Note 331 — Chapter II · THE REGENCY OF WILLIAM THE MARSHAL 1216–1219

Hist. G. le Mar., ll. 815–1106. I am compelled to differ from the illustrious editor of the Histoire respecting this “affair of Drincourt,” which he regards as a fantastic version of what the Gesta Henrici and Robert of Torigny relate as having taken place there in 1173. To my mind, the divergences pointed out in M. Meyer’s own footnote to Hist. G. le Mar., vol. iii. p. 16, and in his introduction, ib. p. xxviii., indicate plainly that the poet and the prose writers are speaking of two distinct events; and this indication is confirmed by the fact that the poet brings his story of Drincourt into immediate connexion with the knighting of the Marshal (cf. M. Meyer’s note 3, vol. iii. p. xxvi.). This “most puzzling passage in the whole poem” need not puzzle us at all, if we will but accept it literally; i.e., as relating to an otherwise unrecorded episode in the strife between Henry and Louis, about the Vexin and other matters, which went on—intermittently indeed and with long intervals of peace, but still never wholly laid to rest—through fully ten years prior to the crowning of the “young king.” The episode was obviously one of no great consequence, except to the Marshal, who probably cherished its memory as that of the first real fight in which he was privileged to take a share. Its non-appearance in the other records of the time is therefore no proof of its unreality. The names of the chief actors on the French side—the Count of Flanders and his brother Matthew, Count of Boulogne—are no doubt an “anachronism,” dragged in, by a very natural confusion of memory on the part of the poet’s informants, from the later “affair of Drincourt” in 1173. For the incident itself, apart from this error as to some of the persons concerned in it, more than one possible date might be suggested which would fit in well enough with the place given to the affair in the string of the poet’s narrative.