French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his
claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean.
His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic
Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who
ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under
his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue,
in aims, in history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the
unwieldy bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the
men of Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated
France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional
feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another
world"--strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the
subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner.
To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just
as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to
Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign
tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.

We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new
king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin
cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner
amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks
hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad
shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed
from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary
strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for
fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and
cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray
eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was
moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was
lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot
in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in
violent physical exertion. "With an immoderate love of hunting he led
unquiet days," following the chase over waste and wood and mountain;
and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for
supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after
nightfall, even when his own