[355] Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 10). [356] _Gesta Cons._ and _Gesta Amb. Domin._ as above. [357] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 280. [358] Chron. Vindoc. a. 1027 (_ib._ p. 165). Cf. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1027 (_ib._ p. 22). [Illustration: Plan VI. MEDIEVAL ANGERS. Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co. ] Fulk was now at the height of his prosperity. He had been count of Anjou for forty years, and his reign had been one of unbroken success. Each in turn of the greater neighbours who had stood, a threatening ring, around Geoffrey Greygown’s boy-heir had been successfully dealt with in some way or other, till the little Marchland had grown to be a power in the realm second only to Normandy and perhaps to Aquitaine; and before Fulk’s reign closed, even Aquitaine, the only one of Anjou’s immediate neighbours which had not had to bow before him, fell prostrate at the feet of his son. Fulk’s last years were to be years of peace. Only once again did he take part in the general affairs of the French kingdom; and then, as ever, his action was in strict accord with the policy which he had begun and which his descendants followed consistently down to the time of Henry Fitz-Empress: a policy of steady loyalty to the lawful authority of the French Crown, against which the counts of Blois lived in perpetual opposition. After Robert’s death, in 1031, Fulk appeared in the unexpected character of peace-maker between Queen Constance and her son, the young King Henry, whom she was trying to oust from his throne;[359] and he afterwards accompanied Henry on an expedition to dislodge Odo of Champagne from Sens, which however succeeded no better than the attempt once made by Odo and Henry to dislodge Fulk himself from Amboise.[360] But peace or war, it mattered not to the Black Count; he was never at a loss for work. When there was no enemy to fight or to outwit, his versatile energies flung themselves just as readily into the encouragement of piety or the improvement and embellishment of his capital. Over the black bastions of the castle with which the French King Philip Augustus, when he had wrested Angers from a degenerate descendant of its ancient counts, found it needful to secure his hold on “this contemptuous city,” there still looks out upon the river a fragment of a ruined hall, chiefly of red flintstone; it is the sole remains of the dwelling-place of Fulk Nerra--in all likelihood, his own work.[361] A poetic legend shows him to us for once quietly at home, standing in that hall and gazing at the view from its windows. At his feet flowed the purple Mayenne between its flat but green meadows--for the great suburb beyond the river did not yet exist--winding down beneath a bridge of his own building to join the Loire beyond the rising hills to the south-west. His eyes, keen as those of the “Falcon” whose name he