nœuvre, and called it a Lombard trick, reproaching the Constable de Nesle with appreciating the Flemings too highly because of his connexion with them. (He had married a daughter of the Count of Flanders.) "If you advance as far as I shall," replied the count, "you will go far enough, I warrant." So saying he put spurs to his horse, and led on his knights; on which the Count d'Artois and the French squadrons charged also. This formidable cavalry could not reach the Flemings, but fell one over the other into the canal, which they had not perceived, and which was five fathoms wide and three deep. The Flemish counts, seeing the disorder, instantly passed the canal on either side to take advantage of it, and fell on the discomfited French. The battle was but a massacre. Numbers of the French nobles perished; the Count d'Artois, Godfrey of Brabant and his son, the Counts of Eu and of Albemarle, the constable and his brother, De Tanquerville, Pierre Flotte, the chancellor, and Jacques de St. Pol, in all some 6000 knights. Louis of Clermont and one or two others escaped, to the damage of their reputation. This battle of Courtray was fought on the 11th of July, 1302.

Had the war not been one exclusively of defence on the part of the Flemings, or had they had ambitious and adventurous chiefs, such a disaster might have endangered the throne of France. It was the Flemish democracy which had conquered, and its chiefs contented themselves with reducing the remaining cities, and expelling the gentry and rich citizens as of French inclinations. This reaction extended from Flanders into Brabant and Hainault. Philip in the meantime exerted all his activity and resources. Had he been an English

king he would have called his parliament together, and have found national support and national supplies. The French king preferred having recourse to a recoinage.

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CHAP. In 1294 he had forbidden any persons to keep plate unless they possessed an annual revenue of 6000 livres. He now ordered his baillis to deliver up their plate, and all non-functionaries to send half of theirs. Those who did so received payment in the new coin, and lost one-half thereby. A tax of one-fifth, or twenty per cent. of the annual revenue, was levied on the land, and a twentieth was levied on moveable property. In the following year the king found it more advantageous to order that all prelates and barons should, for every 500 livres of yearly revenue in land, furnish an armed and mounted gentleman for five months' service, whilst the non-noble was to furnish and keep up six infantry soldiers (sergens de pied) for every hundred hearths. This decree was a return to feudal military service, occasioned, no doubt, by the general disaffection caused by the raising of the war supplies in money. As if to recompense all classes for the severity of the exaction, Philip published an ordonnance of reform for the protection of both laymen and ecclesiastics from the arbitrary encroachments or interference of his officers.

Having thus set his realm in order, and collected an army of 70,000 men at Arras, the king marched to meet the Flemings, who in equal force had mustered in the vicinity of Douai. They kept, as at Courtray, on the defensive; and the King of France, too cautious to attack them, allowed the whole autumn to pass, and returned to France after a campaign as inefficient as inglorious.

It was at this period that Bordeaux flung off the yoke, and expelled the garrison of the French king, which led to the restoration of Guienne, and a treaty of peace between the two crowns. But the Pope menaced to become a more dangerous enemy than either English or Flemings. Boniface had been endeavouring to persuade the French prelates to proceed to Rome in order to form the council which was to pronounce judg

ment in his dispute with Philip. The king maintained his decree, forbidding them to quit the country, and ordered the passes to be guarded, in order to intercept them. The Pope declared that such a prohibition brought down upon him who issued, as well as upon those who obeyed, a sentence of excommunication. A legate was despatched to France to complain and remonstrate with Philip on his conduct, whilst secretly he urged the departure of the prelates for Rome. The king was able to set aside most of these demands or complaints as contrary to the Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis. He explained the burning of the Pope's bull by saying that it had been invoked by the Bishop of Laon against the sheriffs, and that it thus came on an appeal before parliament, which ordered it to be destroyed, as contrary to the law of the land. Thus the burning of the bull had probably been a parliamentary proceeding, imagined and executed by the legists. The Pope, dissatisfied with the explanations, and encouraged by the presence of some forty bishops of the South of France, issued another bull, forbidding the clergy to say mass before the king, or allow him to participate in the sacrament.

