but marked by special characteristics of thought and feeling.  Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake.  The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them.

CHAPTER XI

THE DEATH OF HENRY

In the last nine years of Henry’s reign his work lay elsewhere than in his English kingdom.  They were years spent in a passionate effort to hold together the unwieldy empire he had so laboriously built up.  On the death of Louis in 1180 the peaceful and timid traditions of his reign were cast aside by the warlike Philip, who had from childhood cherished a violent hatred against Henry, and who was bent on the destruction of rival powers, and the triumph of the monarchy in France.  Henry’s absorbing care, on the other hand, was to prevent war; and during the next four years he constantly forced reconciliation on the warring princes of France.  “All who loved peace rejoiced at his coming,” the chroniclers constantly repeat.  “He had faith in the Lord, that if he crossed over he could make peace.”  “As though always at his coming peace should certainly be made.”

But in Britanny and in Aquitaine there was no peace.  The sons whom he had set over his provinces had already revolted in 1173.  In 1177 fresh troubles broke out, and from that time their history was one of unbroken revolt against their father and strife amongst themselves.  “Dost thou not know,” Geoffrey once answered a messenger of his father’s, sent to urge him to peace, “that it is our proper nature, planted in us by inheritance from our ancestors, that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive against brother, and son against father.  I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right, nor vainly seek to rob us of our nature!” In 1182 Henry sought once more to define the authority of his sons, and to assert the unity of the Empire under his own supremacy by ordering Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their brother for Aquitaine and Britanny.  Richard’s passionate refusal struck the first open blow at his father’s imperial schemes, and war at once broke out.  The nobles of Aquitaine, weary of the severe rule of Richard, had long plotted to set in his place his gentler brother Henry, and the young king, along with Geoffrey, lent himself openly to the conspiracy.  In 1183 they called for help from Flanders, France, and Normandy, and a general revolt seemed on the point of breaking out, like that of ten years before.  Henry II. was forced to march himself into Aquitaine.  But in a war