Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/613

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his sons. His daughter Isabel or Elizabeth he gave in marriage to Count Robert of Meulan, by this time no very youthful bridegroom. Among princes of greater power, but of less lofty birth, the foreign allies of the Norman house were represented by the younger Count Robert of Flanders, nephew of the Conqueror's queen, and by Stephen Count of Chartres and Blois, husband of the Conqueror's noblest child, and father of a king of England and of a bishop of an English see more personally eminent than his royal brother. Rotrou of Mortagne and Walter of Saint Valery went from the border lands so closely connected with Norman history. In Everard of Puiset we hear the name of a house which was in the next century to become famous in England on the throne of Saint Cuthberht, the throne at that moment empty and widowed by the death of William of Saint-Calais. And from a house most hateful to England, but which had received no small share of the spoils of England, went forth three brethren, one of whom was to show himself the worthiest, and to be placed the highest, in the crusading host. Eustace of Boulogne, a prince beyond the sea but in England lord of lands scattered from Mendip to the Kentish and East-Saxon shores, marched with his two brothers, both of whom were to reign as kings in the Holy City. The part of Baldwin in the enterprise had been already foreshadowed in visions told in the hall of Conches. Visions were hardly needed to foretell the