Whilst the Pope, with his council of French prelates, was thus fulminating his decrees preparatory to the final sentence of downright excommunication and deposition, Philip summoned his prelates and nobles again in the spring of 1303. Before this assembly Nogaret, who had succeeded Pierre Flotte, brought forward a solemn accusation of the Pope for having procured his election by fraud and violence, and for being guilty of heresy and simony. Of these crimes he was ready to impeach the Pope before a General Council in order to deliver the Church from his oppression. This solemn impeachment was not followed up at the time, nor did the king appear in it. But when the Pope launched forth his bull of almost excommuni

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CHAP. cation, the king summoned the same assembly to meet once more in the month of June.

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Nogaret had gone upon a mission to Italy, and it was a noble, the Seigneur de Plessis, who came forward as the accuser of the Pope. The crimes now laid to the charge of Boniface were of great enormity: he was not only heretic and simoniac, but a sorcerer, a sensualist of the most infamous kind, a disbeliever in the Eucharist and in the immortality of the soul. In short, he denounced the Pope as guilty of whatever crime passion could suggest. This time the king rose and adopted the proposal for a general council, to which he appealed with the Lord de Plessis, and which he declared he would attend. The prelates present also approved this proposal of appealing to a future council, as the best mode of extricating themselves from the difficult position. And when they accepted it, the king sent commissioners throughout the country to demand adherence to the appeal. They collected more than seven hundred acts of the kind from prelates, chapters, colleges, and monks of all orders, hospitallers and knights of St. John of Jerusalem included.

Notwithstanding this marshalling of royal and lay rights as well as of the judicial and noble authorities of the nation against the pretensions of the Pope, Philip feared the effects of his denunciations, and he resolved to meet them, as the emperor had frequently done, by violence. William of Nogaret had been despatched to Italy. Singular to say, both he and Plasian, the two legists who were most violent against Boniface, were descendants of Toulousan Albigenses, who thus gladly avenged their ancestral wrongs upon the Pope. Nogaret went to Italy, accompanied by Musciato, the great Florentine banker in Paris, and both fixed their quarters at a castle between Florence and Sienna, belonging to Musciato. The great enemies of the Pope were the Colonna, whom he had persecuted

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and exiled, and treated with such injustice that one of CHAP. the family had passed years rowing on the benches of a Saracen galley, rather than liberate himself by confessing who he was. When the Pope showed himself quite intractable, Nogaret and Musciato procured the service of this very person, Sciarra Colonna, and enabled him to raise a body of horse. The Pope had retired to Anagni, his native town, where he considered himself more safe than amidst the people of Rome. Nogaret purchased the good will of all who had authority in Anagni; and on the 8th of September the armed conspirators broke into the town, entered forcibly the houses of several cardinals and that of the Pope, whom they made prisoner. Nogaret hoped to get quiet possession of his person, but it was necessary to overcome so much resistance that it was the soldiers of Sciarra and Sciarra himself who made and held him captive. When these menaced the Pope to take his life if he would not resign the pontificate, Nogaret defended him from violence, and told Boniface that he it was and the King of France who still saved and protected him. Boniface replied that he was ready to perish by the hands of Patherins and Albigenses, like Nogaret. The agent of Philip thus knew not well how to deal with the Pope, whom he had to protect from the violence of Colonna, yet whom he could induce to make no submission. In this perplexity he remained three days, when at last the people of Anagni, who had first favoured the conspirators, seeing that they knew not how to make use of their opportunity, rose against them, and driving away the soldiers of Colonna, liberated the Pope. Boniface, who was of a very advanced age, that of eighty-five, did not recover the fright, the turmoil, and ill-usage to which he had been subjected. When liberated, his first impulse was to pardon his enemies, rather than avenge his wrongs. But afterwards he fell into frenzy at the recollection of the indignities he had