Chapter XI: Part II: Voyage and Discovery 337 (10)

No storm of protest was aroused, for the Papacy in its bitter struggle with the Empire was largely dependent on French support; while Louis’s transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal of some Franciscan brethren, described him as ‘more monk than king’. This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life: his simple diet and love of sombre clothes; his habit of rising from his bed at midnight and in the early mornings to share in the services of the Church; his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip; his almost reckless charity; the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst his Paris slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars who crowded at his gate. ‘He was frail and slender,’ says the same Italian, ‘with an angelic expression, and dove’s eyes full of grace.’

Perhaps, if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might have become a friar; but living in the world he loved his wife and children, and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to please her she also must go in drab attire to please him.

Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battle-field describe him as ‘the finest knight ever seen’, and recount tales of their difficulty in restraining his hot courage, that would carry him into the fiercest hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with all his Christian neighbours, and, well content with the lands that already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guienne. Less successful was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors; but if he could not secure peace he determined at least to remain as neutral in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the Pope deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy that followed on that emperor’s death.

War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any combined action against the Turks; for in him, as in Innocent III, burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century a French peasant lad, Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected at Marseilles in eager response to this message. They expected that a pathway would be opened to them across the sea as in the days of Moses and the Chosen People, and when they had waited for some time in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by false merchants, who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship, disarmed, bound, and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were sold in the market-places of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of the Moslems whom they had hoped to conquer.

When he had first heard of the Children’s Crusade, Innocent III had exclaimed, ‘The children shame us indeed!’ and St. Louis, the inheritor of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk.

[Sidenote: The Seventh Crusade]

One of his subjects, who loved him, the Sieur de Joinville, has left a graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt. From Cyprus, the head-quarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile; and Louis, seeing his ensign borne ashore, would not be restrained, but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand, shouting his battle-cry of ‘Mont-joie St. Denys!’

Before the impetuosity of an army inspired by this zeal the town soon fell; but the mediaeval mind had reckoned little with difficulties of climate, and soon the unhealthy mists that hung over the delta of the Nile were decimating the Christian ranks with fever and dysentery, while many of the best troops perished in unimportant skirmishes into which daring rather than a wise judgement had led them. The advance once checked became a retreat, the retreat a rout; and St. Louis, refusing to desert his rear-guard, was taken prisoner by the Mahometans.

The disaster was complete, for only on the surrender of Damietta and the payment of a huge ransom was the King released, but his patience and chivalry redeemed his failure from all stain of ignominy. Instead of returning to France he sailed to the Holy Land; where, though Jerusalem had again fallen to the Turks after Frederick II’s temporary possession of it, yet a strip of seaboard, including the port of Acre, remained to the Christians.

Louis believed that, unless he persevered in fulfilling his vow, crusaders of a lesser rank would lose their hope and courage, and so, enfeebled by disease, he stayed for three years in Palestine, until the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he had left as regent in France, compelled him to return home. Joinville relates how on this voyage, because of the fierceness of the storm, the sailors would have put the King ashore at Cyprus, but Louis feared a panic amongst the terrified troops if he agreed. ‘There is none’, he said, ‘that does not love his life as much as I love mine, and these peradventure would never return to their own land. Therefore I like better to place my own person ... in God’s hands than to do this harm to the many people who are here.’

Louis reached France in safety, but, chafing at his crusading failures, he once more took the Cross, against the advice of his barons, in 1270. It was his aim to regain Tunis, and so to free part of North Africa at least from Mahometan rule. To this task he brought his old religious enthusiasm, but France was weary of crusades, and many of those who had fought willingly in Syria and Egypt now refused to follow him, leaving the greater part of his army to be composed of mercenaries, tempted only by their pay.

Landing near Carthage, the crusaders soon found themselves outnumbered, and were blockaded by their foes amid the ruins of the town. Pestilence swept the crowded, insanitary camp, and one of the first to fall a victim was the delicate king. ‘Lord, have pity on Thy people whom I have led here. Send them to their homes in safety. Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, nor let them be forced to deny Thy Holy Name.’

The dying words of the saint are characteristic of his love of the Faith and of his people; and everywhere in the camp and in France, when the news of his death reached her, there was mourning for this king among kings who had sacrificed his life for his ideals. Yet the flame of enthusiasm he had tried to keep alight quickly flickered out into the darkness, and his son and successor, Philip III, made a truce with the Sultan of Tunis that enabled him to withdraw his army and embark for home. The only person really annoyed by this arrangement was the English prince Edward, afterwards Edward I, who arrived on the scene just at the time of St. Louis’s death, thirsting for a campaign and military glory; but owing to the general indifference he was forced to give up the idea of war in Africa and continue his journey alone to the Holy Land.

