1099. The venerable Lady Basilia, his mother, died in January that year, in the veil of a nun at Bec, not having lived to see her boy come home. He returned to Normandy about the year 1100, early in which Courthose arrived again in Apulia. Courthose married there one of the loveliest women of the

age, Sibylla de Conversano. The gallant prodigal seems to have expected that he would pass the remainder of his life in ease, plenty, and jollity—a re-action rather frequently remarked in the case of men who had made his grand campaign; but his old ill-luck pursued him. The lovely Sibylla died in a few years. He fought against his brother King Henry as he had against his brother William, and against a father greater than both; and the closing years of his long life were spent in prison in Cardiff. So passed away Gerard de Gournay's leader, one of the most remarkable and, on the whole, engaging, of what may be called the spoiled great men of our history. Showy, gallant, kindly men, with the same good qualities, mixed with the same faults, as those of Courthose, are not uncommon in the records of Norman families.

Gerard de Gournay died years before the chief, to whose flowing talk and jokes he must have listened many a time-under whose lance, he had seen many a turban go down. We lose sight of him in the chronicles after the siege of Nice; though we have

charter-evidence that he was at Jerusalem-that he returned to Normandy (probably in 1099 or 1100) -and that he was alive in 1104.* The return of a crusader was an event in those days. The monks of his favorite monastery marched before him, singing "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini!" His red cross was an object of admiration in his district. His sunburnt face, his collection of Oriental curiosities -bezants, shells, holy relics from the sacred city, spoils of slaughtered infidels, presents from Greek lords-all contributed to invest him with an interest scarcely less vivid than the reverence which he otherwise inspired. How long Gerard remained at home in the midst of all this, cannot now be exactly known. But we are informed by the writer who continued William of Jumièges, that he once more set out to the Holy Land, accompanied by his wife Editha, and that he died during the journey: "Hierusalem petens in ipso itinere mortuus est." His widow afterwards married Drugo de Moncy, the turbulent head of a great family in the Beauvoisis.

This second expedition, or rather pilgrimage,-of Gerard's, indicates the strong degree in which he shared the piety of his House; and all that is said of him by the outspoken and naïve old chroniclers (always honest enough to lash the "wicked barons" of their time), is * "Record," p. 68.

much to his honour. That he should have been on the side of Rufus against Courthose has been already attributed to the influence of his father-in-law the Earl of Warren and Surrey. But Courthose assuredly was a bad ruler, and if there had been anything ungenerous in Gerard's opposition to him, is it likely they would have shared each other's fortune in the Crusade ? What remains but to dismiss him to his long warriorpilgrim's rest, with the sympathy due to one who left his bones in a foreign land,

And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.

It is a curious coincidence that Shakspeare should have spoken these words of a Mowbray who was descended from Gerard de Gournay's own line.

For, by his high-born consort, Edith de Warren, he left the following children :

1. Hugh—whom we call Hugh IV.—to be treated of in his turn, presently.

2. A daughter, married to Richard de Talbot. (The Talbots held various lands under the Gournays and Giffards, and rose to a celebrity and station which need no detailed exposition here.)

3. Gondrée, known as la belle Gondrée, married to Neil or Nigel d'Albini. Neil was a younger son of Roger d'Albini, by his wife Amicia de Mowbray. The elder brother William founded the house of the Earls

of Arundel; while Neil himself by Gondrée de Gournay became the ancestor of the Mowbrays, Dukes of Norfolk, and so of him of whom Shakspeare speaks the words just quoted. Families are to be estimated in historical dignity, not only by the men whom they directly produce, but by those who spring in other lines from their daughters; and the Gournay blood runs in the veins of some of the greatest nobles in the history of England.

4. Walter, a landholder in Suffolk and Normandy in the time of Stephen. That he was of the blood of the Lords of Gournay is proved by the fact that his son held a portion of their fief of Bray by the tenure of parage; a tenure by which a younger son possessed a portion of the family property pari conditione with his elder brother. But as the severance of land in this case occurred at the time of the death of Gerard, when Walter, who profited by it, was alive, he cannot have been remoter from him than the degree of son. Walter was the proved ancestor of the Gournays, afterwards Gurneys, of Swathing and West Barsham in Norfolk, who in their turn were the proved ancestors of the family of Gurney still settled in that county.

溪

CHAPTER IV.

GERARD'S SON, HUGH IV.

ERARD having died while on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Lady Edith returned to Normandy, where her younger children were. This was some time not long after 1104, apparently; during years when Henry I.—crafty, clever, and practical—was securing his crown by putting down the most turbulent of the barons, and imprisoning his brother Courthose. The generation after the Conquest were a somewhat extravagant and imperious race, and gave Henry (who had more head than Rufus, and less heart than Courthose), a great deal of trouble. Hugh IV. we shall see, was not a model of good conduct. But he had valuable points; and his position gave him great temptations; and every family produces its eccentric members, persons in whom the qualities of the race are not so well mixed or balanced as in its best specimens. Hitherto the reader must have been struck