local rulers whom he succeeded. The rebuilding of the ducal palace at Rouen was begun in 1161;[944] that of Caen was nearly finished in 1180; its hall, which still exists, is the traditional seat of the Norman Exchequer.[945] At Tours a round tower which still stands in the barrack-yard is the sole surviving fragment of a castle which Henry is said to have built. His favourite abode in Touraine, however, was not at Tours but at Chinon, where the little fortress above the Vienne which had been the last conquest of Fulk Nerra and the lifelong prison of Geoffrey the Bearded grew under Henry’s hands into a royal retreat of exquisite beauty and splendour--a gem, even now in its ruin, worthy of its setting in the lovely valley of the Vienne, with the background of good greenwood which to Henry was probably its greatest charm. Angers, again, almost put on a new face in the course of Henry’s lifetime. In the year before his birth it had been visited by a fire which reduced to almost total ruin its whole south-western quarter, including the palace of the counts,[946] of which nothing but the great hall seems to have remained. The work of reconstruction, begun no doubt by Geoffrey Plantagenet, was completed on a regal scale by his son, and before the close of Henry’s reign a visitor from England, Ralf de Diceto, could gaze in admiration at the “vast palace,” with its “newly-built apartments, adorned with splendour befitting a king,” which rose at the foot of the vine-clad hills above the purple stream of Mayenne.[947] [944] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161. [945] _Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm._ (Stapleton), vol. i. p. 56. _Ib._ Observ. pp. xxvii–xxviii. [946] Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p. 144). [947] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 292 (_Hist. Com. Andeg._, Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. 337).