Philip III of France has left little mark on history. He stands, with the title of ‘the Rash’, between two kings of dominant personality--his father, canonized as a saint before the century had closed, and his son Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, anything but a saint in his hard, unscrupulous dealings with the world, but yet one of the strongest rulers that France has known.

Philip IV was only seventeen when he became king. From his nickname ‘le Bel’ it is obvious that he was handsome, but no kindly Joinville has left a record of his personal life and character. We can only draw our conclusions from his acts, and these show him ruthless in his ambitions, mean, and vindictive.

In his dealings with the Papacy Philip’s conduct stands contrasted with the usual affectionate reverence of his predecessors; but this contrast is partly accounted for by the fact that, at the end of the quarrel between Empire and Papacy, Rome found herself regarding France from a very changed standpoint to the early days of that encounter.

Ever since the time of Gregory VII the Hohenstaufen emperors had loomed like a thunder-cloud on the papal horizon, but with the execution of Conradin, the last of the royal line,[25] this threatening atmosphere had cleared. The Empire fell a prey to civil war during the Great Interregnum, that is, during the seventeen years when English, Spanish, and German princes contended without any decisive results for the imperial crown. Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who at last emerged triumphant, had learned at least one diplomatic lesson, that if he wished to have a free hand in Germany he could do so best as the friend of the Pope, not as his enemy. One of his earliest acts was to ratify a concordat with Rome in which he resigned all those imperial claims to the lands belonging to the Holy See that Frederick II had put forward. He also agreed to acknowledge Count Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis and the Pope’s chief ally, as Count of Provence and King of Naples and Sicily.

Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained torn by the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines; and the iron hand of the French lay as heavily on ‘The Kingdom’ as ever the Hohenstaufen’s despotic sceptre. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the south, the son of a southern princess; while these French were cruel with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they oppressed.

[Sidenote: The Sicilian Vespers]

Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo, sprang the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter Monday night, when more than four thousand of the hated strangers, men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung into an open pit. Charles of Anjou prepared a fitting revenge for this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother’s sense of justice and tender heart; but while he made his preparations a Spanish prince, Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large fleet. A fierce war followed, but in spite of defeats, treaties that would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings, and continuous papal threats, Sicily clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last as a recognized Aragonese possession a triumphant independence of the Angevin kingdom of Naples.

Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles of Anjou, had hurled anathemas at Peter III; but his successors of more independent mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off Hohenstaufen chains if she must rivet in their stead those of the French House of Anjou. This was the fear that made her look with cold suspicion on her once well-beloved sons the kings of France, whose relations of the blood-royal were also kings of Naples.

[Sidenote: Boniface VIII]

In 1294 Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called ‘the last of the mediaeval Popes’ because any hopes of realizing the world-wide ambitions of a Hildebrand or of an Innocent III died with him, was elected to the Chair of St. Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the new century, was of a splendour to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers; but its glamour was delusive.

Already he had suffered rebuffs in encounters with the kings of England and France: for, when he published a Bull, _Clericis Laicos_, that forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I at once condemned the English Church to outlawry, until from fear of the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented to a compromise that made the Bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France, on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind.

A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of world-government, whether papal or imperial; but, old and stubborn, he could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals. When one of his legates, a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to meet the King with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered the ecclesiastic’s arrest, and that his archbishop should degrade him from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication and deposition, to which the French king replied by an act of open violence.

The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret, grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake, and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman Campagna, who had equally little reverence for the Head of Christendom. Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anagni, where Boniface VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their men-at-arms stood shouting ‘Death to the Pope!’

Boniface could hear them from his audience-chamber, but though he was eighty-six his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of St. Peter in the other, he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication. ‘Here is my head! Here is my neck!’ he replied. ‘Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like Him I will at least die Pope.’ At this one of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove, felling him to the ground, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered. It was the Provençal’s mission to intimidate rather than to murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled to rescue their Vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly.

The proud old man survived the indignities he had suffered only by a few weeks, and his successor, having dared to excommunicate those who took part in the scene at Anagni, died also with mysterious suddenness. No definite suspicion attached to Philip IV, but rumour whispered the fatal word ‘poison’, and the conclave of cardinals spent ten uneasy months in trying to find a new pope. At last a choice emerged from the conclave, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with the title of Clement V. He was crowned at Lyons, and never ventured into Italy, choosing as his residence the city of Avignon in Provence.

Here for just over seventy years, during the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ as it was usually called, a succession of popes reigned under French influence, having exchanged the imperial yoke for one still more binding.

Philip IV at once made use of this French Head of Christendom to condemn the Order of Templars, which from their powerful organization and extensive revenues he had long regarded with dislike and envy.

