But the Crusade had other results also. Richard appears to have taken a more leading part in it than the King of France liked. The King of France returned from the Crusade before Richard. He found that Richard's brother, John, had conspired with the English barons against Richard, and he very gladly gave his aid to John to strengthen the conspiracy.

Richard, probably taking too much upon himself, in his lion-hearted way, had offended other people besides the King of France. One of these was the Duke of Austria. Clearly Richard realised that he was not a very popular person, for he disguised himself and tried to gain his way home from the Crusade undetected. But he was found out as he was going through Austria. He was brought before the Duke and imprisoned. Later the Duke of Austria handed him over to the emperor, and he was imprisoned in a castle in Germany.

There, according to the story, he was overheard, singing a song of his own making, by a youth who had at one time been his page and was passing by that castle in which he was held prisoner. However that be, it became known that the King of England, returning from fighting for the Cross, was being held shamefully a prisoner, and the indignation of the Pope and of the greater part of Christendom was fierce. Under threat of being excommunicated from the blessings of the Church, and on payment of a large ransom, the emperor released King Richard, who hastened back to England.

The barons had been conspiring with John, but John had none of the ability to be leader of a great conspiracy. The barons, moreover, had learnt from of old how to make their own power greater by aiding now one claimant to the throne and now another. As soon as Richard appeared they deserted John's very wrongful cause and went back to their proper allegiance to Richard. John had no hereditary right to the Crown, even on Richard's death, for John was the fifth son of Henry II. and Henry's fourth son had himself a son, and this son, by all the laws of heredity, had a claim on the Crown before John, his uncle.

But what we call the laws of heredity were not followed very strictly in those days, and we have seen again and again how ready a king was to portion out to his sons parts of his kingdom. It was a practice which naturally led to fighting and to dissension.

Henry had signified before his death the division that he intended to make, and his sons began to fight and intrigue for their portions while he was still alive. Philip, King of France, seems to have been ready to support any claimant against the King of England. While Richard was king Philip supported John against him. As soon as John became king he turned against John, and John crossed the Channel to fight Philip in order to try to maintain the English sovereignty over Henry II.'s continental possessions.

The Plantagenet kings

But the dukes of the duchies and the counts of the provinces favoured Philip rather than John. Their quick change from the English to the French allegiance shows how little real unity there was under a feudal king. John was a feeble leader, and the result of some months of fighting was that he surrendered nearly all the territory on the Continent held by his grandfather. The kings of England ceased to be Angevins, that is to say ceased to hold the lordship of Anjou. The name of Plantagenet, from the branch of the planta genista, or broom, which they took for their badge and wore in their caps, superseded the name of Angevin for their dynasty.

You might think that now, when the French king was thus establishing himself as lord of nearly all that we call France, the kingdom was beginning to settle down into much the same condition, and with much the same boundaries, as we see it. As a matter of fact it had to be rent apart again, and again re-united, before that settlement could begin. You will do well to note that one of the most powerful of the lords who helped Philip in his fight with John was the Duke of Burgundy. This name of Burgundy was brought into the great story at a very early date, by a Gothic tribe called the Burgundi coming westward with the others. It is a name that remains to this day. But no other name of a territory has stood for such different areas, or has had such different significance. It was, of course, part of Charlemagne's Empire, and now it was held as a fief of the King of France. We shall see Burgundy coming to great power before the story's end, but for the moment the French king is pre-eminent over his lords.

The position between king and barons in England is very different, for the barons are there forcing the king to the acceptance of Magna Carta. By the provisions of that charter or agreement no Englishman shall henceforth be imprisoned without trial; and already travelling justices have been instituted to go through the land and conduct trials.

