[949] See Stapleton, _Mag. Rot. Scacc. Norm._, vol. i., Observ., pp. lix., lxi., lxvii. [950] _Ib._ p. ci. Rob. Torigni, a. 1161. [951] Rob. Torigni, a. 1161. [952] See Stapleton as above, pp. cxlvi–cxlvii. [953] Of Marçay--or Matha--or Turnham; authorities differ so much as to his identity that I dare not venture upon adopting either surname. [954] C. Port, _Cartulaire de l’Hopital St. Jean d’Angers_, pp. 2–10, ii–vi. [955] _Ib._ pp. 11–13. [956] _Ib._ p. xiv. [957] On the hospital-buildings see an article by M. D’Espinay in _Revue de l’Anjou_, vol. xii. (1874), pp. 264–273. This Hospice of S. John formed a third with Fulk Nerra’s abbey of S. Nicolas and Hildegard’s nunnery of our Lady of Charity in the group of pious and charitable foundations round which there gathered, on the meadows that bordered the right bank of the Mayenne, the suburb now known as Ronceray or La Doutre,--a suburb which even before the close of Henry’s reign had grown almost as populous as Angers itself, and was actually preferred to it as a residence by Ralf de Diceto.[958] Twice in Henry’s reign the bridge which linked it to the city was destroyed by fire;[959] the present “Grand-Pont” probably owes its erection to him. Fire was, however, by no means the most destructive element in the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. “Well-nigh disappearing in summer, choked within their sandy beds,” these streams were all too apt, as Ralf de Diceto says of the Mayenne, to “rage and swell in winter like the sea;”[960] and the greatest and most lasting of all Henry’s material benefactions to Anjou was the embankment or “_Levée_”--a work which he seems characteristically to have planned and executed in the very midst of his struggle with the Church[961]--which stretches along Loire-side, from Ponts-de-Cé, just above the junction of the Mayenne and the Loire, some thirty miles eastward to Bourgueil. Further south, in the valley of the Vienne, the legend of the “Pont de l’Annonain” illustrates the curious but not altogether unaccountable confusion which grew up in popular imagination between the two great builders of Anjou. The “bridge,” a long viaduct which stretched from Chinon across river and meadow south-westward to the village of Rivière, was in reality built by Henry to secure a safe transit from Chinon into Poitou across the low ground on the south bank of the Vienne, which in rainy seasons was an all but impassable swamp. Later ages, however, connected it with a dim tradition, which still lingered in the district, of the wonderful night-ride across Loire and Vienne whereby Fulk Nerra had won Saumur, and in the belief of the peasantry the Pont de l’Annonain became a “devil’s bridge,” built in a single night by the Black Count’s familiar demon[962]--a demon who is but a popular personification of that spirit of dauntless enterprise