The crusades at an end, the Templars had outlived the object of their foundation; while the self-denial imposed upon them and their roving, uncloistered life, exposed them to constant temptations to which many of the less spiritual succumbed. Thus their suppression was probably wise; but Philip IV, a pitiless enemy, did not merely suppress, he pursued the Knights of the Temple with vindictive cruelty. Hundreds were thrown into dungeons, and there tortured into confessing crimes, the committal of which they afterwards recanted in vain; while their principal officers were burned at the stake in the market-places of the large French towns. By papal commands the revenues of the Templars passed into the exchequer of the Knights of St. John, who still guarded one of the outposts of Christendom, the island of Rhodes; but the French king took care that a substantial part of the money confiscated in France went instead to his own treasury.

Philip was indeed in serious financial straits, for the revenues of the royal demesnes were proving quite inadequate to meet the expenses of a government that now extended its sway over the length and breadth of France. Philip tried many expedients to meet the deficiency, most of them bad. Such were the frequent debasement of the coinage and the imposition of the _gabelle_, that is of a tax on the sale of goods. This was justly hated because instead of encouraging commerce it penalized industry by adding to the price of nearly every commodity put on the market. Thus a _gabelle_ imposed on grain would mean that a man must pay a tax on it three times over, first in the form of grain, then of flour, and finally as bread.

Worse even than the _gabelle_ was Philip’s method of ‘farming’ the taxes, that is, of selling the right to collect them to some speculator, who would make himself responsible to the government for a round sum, and then squeeze what extra money he could out of the unfortunate populace in order to repay his efforts.

[Sidenote: Government of Philip IV]

It is not, then, for any improved financial administration that the reign of Philip IV is worthy of praise. His was no original genius, but rather a practical ability for developing the schemes invented by his predecessors. Like them he hated and distrusted his insubordinate baronage; and, seeking to impose his fierce will upon them, turned for advice and obedience to men of lesser rank, employing as the main instrument of his government the lawyer class that Philip Augustus and Louis IX had introduced in limited numbers amongst the feudal office-holders at their court.

The employment of trained workers in the place of amateurs resulted in improved administration, so it followed that under Philip IV the French government began to take a definitely modern stamp and became divided into separate departments for considering different kinds of work. Thus it was the duty of the _Conseil du Roi_, or King’s Council, to give the Sovereign advice; of the _Chambre des Comptes_, or Chamber of Finance, to deal with financial questions; of the _Parlement_, or chief judicial court, to sit in Paris for two months at least twice a year to hold assizes and give judgements.

The _Parlement de Paris_ resembles the English Parliament somewhat in name; but except for a right, later acquired, of registering royal edicts, its work was entirely judicial, not legislative. The body in France that most nearly corresponded to the English Parliament was the ‘States-General’, composed of representatives of the three ‘Estates’ or classes, of clergy, nobles, and citizens. The peasants of France, who composed the greater part of her population, were not represented at all.

Philip IV summoned the ‘States-General’ several times to approve his suggestions; but, unlike the ‘Model Parliament’ called by his English contemporary Edward I for similar reasons, it never developed into a legislative assembly that could act as a competent check upon royal tyranny, but existed merely as it seemed to accept responsibility for its ruler’s laws and financial demands, whether good or bad. Its weakness arose partly from the fact that it often sat only for a day at a time and so had no leisure to discuss the measures laid before it, but still more owing to the class selfishness that prevented the three classes from combining to insist on reforms before they would vote any taxes.

This was very unfortunate for France, since on the one occasion that the nobles and burghers actually did combine in refusing to submit to an especially obnoxious _gabelle_ that hit both their pockets, Philip IV was forced to yield, reluctantly enough because the loss of the money led to his failure in a war in Flanders.

Flanders was a fief of the French crown, and because its count, his tenant-in-chief, had dared to rebel against him, Philip had flung him into prison and declared his lands confiscated. Then with his queen he had ridden north to visit this territory now owning direct allegiance to himself, in the belief that he had nothing to do but to give orders to its inhabitants and await their immediate fulfilment. The chroniclers tell us that the royal pair were overcome with astonishment at the display of fine clothes and jewels made by the burghers of Bruges to do them honour.

‘I thought that there was only one Queen in France,’ exclaimed Philip’s consort discontentedly. ‘Here I see at least six hundred.’ The King, always with an eye to the main chance, regarded the brilliant throng more philosophically. They seemed to him very suitable subjects for taxation; but the Flemings had won their wealth by a sturdy independence of spirit both in the market-place and on the high seas: they had been indifferent to the fate of their count, but at any time preferred the risks of rebellion to being plucked like geese by the King of France.

On the field of Courtrai, where Philip brought his army to punish their insolence, the Flemish burghers taught Europe, as their Milanese fellows had at Legnano in the twelfth century, that citizen levies could hold their own against heavily-armed feudal troops; and though the King’s careful generalship redeemed this defeat two years later, he found the victory he obtained barren of fruit. Within a few weeks of the burghers’ apparent collapse yet another citizen army had rallied to attack the royal camp, and Philip, declaring angrily that ‘it rained Flemings’, was driven to conclude a peace.

