The capture of Taillebourg was Richard’s first great military exploit. It laid the foundation of his military fame, not so much by the intrinsic importance of the exploit itself as by the revelation, in the campaign of which it was at once the turning-point and the crown, of the character and capability of the young duke. Its immediate result was the complete submission of the rebels against whom that campaign was directed. Not only did Geoffrey of Rancogne surrender Pons,[105] but Vulgrin of Angoulême, before the end of the month, gave up his capital city and his castle of Montignac; and when Richard, after razing the walls of all these places, sailed for England, he left in Aquitaine, for the moment at least, “all things settled according to his will.”[106] He seems to have visited the tomb of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury[107] before joining his father. Henry received him “with great honour”[108] and gave him his reward; when the young conqueror returned to Aquitaine shortly before Michaelmas, he returned not merely as his father’s lieutenant, but as once again, with his father’s sanction, count of Poitou.[109] CHAPTER II FATHER AND SONS 1179-1183 Domus divisa contra se. We are not told on what conditions, if any, the restitution of Poitou was made to Richard by his father. The matter might become important whenever Henry should again cross the sea; but so long as the king remained in England it would have scarcely any practical effect on Richard’s position in Aquitaine. Whether he commanded the feudal host and disposed of the feudal revenues of Poitou as count or as his father’s delegate, he was, in his father’s absence, equally master of both; and in Aquitaine at large the temporary degradation inflicted on him by Henry seems never to have been recognized at all. He himself had never laid aside the style and title of duke of Aquitaine, nor the princely state belonging to that dignity, nor had he hesitated to deal with the demesne lands of Poitou as his own absolute property. In his own eyes he was count and duke by virtue not of any grant from either Henry or Louis, but of his descent from the old ducal line and of the investiture which he had received at Poitiers and at Limoges from the clergy and people of the duchy. His subjects regarded him in the same light. They fought and intrigued against him not as an intruder or a usurper, nor as the lieutenant of one whom they counted as such, but precisely because he was to them the incarnation of the ducal authority in a form which was specially obnoxious to their habits of turbulent independence and lawless self-will. For seven years they had been watching with growing uneasiness and dismay the development of the “new duke,” whom as a boy of fourteen they had acclaimed at Limoges in 1172, into a man of very different character from the dukes of the last two or three generations.