It was probably in the interval between these two expeditions, to Gascony and to Sancerre, that a new strife arose in the Angoumois. Count Vulgrin Taillefer III had died on June 29[137] leaving an only child, a girl “who,” says Geoffrey of Vigeois, “was the cause of great calamity to her country.” Richard, as duke, took her into his wardship as heiress of Angoulême and claimed also the wardship of her land;[138] but her uncles, William and Aimar, tried to seize their dead brother’s heritage. Richard drove them out of Angoulême, whereupon they found a refuge at Limoges with their half-brother, viscount Aimar.[139] It was plain that Richard would soon be involved in a new war with them and with Aimar of Limoges; and meanwhile other influences were tending to develope that war into a general one. The comparative peace of the last eighteen months was almost ominous; it certainly did not imply contentment on the part of the barons of Aquitaine. They were all this while writhing under the iron rule of their young duke; many of them were plotting schemes for “doing their utmost to drive him out of the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou altogether.”[140] Strangely enough, the impulse which at length brought their plottings to a head seems to have sprung from a private quarrel between two brothers who did not rank among the great vassals of the duchy. The castle of Hautefort, on the border of the Limousin and Périgord, was the joint patrimony of Constantine and Bertrand de Born. They lived in it together, but in continual discord, till Constantine drove Bertrand out, seemingly in the latter part of 1181 or early in 1182. Bertrand, however, soon made his way back, and expelled Constantine in his turn. Constantine appealed for help to their immediate feudal superior, the viscount of Limoges,[141] and also, it seems, to the duke. Both took up his cause; but at the moment they were at enmity with each other—probably about the Angoulême succession—so “Richard made war against Aimar, and Richard and Aimar made war against Bertrand and ravaged and burned his land.” Constantine was “a good knight as regards fighting”;[142] Bertrand was something more—“a good knight, and a good fighter, and a good squire of dames, and a good troubadour, and wise and well-spoken, knowing how to deal with bad and good—and all his time he was at war with all his neighbours.”[143] The condition of things described in these last words was to Bertrand an ideal condition: “I would that the great men should be always quarrelling among themselves,” he said.[144] It was the ideal of a typical Aquitanian baron; and that ideal had become much less easy of realization now that the young duke was master of the land than it had been while the ducal interests were represented only by a woman or left in charge of mere seneschals. Bertrand seems to have conceived a project of so working on the minds of the other malcontents as to band them together with