In this sentence of Gerald’s we have perhaps the earliest foreshadowing of the epithet which was to become attached exclusively to Richard’s name. The king of beasts has in all ages been a common simile for a king of men, whether the kingship be material or metaphorical.[117] But Gerald’s words seem, from their context, meant to carry a special significance which is more distinctly implied in the special form of Richard’s traditional surname. Richard is not the only hero whom poets and romancers, in the golden age of old French poetry and romance, credited with the possession of “a lion’s heart,”[118] but he is the only one who became known to the world for all time as pre-eminently and absolutely “The Lion-Heart.” We cannot tell precisely when the epithet came into general use; one writer used it within eight years after Richard’s death.[119] It had evidently fixed itself in popular tradition before a less high-souled generation of romancers sought to explain a surname, whose true meaning they were too far removed from the old epic spirit to appreciate or understand, by devising an origin for it in an impossible tale of their own clumsy invention.[120] Its true origin need be sought no further than the character of him who bore it. “Among the virtues in which he excels, three especially distinguish him beyond compare: supereminent valour and daring;[121] unbounded liberality and bountifulness; stedfast constancy in holding to his purpose and to his word”—thus Gerald of Wales wrote of Richard some eight or nine years after the campaign of Taillebourg.[122] The young duke’s energy and daring had been proved before that expedition; and his lavish readiness to reward those who served him had contributed in no small degree to his military successes, by means of the crowd of highly trained soldiers whom it attracted to his standard. What medieval writers call “constancy” was one of the qualities most universally admired in the medieval world. Richard’s “constancy” had, as yet, shown itself chiefly in a form which compelled the admiration and respect of all his Aquitanian subjects, but was not likely to win him the love of the Aquitanian baronage. From the hour when his father laid on him, a lad of scarce sixteen years and a half, the task of restoring the ducal authority in Aquitaine, his aim was to rule and govern what Gerald truly calls “that hitherto untamed country” in such wise “that not only might he establish within its borders a far more complete and unbroken peace than was wont to reign there, but also, recovering what in time past had been lopped off and separated from it, restore all things to their pristine condition.”[123] The barons of the duchy were for the most part far from regarding “peace within its borders” as a thing to be desired; and Richard’s ideal of a well-ordered state, while thus differing from theirs, was not made more attractive in their eyes by the methods which he employed to realize it. Unlike his elder brother,