The Angers in which Fulk came to rule as count, about the time when Æthelstan succeeded Eadward the Elder as king of Wessex, was a town not of dark slate walls as it is chiefly now, but of red flintstone and redder brick, such as the medieval builders long copied from the works of their Roman masters, and such as may still be found embedded in the outer walls of the bishop’s palace and half hidden behind the mighty black bastions of the later castle. That castle covers, or rather encloses, the site of a hall which Count Odo, the successor of the traitor Lambert, had built about the year 851 on ground acquired by exchange with Bishop Dodo. For some time after Frankish counts had been substituted for Roman prefects, the spiritual and temporal rulers of Angers had continued to dwell side by side on the hill-top; Odo, however, instead of again occupying the palace which Lambert had deserted, made it over to the bishop in return for a plot of ground lying just outside the south-west corner of the city wall. There he built himself a house, with the river at its feet and a vine-clad hill at its back; and there from that time forth was the dwelling-place of the Angevin counts.[243] Fulk the Red took up his abode there in the early days of a great political transition which was to change the kingdom of the West-Franks into a kingdom of Parisian France. Half a century had yet to elapse before the transition was accomplished; at its present stage indeed few could foresee its ultimate issue. If the ducal house of Paris had many friends, it had also many foes. The old Karolingian nobility was slowly dying out or sinking into the background before the new nobility of the sword; the great house of Vermandois had thrown its weight into the scale with the advancing power; but there were still many who looked with contempt and disgust on the new order of things, on the house of Paris and all its connexions. The count of Anjou was wedged in between powers anything but favourably disposed towards him and his patrons. The princes of Aquitania looked scornfully across the Loire at the upstarts on its northern bank; little as they recked of any authority beyond their river-barrier, the only one which they acknowledged at all was that of the Karolingian king at Laon. The Bretons beyond the Mayenne were as far from being subdued as ever. Within the duchy of France itself, one little corner was equally scornful of the dukes and of their partisans; Maine, although from its geographical position necessarily reckoned part of the duchy “between Seine and Loire,” still refused to acknowledge any such reckoning; its ruling house, as well as the great nobles of the South, claimed to have inherited the traditions of the Roman Empire and the blood of its Frankish conquerors. In the eyes of the Cenomannian counts, who traced their pedigree from a nephew of Charles the Great, the heirs of Tortulf the Forester were nothing but upstart barbarians.