ustration: Isabella, wife of King John. From her monument at
Fontevrault.]

5. =Causes of Philip's Success.=--It was not owing to John's vigour
that Aquitaine was not lost as well as Normandy and Anjou. Philip had
justified his attack on John as being John's feudal lord, and as being
therefore bound to take the part of John's vassals whom he had
injured. Hitherto the power of the king over his great vassals, which
had been strong in England, had been weak in France. Philip made it
strong in Normandy and Anjou because he had the support there of the
vassals of John. That these vassals favoured him was owing partly to
John's contemptible character, but also to the growth of national
unity between the inhabitants of Normandy and Anjou on the one hand
and those of Philip's French dominions on the other. Normans and
Angevins both spoke the same language as the Frenchmen of Paris and
its neighbourhood. Their manners and characters were very much the
same, and the two peoples very soon blended with one another. They had
been separated merely because their feudal organisation had been
distinct, because the lord over one was John and over the other was
Philip. In Aquitaine it was otherwise. The language and manners there,
though much nearer to those of the French than they were to those of
the English, differed considerably from the language and manners of
the Frenchmen, Normans, and Angevins. What the men of Aquitaine really
wanted was independence. They therefore now clung to John against
Philip as they had clung to Richard against Henry II. They resisted
Henry II. because Henry II. ruled in Anjou and Normandy, and they
wished to be free from any connection with Anjou and Normandy. They
resisted Philip because Philip now ruled in Anjou and Normandy. They
were not afraid of John any longer, because they thought that now that
England alone was left to him, he would be too far off to interfere
with them.

6. =The Election of Stephen Langton to the Archbishopric of
Canterbury. 1205.=--In England John had caused much discontent by the
heavy taxation which he imposed, not with the regularity of Henry II.
and Hubert Walter, but with unfair inequality. In =1205= Archbishop
Hubert Walter died. The right of choosing a new archbishop lay with
the monks of the monastery of Christchurch at Canterbury, of which
every archbishop, as the successor of St. Augustine, was the abbot.
This right, however, had long been exercised only according t