he did not court popularity; he was indeed absolutely indifferent to it, if not contemptuous of it. “Strictness and firmness, gravity and constancy,” were the characteristics in him which men contrasted with the young king’s easy good-nature, indulgent temper, and pleasantness towards all who approached him. Richard’s generosity and graciousness were of a higher type than young Henry’s; they were displayed only where they were deserved.[124] With him everything was earnest. Even martial sports had no charm for a lad who, while other young knights of his day—his brothers among them—were acquiring the use of arms in an endless round of tournaments, was serving his military apprenticeship in real warfare; a warfare which he waged with tireless persistence and relentless severity for nearly ten years, “that he might quell the insubordination of an unruly people, and make innocence secure amid evildoers.”[125] His zeal for public order and justice, his ruthless application of the utmost rigor of law to those who in his eyes deserved punishment, naturally provoked the hatred of his opponents, and laid him open to the charge of cruelty.[126] No instances, however, are recorded; the Aquitanian chroniclers say nothing on the subject, and there is no real ground for supposing that his sternness towards the barons who withstood his will was other than what Gerald represents it to have been—part of a wholesome and necessary discipline.[127] In 1183 they are said to have accused him of crimes of another kind;[128] but this accusation rests only upon an English writer’s report of the pleas by which they sought to justify their own treason. That some at least of the worst details of the charge were a product of that “recklessness of tongue” for which the men of the south were notorious, may with much probability be inferred from the silence of the Aquitanian chroniclers on this point also. The only comment made by a contemporary local writer on Richard’s character and conduct during these early years of storm and stress is a tribute of praise even more impressive, considering the period and the circumstances in which it was written, than the panegyrics that were lavished from all quarters upon his later achievements. Geoffrey of Breuil seems to have been a member of a junior branch of the knightly family of Breuil in Poitou; his father’s house was at Ste. Marie de Clairmont, near Excideuil in Périgord. He made his profession as a monk at S. Martial’s abbey at Limoges in 1160, was ordained priest in 1167, and ten years later was made Prior of Vigeois in the Limousin. His sketch of Aquitanian history ends abruptly at the year 1185. In that year he, as he says, decided to insert in his work “the names of the kings who are ruling the world in this our age.” After mentioning by name Prester John, the two Emperors, the kings of Jerusalem, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sicily, Morocco, Spain, and Hungary, he