Two years later the scheme of partition was fully developed, and now Anjou was explicitly included in it. At Epiphany 1169 Louis of France granted to the younger Henry the investiture of Anjou and Maine, on the understanding that the boy was to hold these fiefs, as well as Normandy, in his own person, directly of the French crown. Richard was invested, on the same terms, with the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine. Britanny was granted to young Henry, to be holden by his brother Geoffrey of him as mesne lord, under the king of France as overlord.[10] The one fragment of the continental dominions of the Angevin house which the king of England formally reserved to himself was Touraine; his homage for it was due to a prince of inferior rank, the count of Blois, and his paternal pride chose rather to perform that homage himself than to suffer it to be performed by any of his sons.[11] [Sidenote: 1170] All these arrangements were as yet merely prospective. Henry had no intention of abdicating, nor of depriving Eleanor of her rights as duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou, nor even of dispossessing the reigning duke of Britanny. His purpose was simply to insure that, were he himself unexpectedly to become disabled or die, there should be no fair pretext for fighting over his inheritance or defrauding any of his sons of their shares, but that they should be bound to each other, and their overlord Louis bound to each and all of them, by such legal ties as none of the parties could lightly venture to set at defiance. In June 1170 the scheme was completed by the coronation of the younger Henry at Westminster. Two months later the elder king fell sick at La Motte-de-Ger, near Domfront. Believing his end to be at hand, he confirmed the partition of January 1169, and solemnly bequeathed the one son who had no share in it--John--to the guardianship of his eldest brother, “the young king,” “that he might advance him and maintain him.”[12] One contemporary historian adds: “And he (the king) gave to his youngest son John the county of Mortain.”[13] The meaning of this probably is that Henry expressed a wish, or made a suggestion, that his successor should provide for John by investing him with Mortain.[14] From the days of the Conqueror downwards, this Norman county had always been held by some junior member of the Norman ducal house. Henry I. had granted it to his favourite nephew, Stephen; it had passed to Stephen’s son William, and afterwards to his daughter Mary; in 1168, Mary’s husband, Count Matthew of Boulogne, had ceded it to Henry II., on condition that a heavy sum charged upon its revenues should be paid annually to his two daughters.[15] Its actual value, therefore, was now very small; and Henry on his recovery seems to have abandoned, for the time at least, his project of bestowing it on John. A year later his diplomacy had wrought out a scheme for providing John with a far more splendid, as well as more valuable, endowment than