His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his 'Constitutions' and his 'Assizes' that it came to pass that over all the world the English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he who gave England a foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred years. The impress which the personality of Henry II. left upon his time meets us wherever we turn." _Mrs. J. R. Green, Henry the Second, chapters 1-2._ Henry II. and his two sons, Richard I. (Cœur de Lion), and John, are distinguished, sometimes, as the Angevin kings, or kings of the House of Anjou, and sometimes as the Plantagenets, the latter name being derived from a boyish habit ascribed to Henry's father, Count Geoffrey, of "adorning his cap with a sprig of 'plantagenista,' the broom which in early summer makes the open country of Anjou and Maine a blaze of living gold." Richard retained and ruled the great realm of his father; but John lost most of his foreign inheritance, including Normandy, and became the unwilling benefactor of England by stripping her kings of alien interests and alien powers and bending their necks to Magna Charta. _K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings._ ALSO IN: _W. Stubbs, The Early Plantagenets._ See, also, AQUITAINE (GUIENNE): A. D. 1137-1152; IRELAND: A. D. 1169-1175. ENGLAND: A. D. 1162-1170. Conflict of King and Church. The Constitutions of Clarendon. Murder of Archbishop Becket.