ABSTRACT
William returned from the East to pick up the threads of his careerin the spring of 1186. He found the king in Normandy, in his hunting lodge of Lyons-la-Forêt.1 He was welcomed and found the king as good as his word; he was retained to serve in the military household of Henry II, still then the most potent ruler in Christendom. He found several familiar faces in the royal retinue: Peter fitz Guy, Gerard Talbot and Robert de Tresgoz, also sometime members of the Young King’s household. The king was now sixty-three years of age, with two legitimate sons left to him. Richard, the Count of Poitou and his presumed heir,
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was approaching thirty; John, the youngest, was nearly twenty: recently he had been made Lord of Ireland, but his father’s attempt to give the title reality had come to grief ominously on the young man’s incompetence.
