[243] See note B at end of chapter. Their disdain, however, mattered little to Fulk. In those critical times, he who had the keenest sword, the strongest arm, the clearest head and the boldest heart, had the best title to nobility--a title whose validity all were sooner or later compelled to acknowledge. Fulk held Anjou by the grace of God, the favour of his lord the duke, and the might of his own good sword. He was, however, no mere man of war; he was quite willing to strengthen his position by peaceful means. One method of so doing was suggested by his father’s example; it was one which in all ages finds favour with ambitious men of obscure origin, and which was to be specially characteristic of the Angevin house. As Ingelger had married Ælendis of Amboise, so Fulk sought and won the hand of another maiden of Touraine, Roscilla, the daughter of Warner, lord of Loches, Villentras and Haye. It can only have been as the dowry of his wife that Fulk came into possession of the most valuable portion of her father’s lands, the township of Loches.[244] It lay some twenty miles south of Amboise, on the left bank of the Indre, a little river which takes its rise in the plains of Berry and winds along a wooded valley, through some of the most romantic scenery of southern Touraine, to fall into the Loire about half way between Amboise and Angers. In a loop of the river, sheltered on the south and west by a belt of woodland which for centuries to come was a favourite hunting-ground of Roscilla’s descendants, rose a pyramidal height of rock on whose steep sides the houses of the little township clustered round a church said to have been built in the sixth century by a holy man from southern Gaul, named Ursus, the “S. Ours” whom Loches still venerates as its patron saint.[245] By the acquisition of Loches Fulk had gained in the heart of southern Touraine a foot-hold which, coupled with that which he already possessed at Amboise, might one day serve as a basis for the conquest of the whole district. [244] _Gesta Cons. Andeg._ (Marchegay, _Comtes d’Anjou_), pp. 65, 66. The pedigree there given to Roscilla is impossible. [245] The life of S. Ours is in Gregory of Tours, _Vitæ Patrum_, c. xviii.