lands which he had won around the mouth of the Seine, made a virtue of necessity, and by a treaty concluded at St.-Clair-sur-Epte granted to Hrolf a formal investiture of his conquest, on condition of homage to the king and conversion to the Christian faith. Tradition told how a rough Danish soldier, bidden to perform the homage in Hrolf’s stead, kissed indeed the foot of Charles the Simple, but upset him and his throne in doing so; and although to the declining Karolingian monarchy the new power thus established at the mouth of the Seine was useful as a counterpoise to that of the Parisian dukes, yet the story is not altogether an inapt parable of the relations between the duchy of Normandy and its royal overlord during several generations. The homage and the conversion of Hrolf and his comrades were alike little more than nominal. His son, William Longsword, strove hard to force upon his people the manners, the tongue, the outward civilization of their French neighbours; but to those neighbours even he was still only a “leader of the pirates.” The plundering, burning, slaughtering raids did indeed become less frequent and less horrible under him than they had been in his father’s heathen days; but they were far from having ceased. Politically indeed it was William’s support alone that enabled Charles the Simple to carry on to his life’s end a fairly successful struggle with a rival claimant of his crown, Rudolf of Burgundy, a brother-in-law of Hugh, duke of the French. No sooner was Charles dead and Rudolf seated on his throne than the hostility of the northmen to the new king broke out afresh in a pirate-raid which swept across the Norman border, past Orléans and through the Gâtinais, into the very heart of the kingdom, to the abbey of S. Benedict at Fleury on the Loire. It was not the first time the monastery had been ravaged by pirates; the abbot was now evidently expecting their attack, for he had called to his aid Count Gilbald of Auxerre and Ingelger of Anjou, Fulk’s eldest son, who, young as he was, had already made himself a name in battle with the northmen. The fight was a stubborn one; the defenders of Fleury had resolved to maintain it to their last gasp, and when at length all was over there was scarcely a man of them left to tell the tale. The young heir of Anjou, taken prisoner by the pirates, was slaughtered beneath the shadow of S. Benet’s abbey as Count Robert the Brave had been slaughtered long ago at the bridge of Sarthe.[246] Fortunately, however, the future of the Angevin house did not depend solely on the life thus cut off in its promise. Two sons yet remained to Fulk. The duty of stepping into Ingelger’s place fell upon the youngest, for the second, Guy, was already in holy orders. Eight years later, in 937, Duke Hugh of Paris, the great maker of kings and bishops, who had just restored Louis From-over-sea to the throne of his father Charles the Simple, procured Guy’s elevation to the see of Soissons.[247] The son’s promotion was doubtless owed to the long and steady service of the father; but the young bishop soon shewed himself worthy of consideration on his own account. He played a conspicuous part in the politics of his time, both ecclesiastical and secular; he adhered firmly to the party of Duke Hugh and his brother-in-law Herbert of Vermandois, and even carried his devotion to them so far as to consecrate Herbert’s little son Hugh, a child six years old, to the archbishopric of Reims in 940;[248] and through all the scandals and censures which naturally resulted from this glaringly uncanonical appointment Guy stuck to his boy-archbishop with a courage worthy of a better cause. He could, however, shew zeal for the Karolingian king as well as for the Parisian duke. When in 945 Louis From-beyond-sea fell a prisoner into the hands of the Normans, they demanded as the condition of his release that his two sons should be given them as hostages. On Queen Gerberga’s refusal to trust them with her eldest boy, the bishop of Soissons offered himself in the child’s stead, and the Normans, well knowing his importance in the realm, willingly accepted the substitution.[249] The dauntless Angevin was possibly more at home in the custody of valiant enemies than amid the ecclesiastical censures which fell thick upon him for his proceedings in connexion with Hugh of Reims, and from which he was only absolved in 948 by the synod of Trier.[250] His father was then no longer count of Anjou. A year after Hugh’s consecration, in the winter of 941 or the early spring of 942, Fulk the Red died “in a good old age,” leaving the marchland which his sword had won and guarded so well to his youngest son, Fulk the Good.[251]
The reign of the second Count Fulk is the traditional golden age of Anjou. Under him, she is the proverbially happy land which has no history. While the name of the bishop of Soissons is conspicuous in court and camp, that of his brother the count is never once heard; he waged no wars,[252] he took no share in politics; the annalists of the time find nothing to record of him. But if there is no history, there is plenty of tradition and legend to set before us a charming picture of the Good Count’s manner of life. The arts he cultivated were those of peace; his gentle disposition and refined taste led him to pursuits and habits which in those rough days were almost wholly associated with the clerical profession. His favourite place of retirement, the special object of his reverence and care, was the church of S. Martin at Châteauneuf by Tours. There were enshrined the relics of the “Apostle of the Gauls”; after many a journey to and fro, many a narrow escape from the sacrilegious hands of the northmen, they had been finally brought back to their home, so local tradition said, under the care of Fulk’s grandfather Ingelger. The church was now a collegiate foundation, served by a body of secular canons under the joint control of a dean and—according to an evil usage of the period—a lay-abbot who had only to enjoy his revenues on pretence of watching over the temporal interests of the church. Since the time of Hugh of Burgundy the abbacy of S. Martin’s had always been held by the head of the ducal house of France; and it was doubtless their influence which procured a canonry in their church for Fulk of Anjou. His greatest delight was to escape from the cares of government and go to keep the festival of S. Martin with the chapter of Châteauneuf; there he would lodge in the house of one or other of the clergy, living in every respect just as they did, and refusing to be called by his worldly title; not till after he was gone did the count take care to make up for whatever little expense his host might have incurred in receiving the honorary canon.[253] While there he diligently fulfilled the duties of his office, never failing to take his part in the sacred services. He was not only a scholar, he was a poet, and had himself composed anthems in honour of S. Martin.[254] One Martinmas eve King Louis From-beyond-sea came to pay his devotions at the shrine of the patron saint of Tours. As he and his suite entered the church at evensong, there they saw Fulk, in his canon’s robe, sitting in his usual place next the dean, and chanting the Psalms, book in hand. The courtiers pointed at him mockingly—“See, the count of Anjou has turned clerk!” and the king joined in their mockery. The letter which the “clerk” wrote to Louis, when their jesting came round to his ears, has passed into a proverb: “Know, my lord, that an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[255] Fulk was indeed a living proof that it is possible to make the contemplative life of the scholar a help and not a hindrance to the active life of the statesman. The poet-canon was no mere dreamer; he was a practical, energetic ruler, who worked hard at the improvement and cultivation, material as well as intellectual, of his little marchland, rebuilding the churches and the towns that had been laid waste by the northmen, and striving to make up for the losses sustained during the long years of war. The struggle was completely over now; a great victory of King Rudolf, in the year after Ingelger’s death,[256] had finally driven the pirates from the Loire; and there was nothing to hinder Fulk’s work of peace. The soil had grown rich during the years it had lain fallow, and now repaid with an abundant harvest the labours of the husbandman; the report of its fertility and the fame of Fulk’s wise government soon spread into the neighbouring districts; and settlers from all the country round came to help in re-peopling and cultivating the marchland.[257] This idyl of peace lasted for twenty years, and ended only with the life of Fulk. In his last years he became involved in the intricacies of Breton politics, and storm-clouds began to gather on his western border; but they never broke over Anjou itself till the Good Count was gone.