More than a hundred years ago, Ferdinand Lot drew attention to what he called the strange spectacle of Henry II doing homage to Louis VII in 1156: ‘de voir le plus puissant souverain de l'Europe faire hommage de ses possessions continentals au roitelet de Paris’. It was, he felt, difficult to see the reasons for Henry's condescension. This is all the more curious because we have it on the authority of one of the king's own clerks that Henry II thought it inappropriate for a king to do homage. The announcement of the agreement made on 30 September 1174 between Henry and his three eldest sons after the end of their rebellion included the information that the Young King had wanted to do homage to his father, but his father refused to accept it because young Henry was a king (‘quia rex erat’). In the early 1970s Warren Hollister and Tom Keefe made explicit what some earlier historians had implied when they argued that by doing homage for all his continental possessions, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, Henry ensured that Louis did not support the claims to Anjou made by his younger brother Geoffrey and was thus able rapidly to overcome Geoffrey's resistance. But by that same ritual Henry II became ‘England's first crowned king to do homage to a king of France’. For Hollister, the ‘precedent-shattering’ homage of 1156 ‘marks the death of the Anglo-Norman regnum’.