From England Henry was called away in August 1158, by the troubles of his dominions across the sea.  The power of Anjou had been built up by centuries of tyranny, treason, and greed.  Nantes had been robbed from Britanny, Tours had been wrested from Blois, the southern borderland from Poitou.  A hundred years of feud with Maine could not lightly be forgotten.  Normandy still cherished the ancient hatred of pirate and Frenchman.  To the Breton, as to the Norman and the Gascon, the rule of Anjou was a foreign rule; and if they must have a foreign ruler, better the King of France than these upstart Counts.  Henry held his various states too by wholly different titles, and to every one of them his right was more or less disputed.  To add to the confusion, his barons in every province held under him according to different customs and laws of feudal tenure; and many of them, moreover, owed a double allegiance, and did homage for part of their estates to Henry and for part to the King of France.  In the general uncertainty as to every question of succession, or title, or law, or constitution, or feudal relations, the authority which had been won by the sword could be kept only by sheer military force.  The rebellious array of the feudal nobles, eager to spring to arms against the new imperial system, could count on the help of the great French vassals along the border, jealous of their own independence, and ever watching the Angevin policy with vigilant hostility.  And behind these princes of France stood the French king, Henry’s suzerain lord and his most determined and restless foe, from whom the Angevin count had already taken away his wife and half his dominions, a foe to whom, however, through all the perplexed and intermittent wars of thirty years, he was bound by the indissoluble tie of the feudal relation, which remained the dominant and authoritative fact of the political morality of that day.  For twenty years to come the two kings, both of them hampered by overwhelming difficulties, strove to avoid war each after his own fashion:  Henry by money lavishly spent, and by wary diplomacy; Louis more economically by a restless cunning, by incessant watching of his adversary’s weak points, by dexterously using the arms of Henry’s rebellious subjects rather than those of Frenchmen.

Henry’s first care was to secure his ill-defined and ill-defended frontier, and to recover those border fortresses which had been wrested from Geoffrey by his enemies.  In Normandy the Vexin, which was the true military frontier between him and France, and commanded the road to Paris, had been lost.  In Anjou he had to win back the castles which had fallen to the House of Blois.  His brother Geoffrey, Earl of Nantes, was dead, and he must secure his own succession to the earldom.  Two rival claimants were disputing the lordship of Britanny, but Britanny must at all costs be brought into obedience to Henry.  There were hostile forces in Angoumois, La Marche,