on a November night in 1138, Count Geoffrey of Anjou and his men spent part of the evening feasting in the burghal houses of the Norman coastal town of Touques. The experience, no doubt, was exhilarating. This was the first occasion since King Stephen’s leaving the duchy a year earlier that the count had managed on his own to occupy a major town beyond his wife’s properties along the Maine-Norman border. But the revelry was premature. The castellan at nearby Bonneville, having been left alone, secretly dispersed ‘poor boys and common women’ throughout all quarters of the town in a plan to burn the Angevins out. Forty-six fires were set in all. The amount of smoke and flames made it impossible for either side to engage in combat. Geoffrey and some of his men found refuge in a local cemetery where they waited out the horrific night. Few who waited with him could then have imagined that within six years their lord would become master of Normandy, or that his son, Henry of Anjou, yet a child, would someday reunite the kingdom of England with the duchy of Normandy, joining them in a larger Angevin dominion.

The way to the future lay not with the count’s further campaigns in the duchy, which ended with the Bonneville-sur-Touques debacle, but with the strategic thinking and enterprise of Robert, earl of Gloucester, perhaps the most powerful, certainly the ablest, member of the Anglo-Norman landowning aristocracy. His stature, experience and involvement in the fight of his half-sister, the empress Matilda, countess of Anjou, and her husband for Normandy and England gave the Angevin cause more than hope – it gave it a chance.