32 HISTORY OF FRANCE. [chap. many battles on the one frontier where Gaul is un- guarded by nature. 21. Lewis the Lion in England, 12 15. — A year later King John's intolerable tyranny drove the English barons to wring the Great Charter from him. He then called in the aid of Brabangon mercenaries against them. The barons then offered the crown to Lewis, who was called the Lion, as the husband of John's niece, Blanche of Castile, and put him in possession of the Tower of London. In 12 16 John's death changed the national feelings, and Englishmen turned to his young son Henry III. They now looked on Lewis as a foreign enemy, of whom they must rid themselves as soon as possible. Lewis' army was defeated at the Fair of Lincoln in 12 17, and the reinforcements on their way to him destroyed in mid channel by Hubert de Burgh. He was forced to come to terms with Henry HI., not having gained England, but having carried out all Philip's life- long designs for humbling the House of Anjou. At the beginning of Philip's reign Henry H. held two-thirds of the lands which were fiefs of the crown of France. At the end of it all save the duchy of Aquitaine and the Norman islands had passed from Henry HI. CHAPTER IV. KXJ'KNSTON OF THE KING'S POWER IN THE SOUTH. I. The Albigenses, 1200.— While Philip was engaged in the struggle with the House of Anjou, another war was going on to the southward. All the country which spoke tlic Lane^ue d'oc, or Provencal tongue, including the ticfs of the French crown between the Loire and the Rhone, had little in common with the North. The original natives had been largely Iberians, not Gauls ; the Roman settlement had been much fuller and more last- ing than in the north; the Teutonic conquerors had been Goths, not Franks, their religion Arian, not Catholic. And though they had since been reconciled to the Church, there was still a bias towards freedom of thought. The Persian belief in dual deities for good and evil had several times broken out in the early Church under the name of
