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 Law27 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.

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.

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.’

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.

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 outmanoeuvred 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.

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.

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.

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.

The King himself in his moments of sanity inclined to the side of Charles of Orleans and the Armagnacs; and it happened that just at the time when Henry V of England landed in Normandy and laid siege to Harfleur the Armagnacs controlled Paris. It was their faction therefore that raised an army and sent it northwards to oppose the invaders, while John of Burgundy stood aloof, for besides being unwilling to help the Armagnacs he was reluctant to embroil himself in a war with England, on whose wool trade the commercial fortunes of his Flemish towns depended.

At Agincourt Henry V, who had taken Harfleur and was marching towards Calais, came upon his foes drawn up across the road that he must follow in such vastly superior numbers that they seemed overwhelming. The battle that followed, however, showed that the French had learned no military lesson from previous disasters. The heavily-armed, undisciplined noble on horseback was still their main hope, and on this dark October day he floundered helplessly in the mud, unable to charge, scarcely able to extricate himself, an easy victim for his enemy’s shafts. The slaughter was tremendous; for Henry, receiving a false report that a new French army was appearing on the horizon, commanded his prisoners to be killed, and numbers had perished before the mistake was discovered and the order could be reversed.

When the news of the defeat and massacre at Agincourt reached Paris, that had always hated the Armagnacs, the indignant populace broke into rebellion, crying, ‘Burgundy and Peace!’ but the movement was suppressed, and it was not till 1418 that John ‘the Fearless’ succeeded in entering the capital. By this time Henry V, who had returned to England after his victory, was once more back in France conquering Normandy; and French indignation was roused to white heat when it was known that Rouen, the old capital of the Duchy, had been forced to surrender to his victorious arms.

Even the Duke of Burgundy, who still disliked war with England, felt that he must take some steps to prevent further encroachments; and, after negotiations with the enemy had failed owing to their arrogant demands, he suggested an agreement with the Armagnacs, in order that France, if she must fight, should at least present a united front to her foes.

Here was the moment for France’s regeneration; for the head of the Armagnac faction at this date was the Dauphin Charles, son of Charles ‘the Mad’, and in response to his rival’s olive branch he consented to meet him on the bridge of Montereau in order that the old rift might be cemented. In token of submission and goodwill John of Burgundy knelt to kiss the Prince’s hand; but, as he did so, an Armagnac still burning with party hate sprang forward and plunged his dagger into his side. A shout of horror and rage arose from the Burgundians, and as they carried away the body of John ‘the Fearless’ they swore that this murder had been arranged from the beginning and that they would never pay allegiance again to the false Dauphin.

In the Treaty of Troyes that was forthwith negotiated with the English they ratified this vow, for Henry V of England received the hand of the mad king’s daughter Catherine in marriage and was recognized as his heir to the throne of France. Two years later died both Henry V and Charles VI, leaving France divided into two camps, one lying mainly in the north and east, that acknowledged as ruler the infant Henry VI, son of Henry V and Catherine; the other in the south and south-west, that obeyed the Valois Charles VII.

The Treaty of Troyes marks the high-water mark of English power in France during the second period of the Hundred Years’ War; for, though the banners that Henry V had carried so triumphantly at Agincourt were pushed steadily southward into Armagnac territory after this date, yet the influence of the invaders was already on the wane. The agreement that gave France to a foreigner and a national enemy had been made only with a section of the French nation; and some of those who in the heat of their anger against the Armagnacs had consented to its terms were soon secretly ashamed of their strange allegiance.

When Charles the Dauphin became Charles VII he ceased to appear merely the leader of a party discredited by its murder of the Duke of Burgundy. He became a national figure; and though his enemies might call him in derision ‘King of Bourges’ because he dared not come to Paris but ruled only from a town in central France, yet he remained in spite of all their ridicule a king and a Frenchman. Had he been less timid and selfish, more ready to run risks and exert himself rather than to idle away his time with unworthy favourites, there is no doubt that he could have hastened the English collapse. Instead he allowed those who fostered his indolence and hatred of public affairs in order to increase their own power to hinder a reconciliation with the Burgundians that might have been the salvation of France.

Philip ‘the Good’, son of John ‘the Fearless’, disliked the Dauphin as his father’s murderer, but he had little love for his English allies. By marriage and skilful diplomacy he had absorbed a great part of modern Holland into his already vast inheritance and could assume the state and importance of an independent sovereign. With England he felt that he could treat as an equal, and now regarded with dismay the idea that she might permanently control both sides of the Channel. So long as John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V, acted as regent for his young nephew with statesmanlike moderation, an outward semblance of friendship was maintained; but Bedford could with difficulty keep in order his quarrelsome, irresponsible younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who ruled in England, and with still greater difficulty quell the sullen discontent of the people of Paris who, suffering from starvation as the result of a prolonged war, professed to regard a foreign king as the source of all their troubles.