In England the foundations are being laid for liberty. On the Continent the foundations are being laid for that despotic power of the Crown which is only to be broken by the catastrophe of the French Revolution.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE STRENGTH AND THE WEAKNESS OF ROME

One chief effect of the growing power of the French king over his nobility was the gradual breaking up of the feudal system throughout the greater part of France. Philip sent bailiffs to collect his taxes, instead of receiving them through the hands of the lords, and we may look on this as a striking sign of the changing tunes. He formed, moreover, the beginnings of a standing army. In the extreme south of France, in Aquitaine and Provence, the feudal conditions lasted longer, but there, too, feudalism was crushed out after the so-called Crusade against the Albigenses, the people of Albi in the south of France, who held certain religious views at variance with those of the Church. Moreover, they professed themselves offended by the life and manners of the monastic orders and other clerics. It was the very offence which caused the Reformation later; but these would-be reformers of Albi were too few to win success, and their so-called "heresy" was stamped out with cruel severity.

The troubadours, together with the poetic language of "oc," passed away for ever with the feudal society which had made their manner of life possible. We have come to some very dark pages of our story. In the course of the perpetual fights between the feudal lords themselves, and between combinations of the lords and the king, the one side or the other, finding its own forces failing, hired bands of mercenary soldiers to aid them. When the little wars were over, these hirelings got their dismissal. Perhaps they did, or perhaps they did not, get their pay. If not, they were likely to take its equivalent, and more, from any that had not the force to withstand them, and even if they were paid for past service, what were they to do on their dismissal? What they did was to wander up and down the country, offering their service to any who cared to hire it, and in the meantime supporting themselves by high-handed robbery and violence.

The Scandinavian nations and the Swiss furnished most of these mercenaries, and they were the scourge and terror of all Europe in the Middle Ages. It is very largely the insecurity of life and property due to their numbers and cruelties that so darkens the record of this period of the story.

This particular trouble was one from which the island position of England kept her fortunately free, but she had her own troubles, more than enough. The English barons, in their disgust at their treatment by John, had invited the son of King Philip of France to come over and claim the English throne. He actually was in England, with a French army, at the time of John's death; but a heavy defeat at Lincoln sent him home again.

John's death, in fact, seems to have caused the support of the barons to swing back yet again to the rightful heir to the Crown. Amongst other degradations which he had brought on his country John had sworn fealty to the Pope for his possession of England and Ireland. Our islands had, therefore, in theory, become a possession of the Pope held by the English king as his vassal, and few things in the whole of our great story are more remarkable than the power which the Popes continued to wield over all Europe, except its eastern fringe, at the very time when the position of the Popes themselves was so very insecure at Rome that we actually find them, not only unable to enforce their authority in the city, but now and then compelled to fly from it for their own personal safety.

The cities of Italy

It is very interesting to see what happened in the country which we now call Italy, because it was something that was rather different from that which happened elsewhere. It was different just because there was this contest between the Pope and the Emperor going on all the while, complicating the already difficult position caused by the feudal system.

It is necessary, for the understanding of what happened, that we should free our minds of any idea of a single country, a unity, called Italy, as we know Italy now. There was no such idea in men's minds at the time reached by our story, and we can understand what happened much better if we can get back to their point of view.

For them there was the Emperor, with his very extensive but rather vague claim over a good deal of what Charlemagne had made his own. Then the feudal system had created what were practically independent provinces in the north of Italy as elsewhere. And then there came in the Pope, the power of the Church. And the power of the Church had its principal political influence, as regards Italy, in this: that just as at Rome the Pope, who was originally no more than the Bishop of Rome, had come to have almost, if not quite, sovereign power in the city and its neighbourhood, so too in other cities the bishops began to exercise, not so much sovereign power as the power of chief magistrates in addition to their own spiritual power. Important cities, like Florence, Milan, and Pisa, claimed an independence which the Emperor found it his best policy to concede to them. They were fortified with walls which the inhabitants were well able to defend at need. The feudal lords at the same time had their castles in the country, outside the towns.

There had been trouble and even war about the "investitures," that is to say the appointments to the high offices of the Church; and when this was settled, it went far to free the Church from the civil authority, but at the same time it largely freed the civil power from the Church. The bishops were succeeded by civil officers, called consuls, as rulers in the cities. Then the feudal lords began to come into the cities and live within the walls, and as they were the richest and probably the most able men, they began to be chosen by the citizens as the chief officers. From that to the establishment of themselves as tyrants and despots in the cities—enlightened and art-loving despots, generally—the step was short. Often the chief families were at deadly feud with each other for years and years. Remember the Montagues and Capulets, of whom we read in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," in Verona.

