their count or duke proved unsympathetic to their interests or promoted those of their rivals. How much scope this left for crown intervention depended upon the intensity and durability of these rivalries, and upon the varying extent to which the great lords could regulate them, but in general that scope enlarged quite considerably from the beginning of the twelfth century. Similar opportunities came with the growth of towns during the same period and the request of some of them for the grant of a commune. By granting the request kings could limit the power of an unco-operative bishop or lord, by refusing it gain his support.

By the beginning of the twelfth century trends were thus again beginning to run in favour of the monarchy, and they were assisted by the opportunity which the Capetians had to make politically advantageous marriages now that they would no longer be too evidently consanguinous. The turning-point came in the reign of Louis VI ( 1108-37). Louis's great contribution to the history of the French monarchy was to bring the royal lands, or demesne, firmly under his control, destroying castles whose lords illicitly levied tolls upon travellers and merchants and building his own from which these dues could be raised by the crown. In this he was doing no more than other lords, but his biographer, Abbot Suger of SaintDenis, was able to depict him as the archetypal Christian monarch, protecting his churches and the poor against the ravages of the wicked, and simultaneously champion and standard-bearer of St Denis, apostle of the French. Together these provided an ideological foundation which came less readily to other lords. Something of the same trend can be seen in his practice of touching the poor for scrofula. Nor was Louis inactive outside the demesne. Skilful diplomacy and an occasional campaign secured him the homage, if not of the reluctant Henry I of England then of his prospective heir and later that of the contestants in the civil war which followed Henry's death in 1135. In Flanders his intervention helped to block the succession of a count too closely aligned with Henry when Charles the Good was murdered in 1127. Such interventions helped to revive the ties between the crown

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