ere Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is
little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.
Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of
Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of
their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our
judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first
three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of
strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort
money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But
there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry
Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge
or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the
most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the
floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets
are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou,
the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the
subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.
The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much
towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their
island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in
their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest,
their jealousy of the Church.

Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the
noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of
the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the
residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as
far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier
source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at
least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not
take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the
original Eveche in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the
fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places
the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of
the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal
residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building
in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for
English