With these episodes of Norman feudalism it is interesting to compare the picture of Anglo-Norman society a hundred years later which we find in that unique piece of feudal biography, the _History of William the Marshal_. Companion to the Young King and witness of the final shame of Henry II, pilgrim to Jerusalem and Cologne, advanced to positions of trust under Richard and John, earl of Striguil and Pembroke and regent of England under Henry III, the Earl Marshal stood in close relations to the chief men and movements of his day. His biographer, however, does not let himself wander to tell of others’ deeds, and while his work contains material of much importance for the general history of the time, its chief value lies in its reflection of the life of the age and its faithful portrait of the man himself--soldier of fortune, gentleman-adventurer if you will, but always loyal, honorable, straightforward, and true, by the standards of his time a man without fear and without reproach. Brought up in the Norman castle of Tancarville, the Marshal, like the Young King his master, became passionately addicted to tournaments, _par éminence_ the knightly sport of the Middle Ages, which made hunting and other pastimes seem tame and furnished the best preparation for real war, since, as an English chronicler tells us, in order to shine in war a knight “must have seen his own blood flow, have had his jaw crack under the blow of his adversary, have been dashed to the earth with such force as to feel the weight of his foe, and unhorsed twenty times he must twenty times have retrieved his failures, more set than ever on the combat.” Unknown to England before the reign of Richard, these manly sports flourished most of all in France, the country of chivalry and feats of arms, and for several years we follow the Marshal from combat to combat through Normandy and Maine, Champagne and the Ile-de-France, so that his renown spread from Poitou to the Rhine. At one period in his life he tourneyed every fortnight. The tournaments of his day, however, were not the elegant and fashionable affairs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which the word is apt to call to our minds, assemblages of beauty as well as of prowess, held in special enclosures before crowded galleries, with elaborate rules respecting armor and weapons and the conditions of conflict. On the contrary, they were fought like battles, in the open, with all the arms and methods of war and all its manœuvres and ferocity of attack; indeed they differed from war mainly in being voluntary and limited to a single day. After one series of such thunderous encounters the Marshal was found in a smithy, his head on the anvil and the smith working with hammer and pincers to remove his battered helmet. In a great tournament at Lagni three thousand knights are said to have been engaged, of which the Young King furnished eighty. Knights fought for honor and fame and for sheer