England under the Angevin Kings, Volume IINorgate, Kate
History
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II
Norgate, Kate
Anjou, House of; England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period, 1154-1216
Yet it is there, and there alone, that we can catch a glimpse of one
side of his character which, if we saw him only in England or in
Normandy, we should hardly have discerned at all. Strange as it seems
to us who know him in his northern realms only as the enterprising and
somewhat unscrupulous politician, the stern and vigorous ruler, the
hard-headed statesman, the uncompromising opponent of the Church’s
claims, Henry is yet the one Angevin count who completely reproduced
in his Marchland, as a living reality, the ideal which was represented
there by the name of the good count-canon of Tours. Fulk the Black and
Fulk the Fifth had both tried to reproduce it, each according to his
lights, during those few years when the pressure of external politics
and warfare left them free to devote their energies for a while to
their country’s internal welfare. But Henry’s whole reign was, for his
paternal dominions, a reign of peace. If we drew our ideas of him
solely from the traces and traditions which he has left behind him
there, we could never have guessed that he was a greater warrior than
Fulk Nerra; we should rather have taken him for a quiet prince who,
like Fulk the Good, “waged no wars.” These traces and traditions lie
scattered over the soil of Anjou, Touraine and Maine as thickly as the
traces and the traditions of the Black Count himself. Henry is in fact
the only one of the later Angevin counts who made upon the imagination
of his people an impression even approaching in vividness to that
left by Fulk the Black, and of whose material works there remains
anything which can be compared with those of the “great builder” of the
preceding century. But the memory which Anjou has retained of Henry
differs much in character from that which she has kept of Fulk; and
it differs more widely still from that which Henry himself has left
in his island-realm. In English popular tradition he appears simply
as the hero of a foolish and discreditable romance, or as the man
who first caused the murder of S. Thomas and then did penance at his
grave; and material traces of him there are literally none, for of his
English dwelling-places not one stone is left upon another, and not a
single surviving monument of public utility, secular or ecclesiastical,
is connected with his name. In the valley of the Loire it was far
otherwise. There the two great Angevin builders share between them the
credit of well-nigh all the more important monuments which give life to
the medieval history of the land--except the military constructions,
which belong to Fulk alone. It is not in donjons such as that of Loches
or Montrichard, but in palaces and hospitals, bridges and embankments,
that we see our Angevin king’s handiwork in his own home-lands. Almost
every one of his many local capitals was adorned during his reign with
a palace of regal dimensions and magnificence, reared by him in place
of the lowlier “halls” which had served for the dwelling of the merely
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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