King Henry was now gathering up his strength for another invasion of the Norman duchy. This time Geoffrey did not fail him. Both had discovered, too late, who was really their most dangerous rival, and all old grudges between them were forgotten in the common instinct of vengeance upon the common foe. Early in 1058 Henry came to visit the count at Angers;[488] and the plan of the coming campaign was no doubt arranged during the time which they then spent together. It was to be simply a vast plundering-raid; neither king nor count had now any ambition to meet the duke in open fight. In August they set forth—Geoffrey, full of zeal, at the head of all the troops which his four counties could muster. The French and Angevin host went burning and plundering through the Hiesmois and the Bessin, the central districts of Normandy, as far as Caen. Half of the confederates’ scheme was accomplished; but as they crossed the Dive at the ford of Varaville they were overtaken at once by the inflowing tide and by the duke himself; the two leaders, who had been the first to cross, could only look helplessly on at the total destruction of their host, and make their escape from Norman ground as fast as their horses would carry them.[489] The wars of Henry and Geoffrey were over. The king died in the summer of 1060; in November he was followed by the count of Anjou. A late-awakened conscience moved Geoffrey to meet his end in the abbey of S. Nicolas which had been founded by his father and completed under his own care. One night he was borne across the river and received the monastic habit; next morning at the hour of prime he died.[490]

With him expired the male line of Fulk the Red. But there was no lack of heirs by the spindle-side. Geoffrey’s eldest nephew was his half-sister Adela’s son, Fulk “the Gosling,” to whom after long wrangling he had been compelled to restore the county of Vendôme.[491] He was bound by closer ties to the two sons of his own sister Hermengard, daughter of Fulk Nerra and Hildegard, and wife of Geoffrey count of the Gâtinais, a little district around Châteaulandon near Orléans.[492] Her younger son, Fulk, was but seventeen years old when at Whitsuntide 1060 he was knighted by Geoffrey Martel, invested with the government of Saintonge, and sent to put down a revolt among its people.[493] The elder, who bore his uncle’s name, was chosen by him for his heir.[494]

The dominion which Geoffrey the Hammer thus bequeathed to Geoffrey the Bearded was no compact, firmly-knit whole; it was a bundle of four separate states, held on different tenures, and two of them burthened with a legacy of unsettled feuds. The real character of their union shewed itself as soon as Martel was gone. What had held them together was simply the terror of his name, and the dissolution, already threatening before his death, set in so rapidly that in less than three years afterwards two out of his four counties were lost to his successor. It was in fact only the dominions of Fulk the Black—Anjou and Touraine—that were thoroughly loyal to his son. Geoffrey’s last conquest, Maine, was only waiting till death should loose the iron grasp that choked her to recall her ancient line. His earliest conquest, Saintonge, lying further from the control of the central power, was already drifting back to its natural Aquitanian master. Young Count Fulk was still at his uncle’s death-bed when Saintes was surprised and captured by the duke of Aquitaine,—Guy-Geoffrey of Gascony, who had succeeded his twin-brother by the title of William VII. William seems to have justified his aggression on the plea that by the terms of the cession of 1036 Martel had no right to leave Saintonge to collateral heirs, and that on his death without children it ought to revert to the duke.[495] The city of Saintes itself however had been Angevin ever since Fulk Nerra’s days, and a strong party of citizens devoted to Anjou besought Geoffrey’s successor to come and deliver them. While the two brothers prepared to march into Poitou, William gathered an immense force to the siege of Chef-Boutonne, a castle on a rocky height above the river Boutonne, on the borders of Poitou and Saintonge. Thence, at the Angevins’ approach, he descended to meet them in the plain, on S. Benedict’s day, March 21, 1061. The duke’s army, including as it did the whole forces of Gascony and Aquitaine, must have far outnumbered that of the brother-counts; but there was treason in the southern ranks; the standard-bearers were the first to flee, and their flight caused the rout of the whole ducal host.[496] Saintes threw open its gates to the Angevin victor;[497] but its loss was only delayed. Next year the duke of Aquitaine blockaded the city till sword and famine compelled the garrison to surrender;[498] and from that moment Saintonge was lost to the count of Anjou.

