England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and IINorgate, Kate
History
England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II
Norgate, Kate
Anjou, House of; England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period, 1154-1216
The acts of Geoffrey Greygown in the _Gesta Consulum_ are a mass of
fable. The fight with the Dane Æthelwulf and that with the Saxon
Æthelred are mythical on the face of them, and the writer’s habitual
defiance of chronology is carried to its highest point in this
chapter. From him we turn to the story of Fulk Rechin. “Ille igitur
Gosfridus Grisa Gonella, pater avi mei Fulconis, cujus probitates
enumerare non possumus, excussit Laudunum de manu Pictavensis comitis,
et in prœlio superavit eum super Rupes, et persecutus est eum usque ad
Mirebellum. Et fugavit Britones, qui venerant Andegavim cum prædatorio
exercitu, quorum duces erant filii Isoani (Conani). Et postea fuit cum
duce Hugone in obsidione apud Marsonum, ubi arripuit eum infirmitas
quâ exspiravit; et corpus illius allatum est Turonum et sepultum in
ecclesiâ B. Martini” (Fulk Rechin, Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 376).
Whoever was the author of this account, he clearly knew or cared
nothing about the stories of the monkish writers, but had a perfectly
distinct source of information unknown to them. For their legends he
substitutes two things: a war with the count of Poitou, and a war with
the duke of Britanny. On each of these wars we get some information
from one other authority; the question is how to make this other
authority tally with Fulk.
1. As to the Breton war, which seems to be the earlier in date.
No one but Fulk mentions the raid of Conan’s sons upon Angers; and M.
Mabille (Introd. _Comtes_, p. xlviii) objects to it on the ground that
Conan’s sons were not contemporaries of Geoffrey.
Conan of Rennes was killed in 992 in a battle with Geoffrey’s son. He
had been married in 970 to Geoffrey’s daughter Hermengard (see above,
pp. 121, 135). Now a daughter of Geoffrey in 970 must have been almost
a child, but it by no means follows that her husband was equally young.
On the contrary, he seems to have been sufficiently grown up to take
a part in politics twenty years before (Morice, _Hist. Bret._ vol. i.
p. 62). It is certain that he had several sons; it is certain that two
at least of them were not Hermengard’s; it is likely that none of them
were, except his successor Geoffrey. Supposing Conan was somewhat over
fifty when killed (and he may have been older still) that would make
him about thirty when he married Hermengard; he might have had sons ten
years before that, and those sons might very easily head an attack upon
their stepmother’s father in 980 or thereabouts. Surely M. Mabille here
makes a needless stumbling-block of the chronology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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