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Updated: June 29, 2025
At length one of the feeble heirs of Charlemagne ceded to the strangers a fertile province, watered by a noble river, and contiguous to the sea which was their favourite element. In that province they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring principalities of Britanny and Maine.
It was to provide against this danger that Anne had received Henry Tudor at the French court when the threat of delivering him up to Richard forced him to quit Britanny after the failure of his first expedition; and she met the new coalition by encouraging the Earl to renew his attack. Had Richard retained his popularity the attempt must have ended in a failure even more disastrous than before.
He took the hall wall, and pulled it to ground; the chamber's door he cast down, so that it burst in five; he found in the chamber the fairest of all maids; Helen she was named, of noble race; Howel's daughter, noble man of Britanny, Arthur's relative of most noble lineage. I was her foster-mother, and fair her fostered.
Is not the account of the defeat, the shame, the renewed slavery of our common country, too much to write about, although we here in Britanny are ourselves free from the misfortunes that overwhelm our brothers elsewhere?
The great duchy founded three hundred years before on the colonization of the Northmen, always one of the mightiest of the feudal states of France, all the dominions which the counts of Anjou had struggled to bring together through so many generations, the disputed claims on Maine and Britanny recognized now for a long time as going with Normandy, a part even of the splendid possessions of the dukes of Aquitaine; all these in little more than two years Philip had transferred from the possession of the king of England to his own, and all except Britanny to the royal domain.
Aquitaine declared against the imperial system; loud complaints were raised of Henry's contempt of old franchises and liberties, and of the "officers of a strange race" who violated the customs of the country by orders drawn up in a foreign tongue the langue d'oil, the speech of Norman and Angevin. Maine, Touraine, and Britanny were in chronic revolt. The Welsh rose and conquered Flint.
Though the truce still held good between England and France a quarrel of succession to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in 1341 and called Philip to the support of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and Edward to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on year after year. In Flanders things went ill for the English cause.
In doing this he began the policy which the French kings followed for so many years, and on the whole with so little advantage, of fomenting the quarrels in the English royal house and of separating if possible the continental possessions from the English. On Henry's side were a majority of the Norman barons and the counts of Britanny and of Blois.
"In their hands shall be all the land from Britanny to Man: ... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving out of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had long been making a deep impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors.
War first broke out in France in the early summer of 1173. Normandy and Anjou were badly defended, and their nobles were already half in revolt, while the forces of France, Flanders, Boulogne, Chartres, Champagne, Poitou, and Britanny were allied against Henry.
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