[Sidenote: Philip IV]

Besides hating the independence of the Flemings, Philip IV grudged the English supremacy over the Duchy of Guienne that his grandfather had so willingly acknowledged. To his jealous eyes it ran its wedge like an alien dagger into the heart of his kingdom; and watching his opportunity until Edward I was involved in wars with Wales and Scotland, Philip crossed the borders of the Duchy, and by force or craft obtained control of the greater number of its fortresses. There is little doubt that had he lived he would gradually have absorbed the whole of the southern provinces; but when only forty-six he died, mourned by few of his subjects, and yet one of the kings who had set his stamp with the most lasting results upon the government of France.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

The Children’s Crusade 1212
Philip III of France 1270-85
Edward I of England 1272-1307
Clement V 1305-14
Battle of Courtrai 1302

XVIII

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

During fourteen years, from 1314 to 1328, three sons of Philip IV reigned in rapid succession; but with the death of the last the main line of the House of Capet came to an end, and the crown passed to his nephew and namesake Philip of Valois.[26] The latter declared that his claims were based on a clause of the old Salic Law[27] forbidding a woman to inherit landed property, because as it happened Philip IV had left a daughter Isabel, who had married Edward II of England, and their son Edward III loudly protested that his right to the throne of France was stronger than that of the Valois. The Salic Law, Edward maintained, might prevent a woman from succeeding to the throne, but there was nothing in this restriction to forbid the inheritance passing to her male heirs.

[Sidenote: Causes of the Hundred Years’ War]

The question of the Salic Law is important because its different interpretations were the immediate excuse for opening hostilities between England and France in that long and weary struggle called the ‘Hundred Years’ War’. There were of course other and far deeper reasons. One of these reasons was that English kings had never forgotten or forgiven John’s expulsion from Normandy. They wanted to avenge this ignominious defeat and also Philip IV’s encroachments in the Duchy of Guienne, that, united to his policy of supporting the Scottish chieftains in their war of independence, had been a steady source of disaster to England since the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Because of his failure in Scotland and the revolts of his turbulent barons Edward II was murdered; and Edward III, taking warning from his father’s fate, welcomed the war with France, not merely in the hope of revenge and glory, but still more in order to find an occupation for the hot English blood that might otherwise in the course of its embittered feuds murder him.

He rode forth to battle, the hero of his court and of the chivalry of England; but no less, as it happened, the champion of her middle classes, who cheerfully put their hands in their pockets to pay for his first campaigns. The reason of their enthusiasm for this war was that Philip of Valois, in order to annoy his rival, had commanded his Flemish subjects to trade no longer with the English. Now English sheep were the best in Europe (so valuable that their export was forbidden lest another nation should obtain the breed), and English wool was the raw material of all others on which Flanders depended for the wealth and prosperity gained by her looms and factories. Before this time English kings had encouraged Flemish trade, establishing ‘Staple’ markets in certain towns under their protection, where merchants of both countries could meet and bargain over their wares. Wishing to retaliate on Philip VI, however, Edward III stopped the export of wool, though at the same time he offered good terms and advantages to any of the manufacturers of Bruges and Ghent who might care to settle in Norfolk or on the East Coast and set up factories there as English subjects.

Such a suggestion could not satisfy the Flemish national spirit, and in the large towns discontent with the French king grew daily. At last one of the popular leaders, Jacob van Artevelde, ‘the Brewer of Ghent’, began to rouse his countrymen by inflammatory speeches. ‘He showed them’, says the chronicler, ‘that they could not live without the King of England’; and his many commercial arguments he strengthened with others intended to win those who might hesitate to break their oath of allegiance, assuring them that Edward III was in truth by right of birth King of France.

Rebellion sprang up on all sides in response; and when, in 1338, Edward III actually embarked on the war, he had behind him not only the English wool-farmers, but also the majority of Flemish merchants and artisans, alike convinced that his victory would open Flemish markets to trade across the Channel.

The Hundred Years’ War falls into two distinct periods: the first, the contest waged by the Angevin Edward III against the House of Valois, a struggle that lasted until 1375; the second, a similar effort begun by the Lancastrian Kings of England in 1415 after a time of almost suspended hostilities under Richard II. In each period there is the same switchback course to the campaigns, as they rise towards a high-water mark of English successes only to sink away to final French achievement.

The first of the great English victories was fittingly a naval battle, destined to avenge long years during which French raiders had harried the south coast, penetrated up the Solent, and even set fire to large towns like Southampton. In June 1340, near the entrance to the port of Sluys, some two hundred English vessels of all makes and sizes came upon the French fleet, drawn up in four lines closely chained together so as to form a kind of bulwark to the harbour. On the decks of the tall ships, the turrets of which were piled with stones and other missiles, were hundreds of Genoese archers; but the English bowmen at this time had no match in Europe for long-distance accuracy and steadiness, and the whistling fire of their arrows soon drove their hired rivals into hiding and enabled the English men-at-arms to board the vessels opposite them almost unopposed.

