That time was a time of shame and misery such as the Marchland had never yet seen. Eight years of civil war had fostered among the barons of Anjou and Touraine a spirit of turbulence and lawlessness which Fulk, whose own intrigues had sown the first seeds of the mischief, was powerless to control. Throughout the whole of his reign, all southern Touraine was kept in confusion by a feud among the landowners at Amboise;[520] and it can hardly have been the only one of its kind under a ruler who, instead of putting it down with a strong hand, only aggravated it by his undignified and violent intermeddling. Nor were his foreign relations better regulated than his home policy. For a moment, in 1073, an opportunity seemed to present itself of regaining the lost Angevin overlordship over Maine. Ten years of Angevin rule had failed to crush out the love of independence among the Cenomannian people; ten years of Norman rule had just as little effect. While their conqueror was busied with the settlement of his later and greater conquest beyond sea, the patriots of Maine seized a favourable moment to throw off the Norman yoke. Hugh of Este or of Liguria, a son of Herbert Wake-the-dog’s eldest daughter Gersendis, was received as count under the guardianship of his mother and Geoffrey of Mayenne. But Geoffrey, who in the hour of adversity ten years before had seemed little short of a hero, yielded to the temptations of power; and his tyranny drove the Cenomannians to fall back upon the traditions of their old municipal freedom and “make a commune”--in other words, to set up a civic commonwealth such as those which were one day to be the glory of the more distant Cenomannian land on the other side of the Alps. At Le Mans, however, the experiment was premature. It failed through the treachery of Geoffrey of Mayenne; and the citizens, in the extremity of despair, called upon Fulk of Anjou to save them at once from Geoffrey and from William. Fulk readily helped them to dislodge Geoffrey from the citadel of Le Mans;[521] but as soon as William appeared in Maine with a great army from over sea Fulk, like his uncle, vanished. Only when the conqueror had “won back the land of Maine”[522] and returned in triumph to Normandy did Fulk venture to attack La Flèche, a castle on the right bank of the Loir, close to the Angevin border, and held by John, husband of Herbert Wake-dog’s youngest daughter Paula.[523] At John’s request William sent a picked band of Norman troops to reinforce the garrison of La Flèche; Fulk at once collected all his forces and persuaded Hoel duke of Britanny to bring a large Breton host to help him in besieging the place. A war begun on such a scale as this might be nominally an attack on John, but it was practically an attack on William. He took it as such, and again calling together his forces, Normans and English, led them down to the relief of La Flèche. Instead, however, of marching straight to the spot, he