towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But
in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in
check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Freteval while
he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against
his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice
and firmness of the Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to
procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the
education of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes were
assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the
grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the
hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the
sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary
representation; in Hubert's mind they were doubtless intended to do
little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation. His work
poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to
unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in
a revolt against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the election
of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German
throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would
bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.

[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," Chat