and with fork and flail drove the hated “Guirribecs” back over the border.  Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child was born at Le Mans.  Englishmen saw in the grandson of “good Queen Maud” the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of Cerdic.  The name Henry which the boy bore after his grandfather marked him as lawful inheritor of the broad dominions of Henry I., “the greatest of all kings in the memory of ourselves and our fathers.”  From his father he received, with the surname of Plantagenet by which he was known in later times, the inheritance of the Counts of Anjou.  Through his mother Matilda he claimed all rights and honours that pertained to the Norman dukes.

Heir of three ruling houses, Henry was brought up wherever the chances of war or rebellion gave opportunity.  He was to know neither home nor country.  His infancy was spent at Rouen “in the home,” as Henry I. said, “of his forefather Rollo.”  In 1135 his grandfather died, and left him, before he was yet three years old, the succession to the English throne.  But Geoffrey and Matilda were at the moment hard pressed by one of their ceaseless wars.  The Church was openly opposed to the rule of the House of Anjou; the Norman baronage on either side of the water inherited a long tradition of hatred to the Angevin.  Stephen of Blois, a son of the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, seized the English throne, and claimed the dukedom of Normandy.  Henry was driven from Rouen to take refuge in Angers, in the great palace of the counts, overlooking the river and the vine-covered hills beyond.  There he lived in one of the most ecclesiastical cities of the day, already famous for its shrines, its colleges, the saints whose tombs lay within its walls, and the ring of priories and churches and abbeys that circled it about.

The policy of the Norman kings was rudely interrupted by the reign of Stephen of Blois.  Trembling for the safety of his throne, he at first rested on the support of the Church and the ministers who represented Henry’s system.  But sides were quickly changed.  The great churchmen and the ministers were soon cast off by the new ruler.  “By my Lady St. Mary,” said Roger of Salisbury, when he was summoned to one of Stephen’s councils, “my heart is unwilling for this journey; for I shall be of as much use in court as is a foal in battle.”  The revolution was completed in 1139, when the king in a mad panic seized and imprisoned Roger, the representative alike of Church and ministers.  With the ruin of Roger who for thirty years had been head of the government, of his son Roger the chancellor, and his nephew Nigel the treasurer, the ministerial system was utterly destroyed, and the whole Church was alienated.  Stephen sank into the mere puppet of the nobles.  The work of the Exchequer and the Curia Regis almost came to an end.  A little money was still gathered into the royal treasury; some judicial business seems to have been still carried on, but it was only amid