Only the prestige of English arms retained the loyalty of northern France. ‘Two hundred English would drive five hundred French before them,’ says a chronicler of the day; but salvation was to come to France from an unexpected quarter, and enable the same writer to add proudly, ‘Now two hundred French would chase and beat four hundred English.’

In the village of Domremy on the Upper Meuse there lived at the beginning of the fifteenth century a peasant maid, Jeanne d’Arc, who was, according to the description of a fellow villager, ‘modest, simple, devout, went gladly to Church and sacred places, worked, sewed, hoed in the fields, and did what was needful about the house.’ Up till the age of thirteen Jeanne had been like other light-hearted girls, but it was then that a change came into her life: voices seemed to draw her away from her companions and to speak to her from behind a brilliant cloud, and later she had visions of St. Catherine and of St. Michael, whose painted effigies she knew in church.

‘I saw them with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you,’ she said when questioned as to these appearances, and admitted that at first she was afraid but that afterwards they brought her comfort. Always they came with the same message, in her own words, ‘that she must change her course of life and do marvellous deeds, for the King of Heaven had chosen her to aid the King of France.’

Jeanne d’Arc was no hysterical visionary: she had always a fund of common sense, and knew how ridiculous the idea that she, an uneducated peasant girl, was called to save France would seem to the world. For some time she tried to forget the message her Voices told her; but at last it was borne in upon her that God had given her a mission, and from this time neither her indignant father nor timid friends could turn her from her purpose.

Of all the difficulties and checks that she encountered before at last, at the age of seventeen, she was allowed to have audience with Charles VII, there is no space to tell here. News of her persistence had spread abroad, and the torch-lit hall of the castle into which Jeanne was shown was packed with gaily-clad courtiers, and standing amongst them the King, in no way distinguished from the others by his dress or any outward pomp. Every one believed that the peasant-maid would be dazzled; but she, who had seen no portrait of the King and lived all her life in the quiet little village of Domremy, showed no confusion at the hundreds of eyes fixed on her. Recognizing at once the man with whom her mission was concerned she went straight to him and said, ‘My noble lord, I come from God to help you and your realm.’

There must have been something arresting in Jeanne’s simplicity and frankness contrasted with that corrupt atmosphere. Even the feeble king was moved; and, when she had been questioned and approved by his bishops, he allowed her to ride forth, as she wished, with the armies of France to save for him the important town of Orleans that was closely besieged by the English. She went in armour with a sword in hand and a banner, and those who rode with her felt her absolute belief in victory, and into their hearts stole the magic influence of her own gay courage and hope.

We have often spoken of ‘chivalry’, the ideal of good conduct in the Middle Ages. The kings, princes, and knights, whose prowess has made the chronicles of Froissart famous, were to their journalist veritable heroes of chivalry, exponents of courage, courtesy, and breeding. Yet to modern eyes these qualities seem often tarnished, since the heroes who flaunted them were in no way ashamed of vices like cruelty, selfishness, or snobbery. A King John of France would die in a foreign prison rather than break his parole, but he would disdainfully ride down a ‘rabble’ of archers whom his negligence had left too tired to fight his battles. The Black Prince would wait like a servant on his royal prisoner, but accept as a brother-in-arms to be succoured a human devil like Pedro the Cruel; or put a town to the sword, as he did at Limoges, old men, women, and children, because it had dared to set him at defiance.

There is nothing of this tarnish in the chivalry of the peasant-maid who saved France. Pure gold were her knightly deeds, yet achieved without a trace of the prig or the boaster. Jeanne d’Arc was always human and therefore lovable, quick in her anger at fraud, yet easily appeased; friendly to king and soldier alike, yet never losing the simple dignity that was her safeguard in court and camp. Of all mediaeval warriors of whom we read she was the bravest; for she knew what fear was and would often pray not to fall into the hands of her enemies alive, yet she never shirked a battle or went into danger with a downcast face. A slim figure, with her close-cropped dark hair and shining eyes, she rode wherever the fight was thickest, always, in the words of a modern biographer, ‘gay and gaily glad,’ quick to see her opportunities and follow them up, joyful in victory, generous to her foes, pitiful to the wounded and prisoners.

