in marriage Mabil, a noble and excellent woman; a lady devoted to her husband, and blessed in a numerous and beautiful offspring. There was a singular dispute, as they relate, between Robert and Stephen, contending with rival virtue, which of them should take the oath first; one alleging the privilege of a son, the other the dignity of a nephew. Thus all being bound by fealty and by oath, they, at that time, departed to their homes; but after Pentecost, the king sent his daughter into Normandy, ordering her to be betrothed,[1] by the archbishop of Rouen, to the son of Fulco aforesaid, a youth of high nobility and noted courage. Nor did he himself delay setting sail for Normandy, for the purpose of uniting them in wedlock. Which being completed, all declared prophetically, as it were, that, after his death, they would break their plighted oath. I have frequently heard Roger, bishop of Salisbury, say, that he was freed from the oath he had taken to the empress: for that he had sworn conditionally, that the king should not marry his daughter to any one out of the kingdom without his consent, or that of the rest of the nobility: that none of them advised the match, or indeed knew of it, except Robert, earl of Gloucester, and Brian Fitzcount, and the bishop of Louviers. Nor do I relate this merely because I believe the assertion of a man who knew how to accommodate himself to every varying time, as fortune ordered it; but, as an historian of veracity, I write the general belief of the people.
The remaining years of the life and reign of Henry, I must review briefly, in order that posterity may neither be defrauded of a knowledge of these events, nor that I may seem to dwell on topics little relevant to this history. In his twenty-eighth year, the king[2] returned from Normandy; in his twenty-ninth, a circumstance occurred in England which may seem surprising to our long-haired gallants, who, forgetting what they were born, transform themselves into the fashion of females, by the length of their locks. A certain English knight, who prided himself on the luxuriancy of
- ↑ The nuptials of Matilda with Geoffrey Plantagenet, afterwards earl of Anjou, were celebrated in the presence of her father, in Sept. 1127."—Hardy.
- ↑ "Henry completed the twenty-eighth year of his reign the 4th of August, 1128; but the Saxon Chronicle places his return from Normandy during the autumn of 1129."—Hardy.
