swear to keep these “assizes” and obey the justiciars of the fleet, who were further bidden to set out on the voyage as soon as possible; which they did shortly after Easter.[457] The next step in Richard’s preparations for departure was of a very different kind. Of all the country seats belonging to the counts of Poitou the one in which for many generations they seem to have most delighted was Talmont. The lordship of which this castle was the head included a territory known as “the Land of the Countess,” because it had formed part of the dower of the successive countesses of Poitou ever since the middle of the eleventh century. Here, “on the sea-shore, in the wood of La Roche, and not far from the mouth of the Jard”—a little stream which falls into the sea some few miles south-east of the castle of Talmont—Richard now founded a house of Augustinian canons. Its dedication was to “our Lord and the glorious Virgin Mary His Mother”; its name was to be “God’s Place,” _Locus Dei_, _Lieu-Dieu_; and its endowment consisted of the whole “Land of the Countess” with all its appurtenances, “including everything that his mother, as well as himself, had or might have in that place,” with the addition of other gifts and privileges.[458] Eleanor had no need of “the Countess’s Land,” for Richard before leaving England had granted to her, in addition to the dowry given her by his father, the whole of that which Henry I had given to his queen and that which Stephen had given to Maud of Boulogne.[459] Evidently it was with his mother’s sanction that the king now dedicated to higher uses this large share of a cherished possession of her forefathers which was also a favourite pleasure-resort of his own. In God’s Place at Talmont we may surely see an offering made with special intention by the offerer and his mother for his safety and welfare in his great adventure and for the success of the enterprise on which his heart was set.