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194 the earl of Anjou and aid against his nephew William. The same year Charles, earl of Flanders, was slain in Lent by his own men, as he lay before the altar in a church, and prayed to God during mass. And the king of France brought William, the son of the earl of Normandy, and gave him the earldom, and the men of Flanders received him. The same William had before taken to wife the daughter of the earl of Anjou, but they were afterwards divorced because of their nearness of kin, and this through the interference of Henry, king of England; he afterwards married the sister of the king of France, and on this account the king gave him the earldom of Flanders. The same year Henry gave the abbacy of Peterborough to an abbat named Henry of Poitou, who was in possession of the abbacy of St. Jean d'Angeli; and all the archbishops and bishops said that this grant was against right, and that he could not have in hand two abbacies. But the same Henry made the king believe that he had given up his abbey on account of the great disquietude of the land, and that he had done so by the order and with the leave of the pope of Rome, and of the abbat of Cluny, and because he was legate for collecting the Rome-scot. Nevertheless it was not so, but he wished to keep both abbeys in his own hands, and he did hold them as long as it was the will of God. In his clerical state he was bishop of Soissons, afterwards he was a monk at Cluny, then prior of the same monastery, and next he was prior of Sevigny; after this, being related to the king of England and to the earl of Poitou, the earl gave him the abbey of St. Jean d'Angeli. Afterwards, by his great craft, he obtained the archbishopric of Besançon, and kept possession of it three day; and then lost he it right worthily, in that he had gotten it with all injustice. He then obtained the bishopric of Saintes, which was five miles from his own abbey, and he kept this for nearly a week, but here again the abbat of Clugny displaced him, as he had before removed him from Besançon. Now he bethought himself, that if he could be sheltered in England, he might have all his will, on which he besought the king, and said to him that he was an old man, and completely broken, and that he could not endure the wrongs and oppressions of that land, and he asked the king himself, and through all his friends, by name for the