Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there were others who had seized the opportunity afforded them by the war to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority at defiance. The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was wielded by the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her son. The Aquitanian barons whose castles had in the time of the war been fortified or held against Henry II made it clear that they were not disposed to give them up to Richard. He therefore, in pursuance of his father’s orders, set out “to reduce the said castles to nothing.” He began after midsummer by marching into the county of Agen, where Arnald of Bonville had fortified Castillon against him, “and would not give it up.” This place, “fortified by both nature and art,” held out against the duke and his engines of war for nearly two months; “at last he took it, and in it thirty knights whom he kept in his own hands.”[71] We have no certain knowledge of his further movements [Sidenote: 1176] till the following spring, when he and Geoffrey of Britanny went to England together. They landed on Good Friday, April 7.[72] Richard’s purpose seems to have been to seek counsel and help in the difficult task which his father had assigned to him, for when the Easter festivities were over it was arranged by the elder Henry that the younger one should go with Richard into Poitou “to subdue his enemies.” Young Henry went to Normandy on April 20;[73] Richard probably returned about the same time, though the brothers did not cross the Channel together.[74] During his absence Vulgrin of Angoulême, a son of the reigning count William Taillefer, had “presumed” to march into Poitou at the head of a troop of Brabantines. The bishop of Poitiers had at once resolved, with Theobald Chabot, who was “the leader of Duke Richard’s soldiery,” to “deliver the people committed to him out of the hand of their enemies,” and the invaders, although they far outnumbered the forces of the bishop and the constable, had been completely routed near Barbezieux.[75] Richard made straight for Poitou and called out its feudal levies, “and a great multitude of knights from the regions round about flocked to him, for the wages that he gave them.” He began by punishing some of the rebels in Poitou; next, after Whitsuntide (May 23), he marched against Vulgrin’s Brabantines and defeated them in a pitched battle between St. Maigrin and Bouteville, near the western border of the Angoumois. Thence he led his host into the Limousin, to punish Count Aimar of Limoges, who also had taken advantage of the duke’s absence to commit some breaches of the peace. First, Richard besieged and took Aimar’s castle of Aixe with its garrison of forty knights. Then he attacked Limoges, and in a few days was master of the city and all its fortifications. All this was the work of a month.