and cruelties were so intolerable that his nobles were mustering against him, when a fall from his horse brought on a low fever, and he died on the 29th of November, 1314. He was an attorney king of the very worst sort; not going against the law, like the ruder sort of tyrant, but twisting the law to its worst possible use.

27. Lewis X., Hutin, 1314.-The new king, Lewis X., was known by the odd nickname of Hutin or fractious. He let his father's brother, Charles, Count of Valois, govern in his father's fashion, while he gave himself up to sports and revelries. He died on the 5th of June, 1316, leaving only one daughter. But a son John, was born in the following November, only to live six days, and was carried in the arms of his uncle Philip to the grave as a king.

28. Philip the Long, 1316.-From Hugh Capet to this "chrisom child," the kingdom of the house of Paris had gone from father to son. Was the crown now to pass to the late king's daughter or to his brother Philip? Philip seized the crown; and the Parliament had to find a legal confirmation of his act. They therefore went back to the customs of the Salian Franks, and declared that their law was that no woman might inherit land. Half the estates in the kingdom had gone through heiresses, but the rule was accepted as law, and settled the matter in favour of Philip. He died after five years of a reign as cruel as his father's. He and Pope John XXII. savagely persecuted the Franciscan friars, who had preached against their vices, putting them to death in great numbers on an accusation of heresy. Everything was in confusion; the serfs and shepherds were seized with enthusiasm, and vowed to go crusading, but instead they fell on their lords, plundering castles and churches till the king and nobles gained the mastery and slaughtered them in troops. Such wretchedness prevailed everywhere that curses on the king were on each tongue, and his early death was thought to be the consequence.

29. Charles IV., the Fair, 1322.-The reign of his brother, Charles the Fair, is chiefly noted for the crime of his sister, Isabel queen of England. Her husband, Edward II., was tired of crossing the sea to do homage for Guyenne to his short-lived brothers-in-law, and sent his son Edward with her in his stead. He thus gave her the opportunity of raising the force with which she was enabled to act "the she-wolf of France," by dethroning and

murdering her husband. This was but a year before Charles IV. found himself dying, and devised that, if the child shortly expected, proved to be a son, its guardian should be his cousin, Philip, Count of Valois; if it were a daughter, the twelve peers and high barons of France should award the kingdom to whoever had the best right. He died in 1328, and the child was a daughter.

CHAPTER V.

THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.

1. Accession of Philip VI., 1328.—On the birth of the posthumous daughter of Charles IV., Philip, Count of Valois, son of the second son of Philip III., took the title of king, but there were two others to claim it. One was Lewis Hutin's daughter Joan, who had married Philip, Count of Evreux, whom Philip of Valois bought off by giving up the kingdom of Navarre, which had been kept in the hands of her uncles. The other was Edward III. of England, whose claim was that, though a woman might not reign in France, she could transmit the right to her son, and that he was the male heir nearest in blood to the late king Charles IV. But Edward was at that time only sixteen years old, and in spite of his protest, he paid his homage at Philip's coronation, and only renewed his claim some years later at the persuasion of Robert of Artois. This man had been disappointed of the inheritance of Artois, which the parliament had adjudged to a female heir. After in vain trying to back up his cause by forgery, he fled to England in 1330, and practised magical arts to cause Philip's death. Ón Edward's refusal to surrender him, Philip all the more harassed the English lands in Gascony, and in fact his attempts on Aquitaine were the real cause which drove the king of England into war.

2. War with the English in Flanders, 1337.-Lewis, Count of Flanders, was a friend and ally of Philip, but he was harsh and grasping towards his burgher subjects, the great cloth-workers. In the first year of Philip's reign, they rose, and the King and Count together had defeated them at Cassel, and took such vengeance on

Ypres and Bruges as to sow the seeds of further strife. And when, on the quarrel between the kings, Lewis forbade the cloth-weaving subjects to carry on their trade in wool with England, there was a great outbreak, led by a great burgess of Ghent named Facob von Artevelde, a man of much wealth and cultivation, a brewer by trade. Under his leading, Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres again drove out the Count's officers, and allied themselves with the English. The whole English nation was eager for war. Edward embarked for Flanders; he met the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria at Coblenz, and was named his Vicar in the Low Countries; but he could gain no support from any French vassal, and had no other ally but his brotherin-law, the Count of Hainault. The Flemings now called on Edward to take the title of King of France, as, besides their country being a French fief, they had specially bound themselves not to make war on the king of France. If Edward therefore took the title, they might fight for him against Philip and still keep their promise. He accordingly took the title and bore the arms of King of France. Meanwhile the French sacked Southampton, and Hainault was attacked by John, Duke of Normandy. Edward, while sailing to its aid, encountered the French fleet off Sluys, a place so shut in that the French ships could not move, and with 20,000 men fell an easy prey to the English. This was the first of the many great naval victories won by England over France. Philip marched against Edward; but no battle took place, and a truce was made.

