After the paroxysm came the reaction. When the dreaded year had passed over and the world found itself still alive; when the king had at last consented to purchase relief from the interdict by parting from his beloved Bertha, and the nation was rousing itself to welcome the new queen who stepped into Bertha’s place; then the blood which he had shed at Conquereux and elsewhere--one may surely add, the ashes of his wife--began to weigh heavily on the Black Count’s soul; “the fear of Gehenna” took possession of him, and leaving the marchland to the care of his brother Maurice he set out for the Holy Sepulchre.[316] This journey was the first link in a chain which, through the later pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra himself and those of his great-grandson Fulk V., brought the counts of Anjou into a specially intimate relation with the Holy Land and led to the establishment of an Angevin dynasty upon its throne. Legend has not been slack to furnish Fulk the Palmer with characteristic adventures, to tell how his craft outwitted that of the Turks who tried to exclude him from the Sepulchre, and how he not only procured a piece of the true Cross, but while kissing the sacred stone in the fervour of his devotion, detected a loose fragment which he managed to bite off and bring home as the most precious trophy of his journey.[317] His first care on his return was to build an abbey for the reception of this relic. From the rocky angle by the winding Indre where the great “Square Tower”--as the natives emphatically call the keep of Loches--was rising in picturesque contrast to a church reared by Geoffrey Greygown in honour of our Lady,[318] the land which the wife of the first count of Anjou had transmitted to her descendants stretched a mile eastward beyond the river in a broad expanse of green meadow to a waste plot of ground full of broom, belonging to a man named Ingelger. From its original Latin name, _Belli-locus_, now corrupted into Beaulieu, it seems possible that the place was set apart for trials by ordeal of battle.[319] [316] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 15). On the regency of Maurice see note C at end of chapter, and Mabille, Introd. _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. lxxvi. [317] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 102, 103. There is a versified account of the pious theft in the Beaulieu office of the Holy Sepulchre, Salies, _Hist. de Foulques-Nerra_, p. 529. [318] In 963; Chron. Turon. Abbrev. ad ann. (Salmon, _Chron. de Touraine_, p. 185). From the foundation-charter, cited by M. l’abbé Bardet (_La Collégiale de Loches_, p. 8), it seems that Geoffrey founded the church on his return from a pilgrimage to Rome. A fragment of his work possibly remains in the present church (now called S. Ours), which was built by the historian-prior, Thomas Pactius, in the time of Henry II.