[Sidenote:  Chateau Gaillard]

But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the loyalty of the Norman people.  His father might trace his descent through Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a stranger to the Norman.  It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the border at the head of Brabancon mercenaries, in whose camp the old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provencal ruffian, held supreme command.  The purely military site that Richard selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of arms.  As a monument of warlike skill his “Saucy Castle,” Chateau Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages.  Richard fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks.  Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen.  The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard designed to cover his Norman capital.  Approach by the river was blocked by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid stream, and by a fortified town which the king built in the valley of the Gambon, then an impassable marsh.  In the angle between this valley and the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three hundred feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole.  Its outworks and the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the fortifications themselves—­the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel, the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les Andelys.  Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky:  “How pretty a child is mine, this child of but one year old!”

[Sidenote:  Richard’s death]

The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau Gaillard at a later time proved Richard’s foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honour.  “I would take it, were its walls of iron,” Philip exclaimed in wrath as he saw the fortress rise.  “I would hold it, were its walls of butter,” was the defiant answer of his foe.  It was Church land and the Archbishop of Rouen laid Normandy under