of his times.  Whilst fully bent on repressing with firmness his vassals’ attempts to shake themselves free from their duties towards him, and to render themselves independent of the crown, he respected their rights, kept his word to them scrupulously, and required of them nothing but what they really owed him.  Into his relations with foreign sovereigns, his neighbors, he imported the same loyal spirit.  “Certain of his council used to tell him,” reports Joinville, “that he did not well in not leaving those foreigners to their warfare; for, if he gave them his good leave to impoverish one another, they would not attack him so readily as if they were rich.  To that the king replied that they said not well; for, quoth he, if the neighboring princes perceived that I left them to their warfare, they might take counsel amongst themselves, and say, ’It is through malice that the king leaves us to our warfare; then it might happen that by cause of the hatred they would have against me, they would come and attack me, and I might be a great loser there-by.  Without reckoning that I should thereby earn the hatred of God, who says, ‘Blessed be the peacemakers!’ So well established was his renown as a sincere friend of peace and a just arbiter in great disputes between princes and peoples that his intervention and his decisions were invited wherever obscure and dangerous questions arose.  In spite of the brilliant victories which, in 1212, he had gained at Taillebourg and Saintes over Henry III., King of England, he himself perceived, on his return from the East, that the conquests won by his victories might at any moment become a fresh cause of new and grievous wars, disastrous, probably, for one or the other of the two peoples.  He conceived, therefore, the design of giving to a peace which was so desirable a more secure basis by founding it upon a transaction accepted on both sides as equitable.  And thus, whilst restoring to the King of England certain possessions which the war of 1242 had lost to him, he succeeded in obtaining from him in return “as well in his own name as in the names of his sons and their heirs, a formal renunciation of all rights that he could pretend to over the duchy of Normandy, the countships of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and, generally, all that his family might have possessed on the continent, except only the lands which the King of France restored to him by the treaty and those which remained to him in Gascony.  For all these last the King of England undertook to do liege-homage to the King of France, in the capacity of peer of France and Duke of Aquitaine and to faithfully fulfil the duties attached to a fief.”  When Louis made known this transaction to his counsellors, “they were very much against it,” says Joinville.  “It seemeth to us, sir,” said they to the king, “that, if you think you have not a right to the conquest won by you and your antecessors from the King of England, you do not make proper restitution to the said king in not restoring