Frederick Barbarossa

City also fought against city about claims on territory, rights of way on roads and rivers, and many other points. And then came a threat from without which forced the cities of Northern Italy to come together and form a compact, or combination, known as the Lombard League. The threat came from that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (i.e. Red-beard) who was Emperor at the date of that not altogether fortunate third Crusade in which King Richard of the Lion Heart took a leading part. The settlement, in 1122, of the trouble about the investitures, had put the appointment of the Pope into the hands of an Italian College of Cardinals, as we have noticed already, whereas he had hitherto been appointed by a German Emperor. There had been the rather ridiculous position of the Emperor appointing the Pope and the Pope anointing and consecrating the Emperor. And now, although the Pope and Emperor had been of much help to each other in the years before, the Pope from this time forward began to take his stand as an Italian, appointed by Italians, and thus to be in opposition to the German Emperor. The Italians, besides, had been largely increasing in population all these years.

The Italians, moreover, and especially the great cities of North Italy, like Milan and Florence, had been growing more and more independent. Several of the emperors had not paid them much attention, but this Frederick the Red-beard was more aggressive than his predecessors. He attempted to assert a sovereignty like that of the Carolingian emperors—that is, the emperors of Charles's dynasty—over Italy, both north and south. It was the cities of the north, the Lombard cities, that he would naturally encounter first, and these, by forming themselves into this Lombard League, proved too strong for him. They fought him, they forced him to give up his attempt to bring them again into subjection under the German imperial rule. He tried again and again, but again and again they beat him. In its immediate purpose the League had this success; but it did not bring the States belonging to it under one government. They still remained independent of each other, and after Frederick had withdrawn and the need for union was not pressing they went back to their old feuds and fighting among themselves. Besides these smaller differences, there arose a constant and large division throughout all Italy between the two parties that had the names of Guelph and Ghibelline respectively. Originally these had been names of German families—of the Welfs of Bavaria and of the Waiblingen of Swabia—but in course of time, in Italy, they lost all their first meaning. Guelph came to mean the democratic party, favouring the rule of the people, and with this party the Pope was identified. The Ghibellines were for the rule of the high-born rich under the sovereignty of the Emperor. A little later we find the great families of Orsini and Colonna opposed as leaders of Guelph and Ghibelline respectively. There was this constant unrest, but Italy was not seriously troubled again by the claims of the Emperor for thirty years after the death of the red-bearded Frederick. After that interval another Frederick, grandson of the Red-beard, became Emperor, and he again tried to impress his sovereignty over these cities. He had some successes at the start, but in the end he was repulsed quite as decidedly as his grandfather.

As the result of this last defeat of the imperial force, a permanent treaty—a treaty which actually did last—was drawn up defining the rights of the Emperor, and limiting them very narrowly, over Italy. The cities of the League were ensured in their practically complete independence; and a like independence was given to the Tuscan city of Florence though she was not of the League. But still it was as separate city States that their independence was defined. There was still no unity of government.

Now among the cities of the Lombard League, as it was originally formed, Venice was included. It is curious, however, that the name of Venice does not appear in the treaty made with Frederick Barbarossa.

If you will look at the map of Italy you will see, on either side of its long leg, two cities that were great seaports—on the western side Genoa and on the eastern side Venice. Most of the cities of the north of Italy are inland cities. These two, exceptionally, are on the sea.

The power of Venice

But the importance of the two seaports differed greatly, just because they were on opposite sides of the long leg. Venice, looking eastward, was the port to which came, most naturally and easily, all the merchandise and traffic from the East. Through Venice it was distributed throughout the West. This fact gave Venice a great position. It also incited the Venetians to be great sea-goers and great merchants. They became both enterprising and rich. They had a considerable navy. They became more powerful than any other of the States of Italy; and just because this eastward-facing position made their interests rather different from those of the rest, they therefore came to stand rather apart from the others. Their form of government was rather different. It was perhaps better adapted for a State in which the great men were merchants and shipowners. This difference may possibly account for the name of Venice not appearing in the treaty with the Emperor Frederick Red-beard.