From this moment panic set in along the French lines, and the greater number of ships, unable to escape because of the chains that bound them together, were sunk at anchor, with, according to the chroniclers, twenty-five thousand of their crews and fighting-material.

The English were now masters of the Channel, and Edward III was enabled to transplant an army to Flanders, but no triumph in any way corresponding to the victory of Sluys rewarded his efforts in this field of warfare. The campaign became a tedious affair of sieges; and the Flemings, cooling from their first sympathies, came to dislike the English and to accuse Jacob van Artevelde of supplying Edward III with money, merely in order to forward his personal ambitions. This charge the Flemish leader stoutly denied, but when, hearing the people of Ghent hooting him in the street outside his house, he stepped out on to the balcony and tried to clear himself, the mob surged forward, and, refusing to listen to a word, broke in through the barred doors and murdered him. This was ill news for Edward III, but angry though he was at the fate of his ally, he had neither sufficient men nor money to exact vengeance. Instead he himself determined to try a new theatre of war, for, as well as his army in Flanders, he had other forces fighting the French in Normandy and Guienne.

[Sidenote: Battle of Creci]

Edward landed in Normandy; and at Creci, to the north of the Somme, as he marched towards Calais, he was overtaken by Philip of Valois in command of a very large but undisciplined force.

‘You must know’, says Froissart, the famous chronicler of this
first period of the Hundred Years’ War, ‘that the French troops
did not advance in any particular order, and that as soon as their
King came in sight of the English his blood began to boil, and he
cried out to his Marshals, “Order the Genoese forward and begin the
battle in the name of God and St. Denys!”’

These Genoese were archers, who had already marched on foot so far and at such a pace that they were exhausted; and when, against their will, they sullenly advanced, their bows that were wet from a thunderstorm proved slack and untrue. The sun also, that had just emerged from behind a cloud, shone in their eyes and dazzled them. Silently the English bowmen waited as they drew near, shouting hoarsely, and then of a sudden poured into the weary ranks such a multitude of arrows that ‘it seemed as though it snowed’.

The Genoese, utterly disheartened, broke and fled; at which the French king, choking with rage, cried, ‘Kill me this rabble that cumbers our road without any reason’; but the English fire never ceased; and the French knights and men-at-arms that came to take the place of the Genoese and rode them underfoot fell in their turn with the shafts piercing through the joints of their heavy armour.

Again, at Creci it was made evident to Europe that the old feudal order of battle was passing away. Victory fell not to the knight armoured with his horse like a slowly-moving turret, but to the clear-eyed, leather-clad bowman, or the foot-soldier quick with his knife or spear. The French fought gallantly at Creci, and none more fiercely than Philip of Valois, whose horse was killed beneath him; but courage cannot wipe out bad generalship, and when at last he consented to retreat he left eleven princes of the blood-royal and over a thousand of his knights stretched on the battle-field.

The defeat of Creci took from Calais any hope of French succour, and in the following year after a prolonged siege it surrendered to the English and became the most cherished of all their possessions across the seas. ‘The Commons of England’, wrote Froissart, ‘love Calais more than any town in the world, for they say that as long as they are masters of Calais they hold the keys of France at their girdle.’

[Sidenote: The Black Death]

Death at the battle of Creci, decked in all the panoply of mediaeval warfare, had taken its toll of the chivalry of France and England. Now, in an open and ghastly form, indifferent alike to race or creed, it stalked across Europe, visiting palace and castle but sweeping with a still more ruthless scythe the slum and the hovel. Somewhere in the far East the ‘Black Death’, as it was later called, had its origin, and wherever it passed, moving westward, villages, nay, even towns, disappeared.

More than thirteen million people are said to have perished in China, India was almost depopulated, and at last in 1347 Europe also was smitten. Very swift was the blow, for many victims of the plague died in a few hours, the majority within five days; and contemporary writers tell us of ships, that left an eastern harbour with their full complement of crew, found drifting in the Mediterranean a few weeks later without a living soul on board to take the helm; of towns where the dead were so many that there was none to bury them; of villages where the peasants fell like cattle in the fields and by the wayside unnoticed.

In Italy, in France, in England, there is the same record of misery and terror. Boccaccio, the Italian writer, describes in his book, the _Decameron_, how the wealthy nobles and maidens of Florence fled from the plague-stricken town to a villa without the walls, there to pass their days in telling one another tales. These tales have made Boccaccio famous as the first great European novelist; but in reality not many even of the wealthy could keep beyond the range of infection, and Boccaccio himself says elsewhere ‘these who first set the example of forsaking others languished where there was no one to take pity on them’.

