men. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the
substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh
century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out
upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the
building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must
have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of
our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and
filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day
represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with
Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.

The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our
Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the
suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the
chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date
back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance
dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and
policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in
England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the
Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled
him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of
Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost
to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even
stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the
costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as
if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted
his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is
a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see
the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and
industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and
Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have
been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of
industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new
mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.
But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or
hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of
the Angevins is the tale of