and his son Ingelger, who had swept the northmen from Touraine and the land to the west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became the first Count of Anjou.  But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is a mere creation of some twelfth century jongleur.  The earliest Count whom history recognizes is Fulk the Red.  Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of France who were now drawing nearer to the throne, and between 909 and 929 he received from them in guerdon the county of Anjou.  The story of his son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of his house.  Alone of his race Fulk the Good waged no wars:  his delight was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called “Canon.”  One Martinmas eve Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the French king, Lewis d’Outremer, entered the church.  “He sings like a priest,” laughed the king as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon.  But Fulk was ready with his reply.  “Know, my lord,” wrote the Count of Anjou, “that a king unlearned is a crowned ass.”  Fulk was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing, enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner of the wasted land.  To him alone of his race men gave the title of “the Good.”

[Sidenote:  Fulk the Black]

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a bold, dashing soldier, Fulk’s son, Geoffry Greygown, sank almost into a vassal of his powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and Champagne.  But this vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor.  Fulk Nerra, Fulk the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we can trace that marked type of character which their house was to preserve through two hundred years.  He was without natural affection.  In his youth he burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom decked out in his gayest attire.  In his old age he waged his bitterest war against his son, and exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation which men reserved for the deadliest of their foes.  “You are conquered, you are conquered!” shouted the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father’s feet.  In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets.  Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre.  Barefoot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of penitence.  He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his lands.  He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who had troubled it.  Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black.  But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.