difficulties as to the relation of the pope and the King of the Romans to the treaty, while Earl Simon’s wife Eleanor and her children refused to waive their very remote claims to a share in the Norman and Angevin inheritances, which her brother was prepared to renounce.  As ever, Montfort held to his personal rights with the utmost tenacity, and the self-seeking obstinacy of the chief negotiator of the treaty caused both bad blood and delay.  At last he was bought off by the promise of a money payment, and the preliminary ratifications were exchanged in the summer of 1259.  On November 14 Henry left England for Paris for the formal conclusion of the treaty.  There were great festivities on the occasion of the meeting of the two kings, but once more Montfort and his wife blocked the way.  Not until the very morning of the day fixed for the final ceremony were they satisfied by Henry’s promise to deposit on their behalf a large sum in the hands of the French.  Immediately afterwards Henry did homage to Louis for Gascony.

The chief condition of the treaty of Paris was Henry’s definitive renunciation of all his claims on Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, and his agreement to hold Gascony as a fief of the French crown.  In return for this, Louis not only recognised him as Duke of Aquitaine, but added to his actual possessions there by ceding to him all that he held, whether in fief or in demesne, in the three dioceses of Limoges, Cahors, and Perigueux.  Besides these immediate cessions, the French king promised to hand over to Henry certain districts then held by his brother, Alfonse of Poitiers, and his brother’s wife Joan of Toulouse, in the event of their dominions escheating to the crown by their death without heirs.  These regions included Agen and the Agenais, Saintonge to the south of the Charente, and in addition the whole of Quercy, if it could be proved by inquest that it had been given by Richard I. to his sister Joan, grandmother of Joan of Poitiers, as her marriage portion.  Moreover the French king promised to pay to Henry the sums necessary to maintain for two years five hundred knights to be employed “for the service of God, or the Church, or the kingdom of England."[1]

    [1] For the treaty and its execution see M. Gavrilovitch,
    Etude sur le traite de Paris de 1259 (1899).

The treaty was unpopular both in France and England.  The French strongly objected to the surrender of territory, and were but little convinced of the advantage gained by making the English king once more the vassal of France.  English opinion was hostile to the abandonment of large pretensions in return for so small an equivalent.  On the French side it is true that Louis sacrificed something to his sense of justice and love of peace.  But the territory he ceded was less in reality than in appearance.  The French king’s demesnes in Quercy, Perigord, and Limousin were not large, and the transference of the homage of the chief vassals