Another of Henry’s vassals in Berry, Odo of Issoudun, had lately died leaving an infant heir, and this child had been stolen by his kinsman the duke of Burgundy. The custody of his fief was offered to the king by the barons who had it in their keeping, but he refused to receive it without the child,[96] whom he made no attempt to reclaim. It was not worth while to risk an embroilment with Burgundy about a petty lordship in Berry at the moment when an opportunity was just presenting itself for annexing to the Poitevin domains a valuable fief of the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of La Marche, which lay between Berry and the Limousin. Count Adalbert V of La Marche had separated from his wife, lost his only son, and seemingly disinherited his only daughter with her own consent;[97] the kinship between him and his only other surviving relatives was so remote that he deemed himself free to dispose of his county without regard to them; and he now offered to sell it to its overlord, King Henry, for a sum of money wherewith he himself might go to end his lonely days in the Holy Land. In December Henry went to meet him at Grandmont; the bargain was quickly struck, the conveyance executed, and the purchase money—less than a third of what Henry is said to have estimated the county as worth—paid down, and the barons and knights of La Marche did homage to Henry as their immediate liege lord.[98] In all these proceedings of Henry in Aquitaine there is no reference to Richard. They clearly indicate that the elder holder of the ducal title still claimed the ducal power and authority as his own, not his son’s. He seems, however, to have left to Richard the punishment of one important Limousin rebel whose case he had a year before expressly reserved for his own judgement; for it was Richard who now “took away the castle”—that is, the fortified town—“at Limoges where S. Martial rests in his minster” from the viscount; “and it served the viscount right,” adds a Norman chronicler, “for helping the count of Angoulême against the duke.”[99] This seems to have been about the time when Henry was in Aquitaine, and it is the only act of Richard’s mentioned by any chronicler between Henry’s arrival in Normandy in August 1177 and his return to England in July 1178.[100] We may infer, almost with certainty, that it was done by Henry’s order; and, with considerable probability, that the unusual state of quiescence in which Richard seems to have passed these eleven months was due in part at least to the restraint placed on him by Henry’s presence on the continent. So long as Richard remained in the dependent position to which he had been reduced by the agreement at Montlouis, it would be impossible for him to take any considerable military or political action, unless by his father’s order, while his father was within reach. [Sidenote: 1178] But in the autumn of 1178, when Henry was once more in England, Richard’s activity re-commenced. “With a great