Even more obscure than the internal history of Normandy under Henry II. is that of Anjou and of the two dependencies which may now be reckoned as one with it, Touraine and Maine. There is in his time throughout the whole of his dominions, with the marked exception of England, a dearth of historical records. Normandy cannot boast of a single historian such as those of the preceding generation, Orderic or William of Jumièges; the only Norman chronicle of any importance is that of Robert of Torigny, commonly known as “Robert _de Monte_,” from the Mont-St.-Michel of which he was abbot; and even his work is nothing more than a tolerably full and accurate chronicle of the old-fashioned type, arranged on the annalistic plan “according to the years of our Lord” which William of Malmesbury had condemned long ago. The Breton chronicles, always meagre, grow more meagre still as the years pass on; the same may be said of the chronicles of Tours; the “Acts of the bishops of Le Mans,” our sole native authority for the history of Maine, cease to record anything save purely ecclesiastical details. In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland; and indeed the half-blank pages of the few monastic chronicles which still dragged out a lingering existence in one or two of the great Angevin abbeys shew us that under Count Henry Fitz-Empress Anjou was once more, as of old under Count Fulk the Good, happy in having no history.