Neither courage, nor devotion, nor selfishness could avail against the dread scourge; though like all diseases its ravages were most virulent where small dwellings were crowded together or where dirt and insanitary conditions prevailed. ‘They fell sick by thousands,’ says Boccaccio of the poorer classes, ‘and having no one whatever to attend them, most of them died.’ According to a doctor in the south of France, ‘the number of those swept away was greater than those left alive.’ In the once thriving port of Marseilles ‘so many died that it remained like an uninhabited place’. Another French writer, speaking of Paris, says, ‘there was so great a mortality of people of both sexes ... that they could hardly be buried.’ ‘There was no city, nor town, nor hamlet,’ writes an Englishman of his own country, ‘nor even, save in rare instances, any house, in which this plague did not carry off the whole or the greater portion of the inhabitants.’

One immediate result of the Black Death was to put a temporary stop to the war between England and France; for armies were reduced to a fraction of their former strength and rival kings forgot words like ‘glory’ or ‘conquest’ in terrified contemplation of an enemy against whom all their weapons were powerless.

Other and more lasting effects were experienced everywhere, for town and village life was completely disorganized: magistrates, city officials, priests, and doctors had perished in such numbers that it was difficult to replace them: criminals plundered deserted houses unchecked: the usually law-abiding, deprived of the guidance to which they had been accustomed, gave themselves up to a dissolute life, trying to drown all thoughts of the past and future in any enjoyment they could find in the present. Work almost ceased: the looms stood idle, the ships remained without cargoes, the fields were neither reaped of the one harvest nor sown for the next. The peasants, when reproached, declared that the plague had been a sign of the end of the world and that therefore to labour was a waste of time. ‘All things were dearer,’ says a Frenchman: ‘furniture, food, and merchandise of all sorts doubled in price: servants would only work for higher wages.’

In the years following the Black Death the labouring classes of Europe discovered for the first time their value. They were the necessary foundation to the scheme of mediaeval life, the base of the feudal pyramid; and, since they were now few in number, masters began to compete for their services. Thus they were able to demand a better wage for their work and improved conditions; but here the governments of the day, that ruled in the interests of the nobles and middle classes, stepped in, forbade wages to be raised, or villeins and serfs to leave their homes and seek better terms in another neighbourhood. The discontent of those held down with an iron hand, yet half awake to the possibilities of greater freedom, seethed towards revolution; but few mediaeval kings chose to look below the surface of national life, and in the case of England Edward III was certainly not enough of a statesman to do so.

In 1355 he renewed the war with France, hoping that by victories he would be able to fill his own purse from French ransoms and pillage as well as to drug the disordered popular mind at home with showy triumphs. His eldest son, Edward, the Black Prince, who had gained his spurs at Creci, landed at Bordeaux and marched through Guienne, the English armies like the French being mainly composed of ‘companies’, that is, of hired troops under military captains, the terror of friends and foes alike; for with impartial ruthlessness they trampled down corn and vineyards as they passed, pillaged towns, and burned farms and villages.

[Sidenote: Battle of Poitiers]

Philip of Valois was dead, but his son, John ‘the Good’, had succeeded him, and earned his title, it must be supposed, by his punctilious regard for the laws of mediaeval chivalry. His reckless daring, extravagance, and rash generalship made him at any rate a very bad ruler according to modern standards. Froissart says that on the field of Poitiers, where the two armies met, ‘King John on his part proved himself a good knight; indeed, if the fourth of his people had behaved as well, the day would have been his own.’

This is extremely doubtful, for the French, though far the larger force, were outmanœuvred from the first. The Black Prince had the gift of generalship and disposed his army so that it was hidden amid the slopes of a thick vineyard, laying an ambush of skilled archers behind the shelter of a hedge. As King John’s cavalry charged towards the only gap, in order to clear a road for their main army, they were mown down by a merciless fire at short range from the ambush; while in the ensuing confusion English knights swept round on the French flank and put the foot-soldiers to flight. The Black Prince’s victory was complete, for King John and his principal nobles were surrounded and taken prisoners after a fierce conflict in which for a long time they refused to surrender. ‘They behaved themselves so loyally’, says Froissart, ‘that their heirs to this day are honoured for their sake’: and Prince Edward, waiting on his royal captive that night at dinner, awarded him the ‘prize and garland’ of gallantry above all other combatants.

Evil days followed in France, where her king’s chivalry could not pay his enormous ransom nor those of his distinguished fellow prisoners. For this money merchants must sweat and save, and the peasants toil longer hours on starvation rations; while the ‘companies’, absolved by a truce from regular warfare, exacted their daily bread at the sword-point when and where they chose.

Famous captains, who were really infamous brigands, took their toll of sheep and corn and grapes; and those farmers and labourers who refused, or could not give what they required, they flung alive on to bonfires, while they tortured and mutilated their wives and families. Against such wickedness there was no protection either from the government or overlords; indeed, the latter were as cruel as the brigand chiefs, extorting the very means of livelihood from their tenants and serfs to pay for the distractions of a court never more extravagant and pleasure-seeking than in this hour of national disaster.

