The chronology of the life of Fulk the Red, long a matter of mingled tradition and guess-work, has now been fairly established by the investigations of M. E. Mabille. This gentleman has examined the subject in his introduction to MM. Marchegay and Salmon’s edition of the _Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou_, and in an article entitled “Les Invasions normandes dans la Loire,” in the _Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes_, series vi. vol. v. pp. 149–194; to each of these works is appended by way of _pièces justificatives_ a series of charters of the highest importance for establishing the facts of the early history of Anjou and Touraine. The first appearance of Fulk is as witness to a charter given at Tours by Odo, as abbot of S. Martin’s, in April 886. (Mabille, introd. _Comtes_, p. lxix. note). Now if Fulk the Red was old enough to be signing charters in 886, his parents must have been married long before the days of Louis the Stammerer--in 870 at the very latest, and more likely several years earlier still. His grandparents therefore (_i.e._ Tertullus and Petronilla) must have been married before 850. It is possible that Hugh the Abbot who died in 887 may have had a daughter married as early as this; but it does not seem very likely. 2. The story of Ingelger’s investiture with Orleans and the Gâtinais is suspicious. His championship of the slandered countess of Gâtinais (Marchegay, _Comtes_, pp. 40–45) is one of those ubiquitous tales which are past confuting. Still the statement that he somehow acquired lands in the Gâtinais is in itself not impossible. But the coupling together of Gâtinais and Orléans is very suspicious. Not one of the historical descendants of Ingelger had, as far as is known, anything to do with either place for nearly two hundred years. There is documentary proof (see the signatures to a charter printed in Mabille’s introd. _Comtes_, p. lxiv, note 1; the reference there given to Salmon is wrong) that in 942, the year after the death of Fulk the Red, the viscount of Orléans was one Geoffrey; and he belonged to a totally different family--but a family which, it seems, did in time acquire the county of Gâtinais, and in the end became merged in the house of Anjou, when the son of Geoffrey of Gâtinais and Hermengard of Anjou succeeded his uncle Geoffrey Martel in 1061. It is impossible not to suspect that the late Angevin writers took up this story at the wrong end and moved it back two hundred years. 3. Comes the great question of Ingelger’s investiture with half the county of Anjou.