3. The War of the Breton succession, 1341.—A fresh plea for war was found in the succession of Britanny, which on the death of the childless duke, John III., was disputed between Joan, the daughter of the next brother, and John, Count of Montfort, the youngest brother. The Parliament of Paris decided in favour of Joan, who was wife of Charles, Count of Blois. Montfort asked aid from Edward, so that each king upheld in Britanny the very principle that would have shut him out from the throne of France: besides which, Joan, the brave wife of Montfort, was the daughter of Philip's ally, the Count of Flanders. The French army brought in the Countess of Blois, taking Nantes, and John of Montfort in it, and only being stopped by the bravery of Joan of Flanders who defended Hennebonne till succour was brought her from England by Sir Walter Manny. After a skirmish

at Vannes, in which the English party were worsted and Robert of Artois killed, a truce was made, during which Philip gave a splendid festival at Paris, defraying the cost with the gabelle, a tax which had been levied on salt to meet the expenses of the war. He took the opportunity of seizing fifteen of his guests, Breton and Norman nobles, who had been inclined to the English, and putting them to death, thus rendering the French name hateful in Britanny. John of Montfort escaped from prison, but only to die; and while his young son was bred up in England the war was carried on by his widow. In 1345 Jacob von Artevelde, whose measures on the behalf of England had affronted the mob of Ghent, so that they attacked and plundered his house, was killed together with seventy of his friends.

4. Campaign of Crécy, 1346.-Geoffry of Harcourt, a Norman lord estranged from Philip by his violence, persuaded Edward to land in Normandy. After ravaging that duchy the English were marching towards Flanders to obtain supplies when Philip, with 3,000 horse, 30,000 foot, and 6,000 Genoese archers, intercepted them in Ponthieu, meaning to bar the passage of the Somme. In his army were a crowd of foreign princes, especially the king's father-in-law, John of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia, the son of the Emperor Henry the Seventh, and his son Charles, who had just been chosen King of the Romans, in opposition to Edward's friend Lewis of Bavaria. King John was now old and blind, but he still fought as a knight errant. There were also princes of Lorraine and Savoy, and a force of mercenary Genoese cross-bowmen. France had a gallant cavalry in her nobles, but no infantry to oppose to the yeomen archers of England. Edward was posted at Crécy, where Philip gave battle on the 25th of August, 1236, immediately on coming up after a march on a sultry showery day. The bow strings of the Genoese who were sent on in front, were damp, and their arrows would not fly, and the poor men were between the enemy and the French knights who wanted to charge. "Clear away this rabble!" cried Philip; so the knights began by cutting down their own hired allies, the English archers on the hill above making havoc of them. Though the Count of Alençon for a moment broke the English ranks, the fight was nothing but a rout, chiefly fatal to the bravest, among whom was the King of Bohemia. The two other kings, Charles and Philip, escaped, leaving dead on the

plain the Dukes of Lorraine and Bourbon, the Counts of Flanders, Nevers and Savoy, two archbishops, 80 barons, 1,200 knights, and 30,000 soldiers. Edward next besieged Calais, and during the blockade, which lasted all the winter, Philip's allies, David II. of Scotland and Charles of Blois, were made prisoners, the one at Nevil's Cross and the other at Roche Derrien. When brought to the extremity of famine, the burghers of Calais accepted Edward's terms, namely, that six should come in sackcloth with ropes round their necks to die for their obstinacy; but, when they knelt before him, he yielded to the queen's prayers and spared their lives. He drove out however all the French inhabitants, though many came back, and made it an English colony, so as to keep an ever open door into France. A brief truce ensued, during which a horrid pestilence called the Black Death raged throughout Europe and swept off a third of the whole population of France.

5. Acquisition of the Dauphiny, 1349. -Joan I., Queen of Naples, the last direct descendant of Charles of Anjou, was driven to take refuge in her county of Provence by Lewis the Great, King of Hungary, whose brother, her husband, Andrew, she had probably murdered. In her distress she sold Avignon to Pope Clement VI., and adopted as her heir the King's grandson, Charles, Duke of Anjou, second son of John, Duke of Normandy. This was the beginning of the second Angevin dynasty in Naples. Thus France was further mixed up with the affairs of Italy, and at the same time it made a great advance beyond the Rhone, to which the way had been opened by the annexation of Lyons. The Dauphiny or county of Viennois had been ruled by a series of counts called Dauphins, apparently from the dolphin in their coats of arms. Humbert, the last of these, on becoming a priest, sold the county to John on condition that it should be held by the king's eldest son, and should remain a fief of the empire. This last condition was gradually eluded; but, as long as the kingdom lasted, the heir apparent bore the title of Dauphin of Viennois. Just as this was arranged, Philip ended his reign of war and disaster by his death in 1350.

6. John's Quarrel with Charles of Navarre, 1350.-The new King John, called Le Bon, had small abilities, a narrow mind, hot temper, and was full of fanciful notions of honour, so that gallantry and baseness take strange turns