The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet brought the English to Martel in the twelfth century; but it does not appear that they obtained or cared to keep anything like a permanent grip on the place until the fourteenth century. Inasmuch, however, as Henry Short-Mantle, the rebellious son of Henry II., met with no resistance at Martel when he came thither, after pillaging the sanctuary of Roc-Amadour in 1183, it may be concluded that English influence was already established there. In the market place is a house a portion of which was once included in a building that has now nearly disappeared, but which is known to every inhabitant as the 'palace of Henry II.' On the first floor, communicating with a spiral staircase, is a room paved with small pebbles. On one side is a broad chimney-place, just such as we see now all through Guyenne, even in the towns. According to the tradition preserved by the family to whom the house belongs, it was in one of the chimney-corners of this room that Prince Henry sat on the evening of the day that he left Roc-Amadour. It is uncertain, however, whether the Prince went to Martel immediately after the sacrilege, or after a pilgrimage that he made to the sanctuary to atone for his crime, when he was suffering from the disease that killed him. There is a local legend that he was followed by two monks, who contrived to put poison into his goblet; but whether he was poisoned or died of dysentery at Martel, as the chroniclers maintain, is a detail of small importance. That he did die here, and very repentantly, on a bed of ashes, and held up by the Bishop of Cahors, is a historical fact.
An indubitable testimony of the English occupation of Martel is the heraldic leopard of the Plantagenets. I found it carved in stone among the ruins of King Henry's palace, and hard by I saw it again upon a rusty fireplate that had been thrown into a corner. There is not a native of Martel who is not ready to talk of _le leopard anglais_.
The English were never loved by the Martellois. The people of this district are strong in their attachments, and perhaps even stronger in their animosities and prejudices. Without doubt the English did not treat them with marked tenderness; but there was very little human kindness in the Middle Ages, and the French, or the races which now compose France, left nothing to be invented in the arts of cruelty and oppression in the wars that they waged among themselves before they learnt, or were forced to learn, that it was to their interest to hold together and form one nation. Moreover, the greater number of the so-called English who kept a considerable part of Aquitaine in continual terror for three centuries were natives of the soil.