This plan he presently proceeded to carry out; the old church was patched up, and in due course he solemnly laid the foundation stone of the present structure. This was somewhere about the year 1170. At first the work was pushed on with vigour, but for some reason or other, probably owing to lack of funds, when the eastern wall of the ambulatory was completed, things came to a standstill, and nothing further was done for nearly sixty years. Duke Godfrey died in 1190, and his son and successor, Henry the Warrior--a keen, unscrupulous, strenuous prince, with a passion for territorial aggrandisement, and never happy unless he were doing something to promote the prosperity of his beloved towns, was too occupied with intrigue and warfare until the closing years of his long and successful career to have any leisure for church building. It was not till 1226 that he at last began to seriously think of realising his father's project, and he did something more than think about it: in the beautiful Transition work in chancel, transept and ambulatory we have the result of his meditations. Henry himself, in the deed by which he endowed the Chapter of Saint Gudila's with ten new stalls, informs us of the motive which had inspired him. The work had been resumed, he says, by his order 'in honour of the Blessed Virgin.' But was he impelled by no other motive than his devotion to the Mother of God? What we know of the antecedents of the man suggests an affirmative answer. The famous road from Cologne to Bruges--that road on which, as we have already seen, the commercial prosperity of the cities of Brabant at this time wholly depended--before entering the duchy of Brabant passed through the _Pays de Liége_, and the bishop who ruled that little principality was thus enabled, whenever he would, to create a commercial crisis by closing up that portion of the great trade route which traversed his domains. To this state of things the burghers of Brabant objected, and Duke Henry would fain have put an end to it by transferring the See of Saint Lambert to one of his own towns. Though after the disastrous battle of Montenaeken (October 14, 1213)--'Saint Lambert's triumph,' as the men of Liége called it--he had humbled himself before Hugh of Pierrepont and sued for pardon on bended knees, his reconciliation with the bishop was only a feigned one, nor had he in reality abandoned his scheme; and it is more than likely that when, in his old age, he at last set his hand to the task which his father had left undone, he flattered himself that the church he was rearing would one day be a cathedral.