Meanwhile a change fraught with far graver consequences had undone Geoffrey Martel’s work in the north. The conqueror of Le Mans was scarcely in his grave when Maine flung off the yoke and called upon the son of her late count Hugh to come home and enjoy his own again. It was however but a shadowy coronet that she could offer now; her independence had received a fatal shock; and, to increase the difficulty of his position, Herbert II. was still a mere boy, without a friend to guide and protect him except his mother, Bertha of Blois. Bertha saw at once that his only chance of saving his father’s heritage from the shame of subjection to Anjou was to throw himself on the honour of the duke of Normandy; to William therefore, as overlord, Herbert commended himself and his county, on the terms of the old grant made to Hrolf by King Rudolf.[499] The commendation was accompanied by an agreement that Herbert should in due time marry one of William’s daughters; but there seems to have been a foreboding that the boy-count’s life was not to be a long one, for it was further provided that if he died without children Maine should revert in full property to William;[500] and a marriage was also arranged between William’s eldest son Robert and Herbert’s sister Margaret, whereby in the next generation the rights of the “man” and his lord, of the house of Hrolf and the house of Herbert Wake-Dog, might be united.[501]

In 1064 Herbert died, leaving neither child nor wife. By the treaty which had seemed so admirably planned to meet all possible contingencies, his county was now to revert to William; but there was more than one difficulty to be met before he could take possession of it. The first was a sudden revival of the Angevin claim. The indifference with which Geoffrey the Bearded seems to have viewed the transactions between Herbert and William may perhaps have been due to the pressure of the war in Saintonge. Far more puzzling than his tardiness in asserting his rights to the overlordship of Maine is the readiness with which, when he did assert them, they seem to have been admitted by William. Geoffrey did not indeed aspire to the actual possession of the county which his uncle had enjoyed; all that he claimed was its overlordship; and William, it seems, acknowledged his claim by permitting the little Robert to do him homage at Alençon and to receive from him a formal grant of Margaret’s hand together with the whole honour of Maine.[502] Geoffrey’s action is easily accounted for. His only reasonable course was to make a compromise with Normandy: the wonder is that he was allowed to make it on such favourable terms. If the story is correct, the truth probably is that compromise was at this moment almost as needful to William as to Geoffrey, for any Angevin intermeddling in Maine would have rendered his difficulties there all but insurmountable. One clause of the treaty of 1061—the marriage of Robert and Margaret—was still in the remote future, for the bridegroom cannot have been more than nine years old, and the bride was far away in what a Norman writer vaguely describes as “Teutonic parts.”[503] There being thus no security that the county would ever revert to the descendants of its ancient rulers, Cenomannian loyalty turned its hopes from Hugh’s young daughter to her aunts, the three daughters of Herbert Wake-the-dog, of whom the nearest to the spot was Biota, the wife of Walter of Mantes, sister’s son to Eadward the Confessor.[504] In his wife’s name Walter laid claim to the whole county of Maine, and a considerable part of it at once passed into his hands. The capital was held for him by Hubert of Sᵗᵉ-Suzanne and Geoffrey of Mayenne—that same Geoffrey who, deceived in his Angevin overlord, had yielded a compulsory homage to William, and now, casting off all foreign masters alike, proved the most determined champion of his country’s independence. It was between William and Geoffrey of Mayenne that the contest really lay; and again the duke proved victorious. The conqueror made his “joyous entry” into Le Mans, and sent for the little Margaret to be kept under his own protection until her marriage could take place. But before the wedding-day arrived she lay in her grave at Fécamp; Walter and Biota had already come to a mysterious end; and the one gallant Cenomannian who held out when Walter and all else had yielded—Geoffrey of Mayenne—was at length compelled to surrender.[505] Thenceforth William ruled Maine as its Conqueror, and as long as he lived, save for one brief moment, the homage due to Anjou was heard of no more.

