30 HISTOR V OF FRANCE. [chap. and as John never produced him, it was probably true- His only full sister, Eleanor, called the Pearl of Britanny, was kept a prisoner in England for her whole life, but his mother, Constance, had married Gny de T/icuars, a Poi- tevin, and her child Aliu was to carry on the succession. The Bretons loudly called on Philip to revenge their duke's death, and he was willing enough to gratify them. The Poitevins joined him, and marched into N-ormandy and took castle after castle, though each was held out to the last, while no help came from England. John could neither get his barons to fight nor to give him money to pay Brabangons, so he never stirred while Chateau Gaillard was taken for want of provisions, and Rouen, after a six months siege. The ease with which Normandy was conquered is very wonderful; most likely the Normans looked on John and Philip as equally strangers, and thought that Philip promised the better of the two. Any- how the great Norman land which had been so long before cut off from the French duchy was now joined again to the French kingdom, and France gained the mouth of Seine and the Northern sea-coast from which it had been so long cut oft". The islands alone clave to their Duke. When the conquest was made, Philip set about to justify it, and called a court of peers, namely the great crown vassals, before which he cited John to appear to answer for his nephew's death. John did not refuse to come, provided he had a safe conduct, to which the answer was that be should come in safety, but that he might only go as the sentence of his peers might decide. On this he refused to come, and he was therefore adjudged to be contumacious, and to have legally forfeited Normandy and Anjou ; but Aquitaine, being Queen Eleanor's, was untouched, excepting that Poitou had levolted and gone over to I'hilip. '1 his was an nnmense step in the power of the French crown. Such a court of justice had never been held before, and though it could not have been brought together but for the general indignation against King John, it much enhanced respect for royal authority. The notion of the peers of France, twelve great vassals of the crown, six bishops and six temporal princes, dates from this time. The idea came out of the romances of CJia> U- tna^ne, the French form of the name of the Emperor Charles the Great (Karolus Magnus). The ambiguity of the name /vV.r Francot urn which the French kings kept, but whicii the German kings, now that they had become