Venice, thus powerful already, became far the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean as a result of the fourth Crusade. Really this so-called Crusade was not directed by the Church at all. It was more of a commercial undertaking than a spiritual adventure. Egypt, which was in the hands of the Moslems, was its object, therefore its forces had to go by sea. Venice furnished money and transport.

Just at this moment the rightful Emperor of the East had been dethroned by his brother, who had usurped his power. The Crusaders, even from the time of the first Crusade, never thought that they met with fair treatment from the Eastern Emperor, for whom they fought. Perhaps they were glad enough now to take up the cause of the rightful but deposed Emperor. Venice, moreover, had her own private cause of offence with Constantinople. The result was that the Crusade was turned aside from its first object, which was Cairo, in Egypt, and was directed against Constantinople. Constantinople fell to their attack in 1204. Baldwin, Count of Flanders, a Norman by race and one of the leaders of the Crusade, was appointed Emperor of the East, and Venice, for her share, was given the nominal sovereignty over some of the islands in the Mediterranean, thus further increasing her power. Frederick II., the grandson of Barbarossa, had come to the imperial throne with claims to an empire scarcely less than that of Charlemagne himself. For besides being Emperor, and thus King of Germany, he still had that claim on the Kingdom of Italy which the emperors had not renounced, even if they could not enforce it. His mother had been heiress of the Norman Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, on which also, therefore, he had a valid claim. Rome lay between these two territories. Moreover, this Frederick was in the succession of the rulers of Burgundy, that great province of which the King of France was nominally the overlord. The less important island Kingdom of Sardinia was his also, and by his marriage he gained the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as it was still called, though it meant only the strip of western coast of Syria and Palestine which the Turk had left to the Christian.

Probably Frederick II.'s power, extensive as it was, was quite unwieldy. Probably his authority over parts of this great extent would not have been very readily obeyed, nor very easily enforced. However that be, he really, as I have said, effected nothing against the Lombard League, which was revived, in spite of the feuds between the cities. The League, as before, had the power of the Pope on its side.

Ascendancy of the Church

One of the means by which the Pope defeated the Emperor in this struggle, and it was perhaps his strongest weapon, was by excommunicating him. Frederick had engaged to go on Crusade, the fifth Crusade, but ill-health had prevented his taking an active part in it, and the Pope gave this as the reason of his excommunication. Excommunication meant that he was denied all part in the services and sacraments of the Church in this life, and was told that his soul would be lost in the world to come. It released his subjects from any necessity of obeying his commands. It put him, moreover, much in the position of an "outlawed" man, which meant that he was not under the protection of the laws of the land, so that any man could be held blameless who lifted a hand to attack him. It was a terrible power, and it was used very terribly by the Church at this time and for many centuries afterwards.

And then this Frederick, this man excommunicated by the Church, undertook the direction of the sixth Crusade. It was an extraordinary position. A Crusade was a war for the Cross, for the Church; and here was one who had been placed quite outside the fold of the Church taking the leadership in this war. But the truth is that these later Crusades were not really aimed against the infidel and the Moslem for religious reasons nearly so much as for political motives. Frederick actually did persuade, without fighting, the Turkish Sultan of Egypt to give him the sovereignty of Jerusalem.

While he thus brought back the Holy Places into the Christian Church, what he claimed to be his own territories in Europe were being invaded by the Pope's forces—a kind of "Crusade" was waged against him who was leading a most successful Crusade in the recognised sense of the term!

He returned to Europe to struggle awhile against the spiritual power; but it was too strong for him. He died in 1250. For another score or so of years Pope and Emperor, Italy and Germany, fought intermittently, with such weapons as each had, but before the beginning of the fourteenth century the Church's spiritual ascendancy prevailed over all the Western world, and Rome had been established in her papal possessions.

During much of that fourteenth century, however, conditions in Rome became so disturbed that the Popes removed to Avignon in France. They removed thither in 1305 and four years later we find the Emperor acknowledged as King of the Romans. It was not for another seventy years that a Pope dared or cared to live in Rome, and even when the Papal Court did return there were for many years two Popes, one, appointed by the Italian cardinals, in Rome, another, elected by the French, in Avignon.