The rapid decline of the Angevin power after Geoffrey Martel’s death was due partly to the reaction which often follows upon a sudden rise, partly to the exceptional greatness of the rival with whom the Angevin count had to deal in the person of William the Conqueror. But behind and beyond these two causes lay a third more fatal than either. The house of Anjou was divided against itself. From the hour of Martel’s death, a bitter dispute over his testamentary dispositions had been going on between his nephews. To young Fulk it seemed an unpardonable wrong that he was left without provision—for even Saintonge, as we have seen, had now slipped from his grasp—while his elder brother was in full possession not only of the paternal county of Gâtinais but also of their uncle’s heritage. In later days Fulk went so far as to declare that his uncle had intended to make him sole heir, to the complete exclusion of Geoffrey the Bearded.[506] Fulk is in one aspect a very interesting person. Almost the sole authority which we possess for the history of the early Angevin counts is a fragment written in his name. If it be indeed his work—and criticism has as yet failed to establish any other conclusion—Fulk Rechin is not merely the earliest historian of Anjou; he is well-nigh the first lay historian of the Middle Ages.[507] But in every other point of view he deserves nothing but aversion and contempt. His very surname tells its own tale; in one of the most quarrelsome families known to history, he was pre-eminently distinguished as “the Quarreller.”[508] With the turbulence, the greed, the wilfulness of his race he had also their craft and subtlety, their plausible, insinuating, serpent-like cleverness; but he lacked the boldness of conception, the breadth of view and loftiness of aim, the unflinching perseverance, the ungrudging as well as unscrupulous devotion to a great and distant end, which lifted their subtlety into statesmanship and their cleverness into genius. The same qualities in him degenerated into mere artfulness and low cunning, and were used simply to meet his own personal needs and desires of the moment, not to work out any far-reaching train of policy. He is the only one of the whole line of Angevin counts, till we reach the last and worst of all, whose ruling passion seems to have been not ambition but self-indulgence. Every former count of Anjou, from Fulk the Red to Geoffrey Martel, had toiled and striven, and sinned upon occasion, quite as much for his heirs as for himself: Fulk Rechin toiled and sinned for himself alone. All the thoroughness which they threw into the pursuit of their house’s greatness he threw simply into the pursuit of his own selfish desires. Had Geoffrey the Bearded possessed the highest capacities, he could have done little for his own or his country’s advancement while his brother’s restless intrigues were sowing strife and discontent among the Angevin baronage and turning the whole land into a hotbed of treason.[509] Geoffrey’s cause was however damaged by his own imprudence. An act of violent injustice to the abbey of Marmoutier brought him under the ban of the Church;[510] and from that moment his ruin became certain. From within and without, troubles crowded upon the Marchland and its unhappy count. The comet which scared all Europe in 1066 was the herald of evil days to Anjou as well as to the land with which she was one day to be linked so closely. In that very year a Breton invasion was only checked by the sudden death of Duke Conan just after he had received the surrender of Châteaugonthier.[511] Next spring, on the first Sunday in Lent, Saumur was betrayed by its garrison to Fulk Rechin;[512] on the Wednesday before Easter he was treacherously admitted into Angers, and Geoffrey fell with his capital into the clutches of his brother.[513] The citizens next day rose in a body and slew the chief traitors;[514] the disloyalty of Saumur was punished by the duke of Aquitaine, who profited by the distracted state of Anjou to cross the border and fire the town;[515] while the remonstrances of Pope Alexander II. soon compelled Fulk to release his brother.[516] Next year, however, Geoffrey was again taken prisoner while besieging Fulk’s castle of Brissac.[517] This time the king of France, alarmed no doubt by the revelation of such a temper among his vassals, took up arms for Geoffrey’s restoration, and he was joined by Count Stephen of Blois, the son of Theobald from whom Geoffrey Martel had won Tours. Fulk bought off both his assailants. Stephen, who was now governing the territories of Blois as regent for his aged father, was pacified by receiving Fulk’s homage for Touraine; the king was bribed more unblushingly still, by the cession of what was more undeniably Geoffrey’s lawful property than any part of the Angevin dominions—his paternal heritage of the Gâtinais.[518] It thus became Philip’s interest as well as Fulk’s to keep Geoffrey in prison. For the next twenty-eight years he lay in a dungeon at Chinon,[519] and Fulk ruled Anjou in his stead.