The sight of her awoke new courage in her countrymen, dismay as at the supernatural in her enemies, who dubbed her a witch and vowed to burn her.

‘Suddenly she turned at bay,’ says a contemporary account of one of her battles, ‘and few as were the men with her she faced the English and advanced on them swiftly with standard displayed. Then fled the English shamefully and the French came back and chased them into their works.’

Orleans was relieved and entered, the reluctant, still half-doubting Charles led to Reims, and there in the ancient capital of France crowned, that all Frenchmen might know who was their true king. ‘The Maid’ urged that the ceremony should be followed by a rapid march on Paris; but favourites who dreaded her influence whispered other counsels into the royal ear, and Charles dallied and hesitated. When at last he advanced it was to find that the bridges over the Seine had been cut, not by the retreating English but by French treachery.

Paris was ripe for rebellion, and at the sight of ‘the Maid’ would have murdered her foreign garrison and opened her gates. Bedford was in the north suppressing a revolt, yet Charles, clutching at the excuse of the broken bridges, retreated southwards, disbanding his army and leaving his defender to her fate.

Her Voices now warned Jeanne of impending capture and death, but her mission was to save France, and hearing that the Duke of Burgundy planned to take the important town of CompiÈgne she rode to its defence with a small force. Under the walls, in the course of a sortie, she was captured, refusing to surrender. ‘I have sworn and given my faith to another than you, and I will keep my oath,’ she declared; and through the months that followed, caged and fettered in a dark cell of the castle of Rouen, exposed to the insults of the rough English archers, she maintained her allegiance, saying to her foes of the prince who had failed her so pitiably, ‘My King is the most noble of all Christians.’

Frenchmen (some of them bishops, canons, and lawyers of the University of Paris), as well as Englishmen, were amongst those who, after the mockery of a trial, sent Jeanne to be burned as a heretic in the market-place of Rouen. Bravely as she had lived she died, calling on her saints, begging the forgiveness of her enemies, pardoning the evil they had done her. ‘That the world’, says a modern writer, ‘might have no relic of her of whom the world was not worthy, the English threw her ashes into the Seine.’

France, that had betrayed Jeanne d’Arc, needed no relic to keep her memory alive. To-day men and women call her Saint, and one miracle she certainly wrought, for she restored to her country, that through years of anarchy had almost lost belief in itself, the undying sense of its own nationality. ‘As to peace with the English,’ she had said, ‘the only peace possible is for them to return to their own land.’ Within little more than twenty years from her death the mission on which she had ridden forth from Domremy had been accomplished, and Calais, of all their French possessions, alone remained to the enemies of France.

In summary of the Hundred Years’ War it may be said that from the beginning the English fought in a lost cause. Fortune, military genius, and dogged courage gave to their conquests a fictitious endurance; but nationality is a foe invincible because it has discovered the elixir of life; and when the tide of fortune turned with the coming of ‘the Maid’ the ebb of English discomfiture was very swift.

In 1435 died the Duke of Bedford, and in the same year Charles VII, moved from his sluggishness, concluded at Arras a treaty with Philip of Burgundy that secured his entry into Paris. By good fortune his young rival in the ensuing campaigns, the English King, Henry VI, had inherited, not the energy and valour of his father, but an anaemic version of his French grandfather’s insanity. Even before his first lapse into melancholia, he was the weak puppet of first one set of influences, then another; and the factions that strove to govern for their own interests in his name lost him first Normandy and then Guienne. Finally they carried their feuds back across the Channel to work out what seemed an almost divine vengeance for the anarchy they had caused in France, in the troubled ‘Wars of the Roses’.

Under Charles VII, well named le bien servi, France, as she gradually freed herself from a foreign yoke, developed from a mediaeval into the semblance of a modern state. Wise ministers, whom in his later years the King had the sense to substitute for his earlier workless favourites, built up the power of the monarchy, restored its financial credit, and established in the place of the disorderly ‘companies’ a standing army recruited and controlled by the crown.

These things were not done without opposition, and the rebellion of ‘the Praguerie’, in which were implicated nearly all the leading nobles of France, including the King’s own son, the Dauphin Louis, was a desperate attempt on the part of the aristocracy to shake off the growing pressure of royal control. It failed because the nation, as a whole, saw in submission to an absolute monarch a means, imperfect perhaps but yet the only means available at the moment, of securing the regeneration of France.

It is significant that when Louis XI succeeded to Charles VII he inevitably followed in his father’s footsteps, forsaking the interests of the class with which he had first allied himself, in order to rule as an autocrat and fulfil the ideal of kingship in his day.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.