‘Jacques Bonhomme,’ the French noble would say mockingly of the peasant, ‘has a broad back ... he will pull out his purse fast enough if he is beaten.’ The day came, however, when Jacques Bonhomme, grown reckless in his misery, pulled out his knife instead, and, in the words of Froissart, became like a ‘mad dog’. He had neither leaders nor any hope of reform, nothing but a seething desire for revenge; and in the ‘Jacquerie’, as the peasant rebellion of this date was called, he inflicted on the nobles and their families all the horrors that he himself, standing by helpless, had seen perpetrated on his own belongings. Castles were burned, their furniture and treasures looted and destroyed, their owners were roasted at slow fires, their wives and daughters violated, their children tortured and massacred.

This is one of the most hideous scenes in French history, the darker because France in her blindness learned no lesson from it. The nobles, who soon gained the upper hand against these wild undisciplined hordes, exacted a vengeance in proportion to the crimes committed, and fixed the yoke of serfdom more surely than ever on the shoulders of Jacques Bonhomme. This was the only way, in their conception, to deal with such a mad dog; but Jacques Bonhomme was in reality an outraged human being of flesh and blood like those who loathed and despised him; and during centuries of tyranny his anger grew in force and bitterness until in the Revolution of 1789 it burst forth with a violence against both guilty and innocent that no power in France was strong enough to stem.

[Sidenote: Étienne Marcel]

The outrages of the Jacquerie unfortunately discredited real efforts at reform that had been initiated in Paris by the leader of the middle classes, the Provost of Merchants, Étienne Marcel. This Marcel had demanded that the States-General should be called regularly twice a year, that the Dauphin Charles,[28] eldest son of King John, who was acting as regent during his father’s imprisonment, should send away his favourites, and that instead of these fraudulent ministers a standing council of elected representatives should be set up to advise the crown.

To these and many other reforms the Dauphin pretended to yield under the pressure of public opinion; but he soon broke all his promises and began to rule again as he chose. Marcel, roused to indignation, summoned his citizen levies, and, breaking into the Prince’s palace, ordered his men-at-arms to seize two of the most hated ministers and drag them to the royal presence. ‘Do that quickly for which you were brought,’ he said to the soldiers; whereupon they slew the favourites as they crouched at Charles’s feet, their fingers clinging to his robe.

This act of violence won for Étienne Marcel the undying hatred of the Dauphin and his court, and from this time the decline of his influence may be traced. In order to maintain his power the popular leader was driven to condone the excesses of the peasants, in their rebellion, that had shocked the whole of France, and to ally himself with Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, to whom he promised to deliver the keys of Paris in return for his support against the Dauphin.

This was a fatal move, for Charles the Bad did not care at all for the interests of the middle classes: he only wished to gain some secret or advantage worth selling, and at once betrayed Étienne to his foes as soon as the Dauphin paid him a sufficient price. Then a trap was arranged, and Marcel killed in the gateway of Paris as he was about to open its strong bars to his treacherous ally. With his death all attempts at securing a more liberal and responsible government failed.

The country, indeed, had sunk into the apathy of exhaustion; and two years later the Treaty of Bretigni, that represents the high-water mark of English power in France, was thankfully signed. In return for Edward III’s surrender of his claim to the French throne, his right to the Duchy of Guienne as well as to Calais and the country immediately round its walls was recognized, without any of the feudal obligations that had been such a fruitful source of trouble in old days.

Peace now seemed possible for an indefinite period; but, in truth, so long as two hostile nations divided France there was always the likelihood of fresh discord; and the Dauphin, who had succeeded his father, King John, gently fanned the flames whenever he thought that the political wind blew to his advantage. From a timid, peevish youth, one of the first to fly in terror from the field of Poitiers, he had developed into an astute politician, whose successful efforts to regain the lost territories of France earned him the title of ‘Wise’.

King Edward III and his son professed to despise this prince, who knew not how to wield a lance to any purpose; but Charles, though feeble in body and a student rather than a soldier at heart, knew how to choose good captains to serve him in the field; and one of these--the famous Bertrand du Guesclin, said to have been the ugliest knight and best fighter of his time--became the hero of many a battle against the English, first of all in France, and later in Spain.

It was owing to the war in Spain that the English hold over the south of France was first shaken; for the Black Prince, who had been created Duke of Guienne, unwisely listened to the exiled King of Castile, Pedro the Cruel, who came to Bordeaux begging his assistance against the usurper of his throne. This was his illegitimate brother, Henry of Trastamara. The English Prince at once declared that chivalry demanded that he should help the rightful king. Perhaps he remembered the strong bond that there had been between England and Castile ever since his great-grandfather, Edward I, had married the Spanish Eleanor: perhaps it was the promise of large sums of money that Pedro declared would reward the victorious troops: it is more likely, however, that the fiery soldier was moved by the news that Henry of Trastamara had gained his throne through French assistance and by the deeds of arms of the renowned Du Guesclin.

