a rather later date, between the mid-1220s and the late 1240s. This
discrepancy may well be the key to unravelling the events that took place
in the autumn of 1259, when Louis IX asked his guest, Henry III, to
return the honours in question to his kinsman, Alfonso of Eu. Henry
is frequently depicted as a naïve or even as a‘simple’ruler, but he was
more than equal to this and expertly yoked the issues together. He made
it clear that,‘when the lord king of France shall have restored to the men
of England their lands in Normandy’, then he himself would‘restore
and return to the men under the authority of...the king of France the
lands and tenements, with their appurtenances, which were theirs in
England’.^12 It would seem, then, that the door had beenfirmly shut.
However, the hopes of the house of Eu may well have beenfired up again
some years later–not least, by the success of their cousins in England, as
we shall see, from the late 1270s or early 1280s onwards. This seems to
have encouraged Alfonso’s son and heir, John II, to appear before
Edward I, in parliament, to petition afresh in the late spring of 1290.^13
Indeed, John produced a dossier of supporting documents to prove his
case. Once again, however, the appeal was refused, although King
Edward carefully assured him that, if there ever was a proper exchange
of territories between Frenchmen and Englishmen, then John wouldfind
the crown exceptionally well-disposed towards him.^14 Yet there is an
irony lurking here. Although Alfonso and John’s efforts were fruitless, the
house of Eu’s eventual success at claiming a variety of other lordships, in
England and in Ireland, would play a significant part in their downfall in
the mid-fourteenth century, at the start of the‘Hundred Years’War’.
Alfonso’s wife, Countess Mary, did not survive for very long after King
Henry had refused to return her ancestral territories. At a rather early
age, she died in her town of Melle, in Poitou, on 1 October 1260.^15 This
(^12) SeeThe Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275– 1504 , ed. C. Given-Wilsonet al.,
16 vols (Woodbridge, 2005), i, 189–90, which notes that this took place in the presence
of Alfonso’s brother, John. It seems that Henry had already granted the estates in
question to his son, the future King Edward I: see M. Prestwich,Edward I(London,
1988), 7, 11. For the broader context, see D. Power,‘The Treaty of Paris (1259) and the
Aristocracy of England and Normandy’,inThirteenth-Century England, vol. xiii, ed. J. E.
Burtonet al. (Woodbridge, 2011), 141–57.
(^13) It is worth pointing out that there is a problem with the numbering system for the counts
of Eu. The issue turns on the question of whether we should‘begin again’with the
French conquest of Normandy in the early thirteenth century, or simply continue
uninterrupted. The latter course has been adopted here; hence it is‘John II of Eu’,
rather than‘John I of Brienne, count of Eu’.
(^14) The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, i, 189–90. See also Power,‘The Treaty of Paris
15 (1259) and the Aristocracy of England and Normandy’, 156 n. 88.
Chronique des comtes d’Eu, 444, andEx obituario monasterii Ulterioris Portus,inRHGF,
xxiii, 452.
106 The Angevins and Athens (c. 1267–1311)