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CHAP.

IX.

were without mayors or sheriffs, were ordered not to pay taîlle, but, instead of it, the tax on sales, of one denier in the livre, which tax was not to be levied on the produce sent to market by either nobles or clergy. There are numberless ordonnances in the same reign for payment of franc-fief and mortmain dues, for prosecuting Lombards defrauding the revenue, for resuming grants for the families of legists, for regulating the payments and organisation of the treasury, and for meeting the expense of public salaries. The chancellor and the notaries were ordered to pay their own salaries out of the proceeds of the Great Seal, and the judges of parliament were to get theirs from out of judicial fines. Money continued to be the great trouble and principal anxiety of government, the middle and civic classes being singled, out as the only ones which could regularly furnish it, except when some rich and privileged body offered itself to the greed of the spoiler. In 1326 the Pope had sought to raise a subsidy in France for the prosecution of his war with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria and his supporters, the Ghibelines of Milan. Charles, in a decree from Château Thierry, forbade the levy of any such tax; but when the Pope offered to give the monarch the tenth for two years, the latter consented to the Papal levy. It amounted to one year's revenue of each benefice, a tax "before unheard of in the kingdom of France." "Thus," adds the continuator of Nangis, "whilst one potentate struck down the Church, the other skinned it."

The same fate which had carried off his brother at so young an age awaited Charles. Taken ill at Christmas, he expired at the end of January, 1328. "Thus was the entire progeny of Philip the Fair, and finer was not to be found in the kingdom of France, completely exterminated in the space of fourteen years.'

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CHAP. X.

PHILIP OF VALOIS.

THE result of the thirteenth century was to make France France, and England England. Feudalism, or the distribution of territory by descent and by marriage, had arrived at a partition that was untenable and absurd, made civil war permanent, and over-rode natural interests and pride by mere family arrangements and claims. A weak king in England, and a crafty one in France, sufficed to right this immense wrong. The dominions of France, with its language, pushed in one stride to the ocean; and England, which saw without chagrin or effort its monarch lose his continental possessions, still kindled with national feeling at beholding the flag of a foreign monarch, in lieu of its own, float upon the opposite shore.

This great aggrandizement of France, by the absorption of the provinces of the Plantagenets, was not achieved by conquest. There was no trial of strength, no decision in the field, no judgment by battle. Had there been such, the English monarchs might have submitted to the award, nor endeavoured to renew the bootless strife. But to all appearance the acquisition of the entire west of France by Philip Augustus, and its retention by his successors, was the result of mere trickery, improbity, and chicane. The English monarch of that age could not perceive that Normandy or Anjou

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X.

CHAP. became annexed to France by the great law of geography and nationality. He merely saw the unfounded pretensions of suzerainty, and the judgment of a false court of peers, where peers there were none, and where the King of France acted the part of prosecutor, judge, and executioner. The flagrant dishonesty of Philip the Fair and Philip the Long with regard to Guienne, repeated and recalled that of Philip Augustus. It was impossible that an English monarch could feel other than deeply wronged by the kings of France; and it was also impossible for the national spirit of England, when awakened, not to respond to it.

In these circumstances is to be found the origin of that fierce war which we are about to relate, and which occupied a century of the history of both countries. It would be melancholy to contemplate the blood spilled, the misery caused, and the time expended, in a strife which could have no other termination than to leave the two countries precisely in the relative position which they occupied at its commencement, if that war had not left such a brilliant record of noble deeds and martial virtues on both sides, as to elevate the character and the pride of both nations, and to heroise Europe in the same degree that the Peloponnesian war had heroised Greece. The result of the Anglo-French war, instead of being conquest or degradation, was, on the contrary, to prove each nation indestructible, and to create on both sides the sentiments of rivalry, no doubt, but at the same time of mutual respect, which precluded the two nations for many years from engaging in serious national hostilities: and when, after four centuries, another and an equally fierce war broke out, the result of five and twenty years of combat was then the samethe impossibility of either country to crush or subdue the other.

It is remarkable that no very serious hostility arose between the countries until both were knitted in strength,

At first, CHAP.

and had attained their natural development. At first, there were powerful and martial kings in England, weak and poor-spirited monarchs in France. The princes of the family of William of Normandy showed the forbearance of the strong towards the weak. With Richard this superiority expired, and Philip Augustus despoiled John. The English nobles were too much absorbed in defending their own insular rights and liberties to care for events upon the continent. This was fortunate for France; for its kings during the thirteenth century showed no military talents, and placed themselves more in antagonism than in identity with the chivalric spirit of their subjects. Philip Augustus played a poor part in the Holy Land. Even St. Louis was a most incapable commander. The west of France was won by lawyers, the south by ecclesiastics. Where military efforts were exclusively employed, as in Flanders, the result was failure.

This did not proceed from want of martial spirit in the nation, but from the kings' being jealous of the classes possessed of such spirit, and making it their policy to set aside the noblesse and take council of legists and of ignoble persons. The chivalry of the period went into the service of Charles of Anjou, and later, into that of Charles of Valois : royalty offered no patronage or career to them. Feudal habits of war were allowed to decay, whilst the wise efforts made by some monarchs to replace or reinforce feudal armies by the militia of towns, were abandoned. All that government looked to was finances. Troops, hastily got together, were sufficient for the military requirements of the period, which, except on the side of Flanders, were not great. A succession of unwarlike monarchs, skilful and fortunate in acquiring territory, had yet by no means organised the country to resist a powerful enemy, or defend its newly acquired possessions.

France, however, had the great advantage in the

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X.

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CHAP. struggle of being the attacked, and not the attacking party. Whatever force England employed must necessarily be transported to a distant field of strife: feudal service was therefore impossible. Troops had to be paid and equipped as well as transported; and thus it was only after many years of war that the English were able to strike a blow. But the English king had at least a nation freely and powerfully organised behind him. The French might have a national spirit, but they had no means of developing or manifesting it. The English king summoned his parliament, appealed to his good towns, explained to them his interests and his wrongs; and the loyalty and patriotism of his subjects supported him even in over-sea warfare. Such freedom and spontaneous action in the country and its population would have been far more profitable to the prince who stood on his defence, like the monarch of France. Had there been national parliaments, national subsidies, had towns their liberties, and every class its free expression, the English could never have marched from one end to the other of the kingdom; but in the thirteenth century every vestige, and almost every tradition, of liberty had disappeared from the soil of France, trodden down by lawyers, priests, and functionaries.

The continuous rule of the legists had in truth been more fatal to the burgess-class of France than even to the aristocracy. The nobles were repressed, not destroyed, and retained all the means for recovering lost privileges and resuscitating as a formidable caste; but the municipal liberties of towns in France were crushed and confiscated by the very politicians who rose from the middle class. Communes had been formed in France for the purpose of defence against feudal exaction and local tyranny. When the Crown abolished these, it succeeded to the patronage of civic interests; and the burgesses, trusting to the monarch and his ministers, seemed to desire no other jurisdiction or protection.

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