The year closed amid general tranquillity. So cordial was, or seemed to be, the alliance of the two kings, that they planned a joint crusade against the Moors in Spain, and wrote to ask the Pope’s blessing upon their undertaking;[1443] and a long-standing dispute between Henry and Theobald of Blois was settled before Christmas by the mediation of Louis.[1444] In England the year is marked by nothing more important than a new issue of coinage.[1445] The administration of the country was directed by the two justiciars, assisted, formally at least, by the queen,[1446] until shortly before Christmas, when she went over sea to keep the feast with her husband at Cherbourg.[1447] Unhappily, the beginnings of strife followed in her train.

The duchy of Aquitaine, or Guyenne, as held by Eleanor’s predecessors, consisted, roughly speaking, of the territory between the Loire and the Garonne. More exactly, it was bounded on the north by Anjou and Touraine, on the east by Berry and Auvergne, on the south-east by the Quercy or county of Cahors, and on the south-west by Gascony, which had been united with it for the last hundred years. The old Karolingian kingdom of Aquitania had been of far greater extent; it had in fact included the whole country between the Loire, the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean. Over all this vast territory the counts of Poitou asserted a theoretical claim of overlordship by virtue of their ducal title; they had, however, a formidable rival in the house of the counts of Toulouse. These represented an earlier line of dukes of Aquitaine, successors of the dukes of Gothia or Septimania, under whom the capital of southern Gaul had been not Poitiers but Toulouse, Poitou itself counting as a mere underfief. In the latter half of the tenth century these dukes of Gothia or Aquitania Prima, as the Latin chroniclers sometimes called them from the old Roman name of their country, had seen their ducal title transferred to the Poitevin lords of Aquitania Secunda—the dukes of Aquitaine with whom we have had to deal. But the Poitevin overlordship was never fully acknowledged by the house of Toulouse; and this latter in the course of the following century again rose to great importance and distinction, which reached its height in the person of Count Raymond IV., better known as Raymond of St. Gilles, from the name of the little county which had been his earliest possession. From that small centre his rule gradually spread over the whole territory of the ancient dukes of Septimania. In the year of the Norman conquest of England Rouergue, which was held by a younger branch of the house of Toulouse, lapsed to the elder line; in the year after the Conqueror’s death Raymond came into possession of Toulouse itself; in 1094 he became, in right of his wife, owner of half the Burgundian county of Provence. His territorial influence was doubled by that of his personal fame; he was one of the chief heroes of the first Crusade; and when he died in 1105 he left to his son Bertrand, over and above his Aquitanian heritage, the Syrian county of Tripoli. On Bertrand’s death in 1112 these possessions were divided, his son Pontius succeeding him as count of Tripoli, and surrendering his claims upon Toulouse to his uncle Alfonso Jordan, a younger son of Raymond of St. Gilles.[1448] Those claims, however, were disputed. Raymond’s elder brother, Count William IV., had left an only daughter who, after a childless marriage with King Sancho Ramirez of Aragon,[1449] became the wife of Count William VIII. of Poitou.[1450] From that time forth it became a moot point whether the lord of St. Gilles or the lord of Poitiers was the rightful count of Toulouse. Raymond unquestionably bore the title and exercised its functions for some six years before his brother’s death and his niece’s second marriage,[1451] and one historian asserts that he had acquired the county by purchase from his brother.[1452] Another story relates that William of Poitou having married the heiress of Toulouse after her father’s death,[1453] immediately entered upon her inheritance, but afterwards pledged it to Raymond in order to raise money for the Crusade.[1454] The reckless, spendthrift duke, whose whole energies were given up to verse-making, discreditable adventures, and either defying or eluding the ecclesiastical authorities who vainly strove to check the scandals of his life, never found means to redeem his pledge; neither did his son William IX.,[1455] although it appears that he did at some time or other contrive to obtain possession of Toulouse.[1456] On his death, however, it immediately passed back into the hands of Alfonso Jordan.

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]

