[Sidenote:  The Angevin Marriage]

Measures such as these changed the whole temper of the Norman rule.  It remained a despotism, but from this moment it was a despotism regulated and held in check by the forms of administrative routine.  Heavy as was the taxation under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering throughout his reign from famine and plague, the peace and order which his government secured through thirty years won a rest for the land in which conqueror and conquered blended into a single people and in which this people slowly moved forward to a new freedom.  But while England thus rested in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her king.  In 1120 his son, William the “AEtheling,” with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry on his return from Normandy; but the White Ship in which he embarked lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet till the guards of the king’s treasure pressed its departure.  It had hardly cleared the harbour when the ship’s side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank beneath the waves.  One terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the night, was heard by the royal fleet; but it was not till the morning that the fatal news reached the king.  Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the ground, and rose never to smile again.  He had no other son, and the circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that William, the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his natural heir.  Henry hated William while he loved his own daughter Maud, who had been married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored by his death to her father’s court.  The succession of a woman was new in English history; it was strange to a feudal baronage.  But when all hope of issue from a second wife whom he wedded was over Henry forced priests and nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress, and affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the son of the one foe whom he dreaded, Count Fulk of Anjou.

[Sidenote:  Anjou]

The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the wonderful history by which the descendants of a Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Normandy had won.  The legend of the father of their race carries us back to the times of our own AElfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames.  In the heart of the Breton border, in the debateable land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester, half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free outlaw-fashion in the woods about Rennes.  Tortulf had learned in his rough forest school “how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil, summer’s heat and winter’s frost, how to fear nothing save ill-fame.”  Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire,