ed by his son. Geoffry Martel wrested
Tours from the Count of Blois, and by the seizure of Le Mans brought his
border to the Norman frontier. Here however his advance was checked by
the genius of William the Conqueror, and with his death the greatness of
Anjou came for a while to an end. Stripped of Maine by the Normans and
broken by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule of Fulk Rechin
left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to fresh energy with the
accession of his son, Fulk of Jerusalem. Now urging the turbulent Norman
nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert's son, William, in his strife
with his uncle, offering himself throughout as the loyal supporter of the
French kingdom which was now hemmed in on almost every side by the forces
of the English king and of his allies the Counts of Blois and Champagne,
Fulk was the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared. It was to
disarm his restless hostility that the king gave the hand of Matilda to
Geoffry the Handsome. But the hatred between Norman and Angevin had been
too bitter to make such a marriage popular, and the secrecy with which it
was brought about was held by the barons to free them from the oath they
had previously sworn. As no baron if he was sonless could give a husband
to his daughter save with his lord's consent, the nobles held by a
strained analogy that their own assent was needful to the marriage of
Maud. Henry found a more pressing danger in the greed of her husband
Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the common broom of Anjou, the planta
genista, in his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet. His claims
ended at last in intrigues with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to
the border to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his
presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 the old king
withdrew to the Forest of Lions to die.

[Sidenote: Stephen]

"God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry's death-bed,
"the peace he loved." With him indeed closed the long peace of the Norman
rule. An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his departure, and
in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew, appeared at the
gates of London. Stephen was a son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela,
who had married a Count of Blois; he had been brought up at the English
court, had been made Count of Mortain by Henry, had become Count of
Boulogne by his marriage, and as head of the Norman baronage had been the
first