The first of the choir windows to demand a date is the Belle-Verriere, which is commonly classed as early thirteenth-century, and may go with the two windows next it, one of which—­the so-called Zodiac window—­bears a singularly interesting inscription:  “Comes TEOBALDUS dat...Ad PRECES COMIXIS PTICENSIS.”  If Shakespeare could write the tragedy of “King John,” we cannot admit ourselves not to have read it, and this inscription might be a part of the play.  The “pagus perticensis” lies a short drive to the west, some fifteen or twenty miles on the road to Le Mans, and in history is known as the Comte du Perche, although its memory is now preserved chiefly by its famous breed of Percheron horses.  Probably the horse also dates from the crusades, and may have carried Richard Coeur-de-Lion, but in any case the count of that day was a vassal of Richard, and one of his intimate friends, whose memory is preserved forever by a single line in Richard’s prison-song:—­

    Mes compaignons cui j’amoie et cui j’aim,
     Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain.

In 1194, when Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote these verses, the Comte du Perche was Geoffrey iii, who had been a companion of Richard on his crusade in 1192, where, according to the Chronicle, “he shewed himself but a timid man”; which seems scarcely likely in a companion of Richard; but it is not of him that the Chartres window speaks, except as the son of Mahaut or Matilda of Champagne who was a sister of Alix of Champagne, Queen of France.  The Table shows, therefore, that Geoffroi’s son and successor as the Comte du Perche—­Thomas—­ was second cousin of Louis the Lion, known as King Louis VIII of France.  They were probably of much the same age.

If this were all, one might carry it in one’s head for a while, but the relationship which dominates the history of this period was that of all these great ruling families with Richard Coeur-de-Lion and his brother John, nicknamed Lackland, both of whom in succession were the most powerful Frenchmen in France.  The Table shows that their mother Eleanor of Guienne, the first Queen of Louis VII, bore him two daughters, one of whom, Alix, married, about 1164, the Count Thibaut of Chartres and Blois, while the other, Mary, married the great Count of Champagne.  Both of them being half-sisters of Coeur-de-Lion and John, their children were nephews or half-nephews, indiscriminately, of all the reigning monarchs, and Coeur-de-Lion immortalized one of them by a line in his prison-song, as he immortalized Le Perche:—­

    Je nel di pas de celi de Chartain,
       La mere Loeis.

“Loeis,” therefore, or Count Louis of Chatres, was not only nephew of Coeur-de-Lion and John Lackland, but was also, like Count Thomas of Le Perche, a second cousin of Louis VIII.  Feudally and personally he was directly attached to Coeur-de-Lion rather than to Philip Augustus.