[Sidenote: Battle of Navarette]

In 1367 the English Prince crossed the Pyrenees, and at Navarette, near the river Ebro, his English archers and good generalship proved a match once more for his foes. Although the Spaniards were in vastly superior numbers they were mown down as they rashly charged to the attack; and Henry of Trastamara was driven from the field, leaving Du Guesclin a prisoner and his brother Pedro once more able to assert his kingship.

The real victors of Navarette now had cause to repent their alliance. Sickness, due to the heat of the climate and strange food, had thinned their ranks even more than the actual warfare: the money promised by Pedro the Cruel was not forthcoming; indeed, that wily scoundrel, after atrocities committed against his helpless prisoners that fully bore out his nickname, had slipped away to secure his throne, while the Black Prince was in no position to pursue him, and could gain little satisfaction by correspondence. Sullen and weary, with the fever already lowering his vitality that was finally to cut short his life, Edward of Wales arrived in Bordeaux with his almost starving ‘companies’. Because he had no money to pay them, he set them free to ravage southern France, while in order to fill his exchequer he imposed a tax on every hearth in Guienne.

These measures proved him no statesman, whatever his generalship. In the early days of the Hundred Years’ War Guienne had looked coldly on Paris, and appreciated a distant ruler who secured her liberty of action; now, victim of a policy of mingled pillage and exactions, she soon came to regard her English rulers as foreign tyrants. Thus an appeal was made by the men of Guienne to Charles V, and he, in defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Bretigni, summoned Prince Edward to Paris--as though he were his vassal--to answer the charges made against him. ‘Gladly we will answer our summons,’ replied the Prince, when he heard. ‘We will go as the King of France has ordered us, but with helm on head and sixty thousand men.’

They were bold words; but the haughty spirit that dictated them spoke from the mouth of a dying man, and the Black Prince never lived to fulfil his boast. His place in France was taken by his younger brother, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who proved himself an indifferent general. In 1373 Duke John marched from Calais into the heart of France, his army burning villages as it went; but though he pressed deeper and ever deeper into the enemy’s country, he met no open foes nor towns that he could take without a siege. ‘Let them be,’ said Charles ‘the Wise’, when his indignant nobles pleaded for leave to fight a pitched battle; ‘by burnings they shall not seize our heritage. Though a storm and tempest rage together over a land they disperse themselves: so will it be with these English.’

Ever since the Treaty of Bretigni Charles had been planning profitable alliances with foreign rulers that would leave the English friendless; while, like Henry the Fowler of Germany, he had fortified his cities against invasion. With the advent of winter Lancaster and his men could find no food nor succour from any local barons; and when at last the remnant of his once proud army reached Bordeaux, it was without a single horse, and leaving a track of sick and dying to be cut off by guerrilla bands. He had not lost a single battle, but he was none the less defeated, and had imperilled the English cause in France.

The truce of 1375 that practically closed the first period of the Hundred Years’ War left to Edward III and his successors no more than the coast towns of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne, and Bordeaux.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Henry V in France]

When in 1415 Henry V of England formally claimed the throne of France, and by so doing renewed the war that had languished since 1375, he had no satisfactory argument save his sword to uphold his demands. Grandson of John of Gaunt, and son of the royal usurper Henry IV, who had deposed and killed his cousin Richard II, Henry V hoped by a successful campaign to establish the popularity of the Lancastrian dynasty. He wished also, like most mediaeval rulers, to find a battle-ground for his barons in any territory except his own. It is only fair to add that of the modern belief that the one possible excuse for shedding human blood is a righteous cause he had not the faintest conception.

‘War for war’s sake’ might have been the motto of this most mediaeval of all English sovereigns; but if his purpose is indefensible to-day in its selfish callousness, he at any rate chose an admirable time in which to put it into execution; for France, that had begun to recover a semblance of nationality under the rule of Charles ‘the Wise’, had degenerated into anarchy under his son Charles ‘the Mad’.

First as a minor, for he was only eleven at the time of his accession, and later when he developed frequent attacks of insanity, Charles VI was destined to be some one else’s tool, while round his person raged those factions for which Louis VIII had shortsightedly prepared when he set the example of creating appanages.[29] First one ‘Prince of the Lilies’ and then another strove to control the court and government in their own interests; but the most formidable rivals at the beginning of the fifteenth century were the Houses of Burgundy and Armagnac.

The latter centred in the person of the young Charles, Duke of Orleans, the King’s nephew and a son-in-law of Count Bernard of Armagnac, who gave his name to the party: the other was his cousin, John ‘the Fearless’, Duke of Burgundy, who was also by inheritance from his mother Count of Flanders, and therefore ruler of that great middle province lying between France and the Empire.