The sum charged on the knight’s fee in Normandy was sixty shillings Angevin;[1470] in England it seems to have been two marks.[1471] The proceeds, with those of a similar tax levied upon Henry’s other dominions,[1472] amounted to some hundred and eighty thousand pounds,[1473] with which he hired an immense force of mercenaries.[1474] But his host did not consist of these alone. The great barons of Normandy and England, no less than those of Anjou, Aquitaine and Gascony, were eager to display their prowess under the leadership of such a mighty king. The muster at Poitiers was a brilliant gathering of Henry’s court, headed by the chancellor with a picked band of seven hundred knights of his own personal following,[1475] and by the first vassal of the English Crown, King Malcolm of Scotland,[1476] who came, it seems, to win the spurs which his cousin had refused to grant him twelve months ago, when they met at Carlisle just before Henry left England in June 1158.[1477] The other vassal state was represented by an unnamed Welsh prince;[1478] and the host was further reinforced by several important allies. One of these was Raymond Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, a baron whom the count of Toulouse had despoiled, and who gladly seized the opportunity of vengeance.[1479] Another was William of Montpellier.[1480] The most valuable of all was the count of Barcelona, a potentate who ranked on an equality with kings.[1481] His county of Barcelona was simply the province which in Karolingian times had been known as the Spanish March—a strip of land with the Pyrenees for its backbone, which lay between Toulouse, Aragon, Gascony and the Mediterranean sea. It was a fief of the West-Frankish realm; but the facilities which every marchland in some degree possesses for attaching itself to whichever neighbour it may prefer, and so holding the balance between them as to keep itself virtually independent of them all, were specially great in the case of the Spanish March, whose rulers, as masters of the eastern passes of the Pyrenees, held the keys of both Gaul and Spain. During the last half-century they had, like the lords of another marchland, enormously strengthened their position by three politic marriages. Dulcia of Gévaudan, the wife of Raymond-Berengar III. of Barcelona, was heiress not only to her father’s county of Gévaudan, but also, through her mother, to the southern half of Provence, whose northern half fell to the share of Raymond of St.-Gilles. Her dower-lands were settled upon her younger son. He, in his turn, married an heiress, Beatrice of Melgueil, whose county lay between Gévaudan and the sea; and the dominions of the house of St.-Gilles were thus completely cut in twain, and their eastern half surrounded on two sides, by the territories of his son, the present count of Provence, Gévaudan and Melgueil.[1482] The elder son of Dulcia, having succeeded his father as Count Raymond-Berengar IV. of Barcelona, was chosen by the nobles of Aragon to wed their youthful queen Petronilla, the only child of King Ramirez the Monk. He had thus all the power of Aragon at his command, although, clinging with a generous pride to the old title which had come down to him from his fathers, he refused to share his wife’s crown, declaring that the count of Barcelona had no equal in his own degree, and that he would rather be first among counts than last among kings.[1483] A man with such a spirit, added to such territorial advantages, was an ally to be eagerly sought after and carefully secured. Henry therefore invited him to a meeting at Blaye in Gascony, and secured his co-operation against Toulouse on the understanding that the infant daughter of Raymond and Petronilla should in due time be married to Henry’s son Richard, and that the duchy of Aquitaine should then be ceded to the young couple.[1484]

A last attempt to avert the coming struggle was made early in June; the two kings met near the Norman border, but again without any result.[1485] Immediately after midsummer, therefore, Henry and his host set out from Poitiers and marched down to Périgueux. There, in “the Bishop’s Meadow,” Henry knighted his Scottish cousin, and Malcolm in his turn bestowed the same honour upon thirty noble youths of his suite.[1486] The expedition then advanced straight into the enemy’s country. The first place taken was Cahors; its dependent territory was speedily overrun;[1487] and while in the south Raymond Trencavel was winning back the castles of which the other Raymond had despoiled him, Henry led his main force towards the city of Toulouse itself.[1488] Count and people saw the net closing round them; they had seen it drawing near for months past, and one and all—bishop, nobles and citizens—had been writing passionate appeals to the king of France, imploring him, if not for the love of his sister, at least for the honour of his crown, to come and save one of its fairest jewels from the greedy grasp of the Angevin.[1489] Louis wavered till it was all but too late; he was evidently, and naturally, most unwilling to quarrel with the king of England. He began to move southward, but apparently without any definite aim; and it was not till after another fruitless conference with Henry in the beginning of July[1490] that he at last, for very shame, answered his brother-in-law’s appeal by throwing himself into Toulouse almost alone, as if to encourage its defenders by his presence, but without giving them any substantial aid.[1491] Perhaps he foresaw the result. Henry, on the point of laying siege to the city, paused when he heard that his overlord was within it. Dread of Louis’s military capacity he could have none; personal reverence for him he could have just as little. But he reverenced in a fellow-king the dignity of kingship; he reverenced in his own overlord the right to that feudal obedience which he exacted from his own vassals. He took counsel with his barons; they agreed with him that the siege should be postponed till Louis was out of the city—a decision which was equivalent to giving it up altogether.[1492] The soldiers grumbled loudly, and the chancellor loudest of all. Thomas had now completely “put off the deacon,” and flung himself with all his might into the pursuit of arms. His knights were the flower of the host, foremost in every fight, the bravest of the brave; and the life and soul of all their valour was the chancellor himself.[1493] The prospect of retreat filled him with dismay. He protested that Louis had forfeited his claim to Henry’s obedience by breaking his compact with him and joining his enemies, and he entreated his master to seize the opportunity of capturing Toulouse, city, count, king and all, before reinforcements could arrive.[1494] Henry however turned a deaf ear to his impetuous friend. Accompanied by the king of Scots and all his host, he retreated towards his own dominions just as a body of French troops were entering Toulouse.[1495]