as they hated France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was “another world”—­strange in speech, in law, and in custom.  And to all the subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner.  To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.

We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new king, “Henry Curtmantel,” as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks hanging to the ground.  The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary strength.  His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and cracked.  Those about him saw something “lion-like” in his face; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot in a paroxysm of passion.  His overpowering energy found an outlet in violent physical exertion.  “With an immoderate love of hunting he led unquiet days,” following the chase over waste and wood and mountain; and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores from incessant exertion.  Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants; in war time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in incessant travel—­one day following another in merciless and intolerable journeyings.  Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race—­its tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without impatience, and the craft that was never at fault.  With the ruddy face and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laborious, patient, industrious, politic.  He never forgot a face he had once seen, nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was never brought to love.  Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his dress—­perhaps the plainest in his court,—­frugal, “so much as was lawful to a prince,” he was lavish in matters of State or in public affairs.  A great