That time was a time of shame and misery such as the Marchland had never yet seen. Eight years of civil war had fostered among the barons of Anjou and Touraine a spirit of turbulence and lawlessness which Fulk, whose own intrigues had sown the first seeds of the mischief, was powerless to control. Throughout the whole of his reign, all southern Touraine was kept in confusion by a feud among the landowners at Amboise;[520] and it can hardly have been the only one of its kind under a ruler who, instead of putting it down with a strong hand, only aggravated it by his undignified and violent intermeddling. Nor were his foreign relations better regulated than his home policy. For a moment, in 1073, an opportunity seemed to present itself of regaining the lost Angevin overlordship over Maine. Ten years of Angevin rule had failed to crush out the love of independence among the Cenomannian people; ten years of Norman rule had just as little effect. While their conqueror was busied with the settlement of his later and greater conquest beyond sea, the patriots of Maine seized a favourable moment to throw off the Norman yoke. Hugh of Este or of Liguria, a son of Herbert Wake-the-dog’s eldest daughter Gersendis, was received as count under the guardianship of his mother and Geoffrey of Mayenne. But Geoffrey, who in the hour of adversity ten years before had seemed little short of a hero, yielded to the temptations of power; and his tyranny drove the Cenomannians to fall back upon the traditions of their old municipal freedom and “make a commune”—in other words, to set up a civic commonwealth such as those which were one day to be the glory of the more distant Cenomannian land on the other side of the Alps. At Le Mans, however, the experiment was premature. It failed through the treachery of Geoffrey of Mayenne; and the citizens, in the extremity of despair, called upon Fulk of Anjou to save them at once from Geoffrey and from William. Fulk readily helped them to dislodge Geoffrey from the citadel of Le Mans;[521] but as soon as William appeared in Maine with a great army from over sea Fulk, like his uncle, vanished. Only when the conqueror had “won back the land of Maine”[522] and returned in triumph to Normandy did Fulk venture to attack La Flèche, a castle on the right bank of the Loir, close to the Angevin border, and held by John, husband of Herbert Wake-dog’s youngest daughter Paula.[523] At John’s request William sent a picked band of Norman troops to reinforce the garrison of La Flèche; Fulk at once collected all his forces and persuaded Hoel duke of Britanny to bring a large Breton host to help him in besieging the place. A war begun on such a scale as this might be nominally an attack on John, but it was practically an attack on William. He took it as such, and again calling together his forces, Normans and English, led them down to the relief of La Flèche. Instead, however, of marching straight to the spot, he crossed the Loir higher up and swept round to the southward through the territories of Anjou, thus putting the river between himself and his enemies. The movement naturally drew Fulk back across the river to defend his own land against the Norman invader.[524] The two armies drew up facing each other on a wide moor or heath stretching along the left bank of the Loir between La Flèche and Le Lude, and overgrown with white reindeer-moss, whence it took the name of Blanchelande. No battle however took place; some clergy who were happily at hand stepped in as mediators, and after a long negotiation peace was arranged. The count of Anjou again granted the investiture of Maine to Robert of Normandy, and, like his predecessor, received the young man’s homage to himself as overlord.[525] Like the treaty of Alençon, the treaty of Blanchelande was a mere formal compromise; William kept it a dead letter by steadily refusing to make over Maine to his son, and holding it as before by the right of his own good sword. A few years later Fulk succeeded in accomplishing his vengeance upon John of La Flèche by taking and burning his castle;[526] but the expedition seems to have been a mere border-raid, and so long as William lived neither native patriotism nor Angevin meddlesomeness ventured again to question his supremacy over Maine.

But on his death in 1087 the advantage really given to Anjou by the treaties of Alençon and Blanchelande at last became apparent. From the moment when Robert came into actual possession of the fief with which he had been twice invested by an Angevin count, the Angevin overlordship could no longer be denied or evaded. The action of the Cenomannians forced their new ruler to throw himself upon Fulk’s support. Their unquenchable love of freedom caught at the first ray of hope offered them by Robert’s difficulties in his Norman duchy and quarrels with his brother the king of England, and their attitude grew so alarming that in 1089 Robert, lying sick at Rouen, sent for the count of Anjou and in a personal interview besought him to use his influence in preventing their threatened revolt. Fulk consented, on condition that, as the price of his good offices, Robert should obtain for him the hand of a beautiful Norman lady, Bertrada of Montfort.[527] Fulk’s domestic life was as shameless as his public career. He had already one wife dead and two living; Hermengard of Bourbon, whom he had married in 1070[528] and who was the mother of his heir,[529] had been abandoned in 1075 without even the formality of a divorce for Arengard of Châtel-Aillon;[530] and Arengard was now set aside in her turn to make way for Bertrada.[531] These scandals had already brought Fulk under a Papal sentence of excommunication;[532] he met with a further punishment at the hands of his new bride. Bertrada used him simply as a stepping-stone to higher advancement; on Whitsun-Eve 1093 she eloped with King Philip of France.[533]