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and plead his cause at Rome. Edward empowered CHAP. certain commissioners to fulfil this office, and negotiate concerning "the right which he had, or might have, to the kingdom and crown of France." That he was prepared to insist upon this right, is proved by his order to the authorities in Guienne to have all appeals from that province to the King of France addressed to him, in that capacity, at his court in London.

These repeated truces were not the result of any diminution of inveteracy or of pretensions on either side, but of the impossibility to continue the payment and employ of such large armies. The history of England tells to what straits Edward was put, pawning his crown, and leaving his best friends and followers in prison, as pledges for his debts. Of Philip's financial or political acts we have not ample records; but sufficient exist to show the immense difficulty he found in supporting the military expenses of such campaigns. Knights and barons no longer marched without pay; and the infantry which Philip employed were Italians, Spaniards, and foreigners more accustomed to the use of the bow and of arms of all kinds, than were the more enslaved French peasants. These foreigners, of course, received a high pay, and cost the price of their transport. There must have been some deeper cause for this habit of employing foreigners in preference to native infantry, than the superior skill of the Italians. The French kings had long since preferred raising soldiers from any class, other than the feudal retainers of the noblesse. They relied, in consequence, on the militia of towns, and, subsequently, when the better citizens refused a military service, in which they occupied a rank and a consideration so much beneath the noble, the town rabble was hired and mustered for war. The want of courage and discipline in this refuse of society was soon apparent; and recourse was had to foreign mercenaries. This was no doubt

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one great cause of the inferiority of the French in subsequent actions to the English, whose monarchs not only employed nobles as officers, but raised soldiers from that class of independent yeomen which did not exist in France.

If to find proper soldiers was no easy task, to raise wherewith to pay them was a difficulty greater still. In 1342, Philip issued an ordonnance, establishing storehouses and gabelles of salt, a government monopoly, in fact, of this necessary of life. Taxes on trade, wholesale or retail, had for some time existed. The Italian merchants paid so much in the pound on imports and exports. The city of Paris, in order to pay for the men-at-arms which were furnished to the royal army, had been allowed to levy a duty on all sales and purchases in the markets. The fairs of Champagne

had always paid a similar tax. The king now levied this generally at the rate of five deniers the livre; but the chief resource was alternately debasing the coin, and raising its standard, until there was no ascertaining or being certain of its value for a month together. This incertitude put a stop to trade, and a scarcity coinciding with it, produced such universal distress, that partial insurrection and a general feeling of discontent was the consequence.

In the meantime, the Pope made no progress in reconciling the two monarchs, or passing judgment upon their differences; and a cruel act of Philip's so aroused Edward's resentment, that although the year of the truce had not expired, he gave orders for recommencing war. Olivier de Clisson, a Breton noble, had been the prisoner of the English. Edward, it seems, released him instead of the Bishop of Leon, also his captive. This sufficed to inspire Philip with doubts of his fidelity, and, of a sudden, de Clisson, de Laval, and some twelve or thirteen Breton nobles, were seized, conveyed to Paris, and, without form of trial, or even

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public accusation, decapitated. Several barons of CHAP. Normandy were soon after seized, and as summarily slain, one of them, of the family of Harcourt, alone escaping. These acts were not more cruel and unjust than the tortures, trials, and condemnations of Philip the Fair; but they were worse precedents, evincing a contempt for even the forms of justice, and making barefaced murder and assassination one of the regular proceedings of government. Such crimes had of course their effects upon both noble and middle classes, and when, in some time after, one or the other attained power, they ordered without scruple those massacres and murders, of which the crown itself had set the first example. This oriental mode of dispatching men. of the first noblesse by the sabre or the bowstring called forth not a remonstrance from the French aristocracy, whilst Edward the Third was unable to infringe upon the right of even one magnate without an opposition that compelled him to respect the law of his country and the privileges of his subjects.

Many of the decapitated nobles were at least friends of Edward. Without being guilty of treason, they might well have considered the rights of De Montfort in Brittany as superior to those of Charles of Blois. Edward denounced the assassinations committed by King Philip in issuing an order to his lieutenants to recommence the war. The French were by no means gladdened at this renewal of hostilities. They feared not so much. the enemy as the tax-gatherer, and began to think that their intolerable burdens would be made permanent. In February 1345, therefore, Philip found it necessary to issue a proclamation, stating that it was not his intention to unite the gabelle of salt or the tax of four deniers the livre to his domain in other words, he promised that they were not to be permanent. Moreover, gave his royal promise that neither he himself, nor the Queen, nor his son, the Duke of Normandy, should make

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any more forced loans. These promises sufficiently testify the abuses they are intended to remedy. In the same year, the king seized for the use of the state a year's revenue of all his functionaries.

Edward had hitherto neglected Guienne, against which his enemies directed their principal efforts. The chief men of Bordeaux and Bayonne and the noblesse true to the English Crown came to the festivity which Edward gave on the occasion of his instituting the Order of the Garter, and their representations made so great an impression on him, that he despatched Lord Derby soon after, with 300 knights, 600 men-at-arms, and a greater number of infantry, to Bayonne. The French, not in force to defend the country south of the Dordogne, endeavoured to prevent Lord Derby from passing that river at Bergerac, and marching to the recovery of Perigord and the districts north of Bordeaux. The English accomplished this, the Genoese alone withstanding their arrows, and the troops which the French had raised in the county flying before them. Derby marched into Perigord, and so well provided was he with what Froissart calls artillery, his engines throwing immense stones, that all the fortresses in Upper Gascony, or Gascony north of the Garonne, submitted to him. The strongest of these was Auberoche, which fortress, as soon as Derby retired for the winter to Bordeaux, the nobles of the county in the French interest came to besiege. There were ten or twelve hundred of them, and Auberoche was hard pressed. Lord Derby and Sir Walter Manny instantly left Bordeaux, with 300 lances and 600 archers, and, with this small force, surprised and fell upon the army besieging Auberoche at the time of supper. The French were routed, and all the chief nobles of the district taken: every English soldier had two or three. The consequence of this victory was not only the fall of Réole and the places held by Philip north of the Garonne, but the capture of the

important town of Angoulême by Lord Derby. The general submission to the English commander was not only due to his prowess, but to his gentillesse, in preventing his soldiers from pillaging and burning the towns and massacring the prisoners, as was then generally the custom in war.

Whilst Lord Derby was reconquering Angoulême, Edward was endeavouring, by means of Arteveld, to turn the Flemish alliance to profit. Notwithstanding the English king's assumption of the arms and title of King of France, the Flemings seemed not disposed to go much further than neutrality. Arteveld himself ruling by the democracy, with the rich citizens opposed to him, felt himself neither secure at home nor able to direct the forces of the Flemings abroad. In order to strengthen his position, he proposed making the son of Edward (the Black Prince) Count of Flanders. The English king came with his fleet to Lecluse, and had an interview there with the town magistrates of the Flemings; they could not entertain his proposal without first consulting their townsmen. The people of Bruges and Ypres were not averse to having the Prince of Wales for their count; but with Ghent it was otherwise there the enemies of Arteveld accused him of wishing to sell his country to the foreigner. They asked what had been done with all the money proceeding from the revenues that had been sequestered? The great treasure, they said, had been despatched to England. Arteveld hastened to Ghent to face his enemies, and refute them; but he had no sooner entered the streets than he perceived the efforts of his enemies to have prevailed, and the minds of his fellow-townsmen turned against him. He shut himself up in his hotel; harangued and tried to move the crowd from one of the windows. Their reply was, "Give us an account of the great treasure of Flanders." Arteveld promised that he would do this fully on the morrow. "No,"

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