Yet even in the midst of these distractions and schisms, when the actual life of the Head of the Church was sometimes in danger, we still see the Church's power steadily increasing—for one reason, because, in the tumult of the times, it was the one force which knew its own purpose and pursued that purpose in all places and at all times unchangeably. By the end of the fourteenth century it stands at last supreme in its own city and country—in Rome itself. Rome as a republic exists no longer: it has become the Papal State.

CHAPTER XIX

THE MOSLEMS IN SPAIN

It is curious to note the different modes of government which prevailed in the different States of Italy in the fifteenth century. There was, nearly halfway down the long peninsula, this Papal State or State of the Church, firmly established by 1450. In the extreme south was the kingdom, that is to say a State governed by a monarchy, of Naples, with which the island of Sicily was at one time included, while at another time the kingdom was separated from it. In the extreme north there was Milan, of which the Duke was the head. Another of the five great States by which all Italy at that time was held was Florence, under a republican government, and there was the powerful naval State of Venice, also in name a republic, though its mode of government differed from the mode of Florence. In Italy more than in any other country, although conditions everywhere were constantly changing, we find what we may call experiments in ways of government being attempted. I do not think that there is any form of government, or even of anarchy—which is absence of all government—under which mankind ever has tried to live that was not put upon its trial in Italy during these years. Yet, through all the shifting scene, so unsettled that even the Pope himself had to fly from the Holy City, the power of the Church still increased and increased. And one of the means of its increase we have to recognise in the Crusades. Although the later Crusades lost much of the high spiritual motives which had inspired the first Crusades, even the worst of them was waged with the underlying idea in the minds of the warriors that they were fighting in the sacred cause of religion.

The earlier Crusades had been fired with the project, which for a while had been achieved, of rescuing the Holy Places of Palestine from the infidel. The first Crusaders of all had been invited thither by the Emperor at Constantinople. The fourth Crusaders had attacked and taken Constantinople itself and had put one of their leaders, Baldwin, the Norman, on the imperial throne. But there were other so-called Crusades that never went eastward at all. Only a few years later than the date, 1204, of the expedition which captured the imperial capital of the East, that so-called Crusade against the Albigenses swept over the beautiful country of the troubadours. The people of this part of France had been disposed, for many years, to adopt a view of the nature of God which had been brought from the east of Europe and was opposed to the doctrine of the Church of Rome. Moreover, these heretics, as the Church deemed them, set their faces firmly against some of the evil practices of the clergy.

It is not only in the south of France, but it is in whatever part of Christendom we look at this time, that we find these evil practices. Doubtless there were very many good and zealous priests and monks, but the records leave no doubt that there were very many who were idle, and worse than idle. From the Pope himself came parchments on which were written pardons for sins committed, and these pardons could be bought, for money, from the clergy. Also there were other parchments on which were written "indulgences," as they were called—that is to say leave to commit sins, up to a certain date, without penalty. These too were sold, for the benefit of the clergy and the Church.

It was against such bad doings as these that the Albigensian heretics protested, and probably it was this protesting, quite as much as their heretical belief, which led the Church to incite an active war against them. They were under the protection of the lords of the castles in which, as we have seen, the troubadours were welcomed and entertained, for these lords themselves appear to have been inclined to their doctrine. One of these lords was excommunicated by the Pope's legate who had been sent to try to suppress the heresy. In the uproar which this caused the legate was killed, and the result of his murder was that the Pope incited the lords of the north of France to take up arms against the south and sweep the Albigensian heretics off the face of the earth.

STATUE OF KNIGHT IN CHAIN ARMOUR.
STATUE OF KNIGHT IN CHAIN ARMOUR.

It was a sweeping which was not perfectly accomplished at the first passage of the broom. The heresy continued to linger on in secret places until the Church, by the use of that most cruel institution called the Inquisition, finally destroyed it. But it was an immediate result of the Crusade that the independence of the lords of the south of France was lost. Their demesnes were gathered in under the sovereignty of the King of France, and all that graceful and picturesque and highly cultivated life in which the troubadours had taken so very large a part came to an end. Their music was silenced: their poems were composed no more.

You may read in your history books that the "era of the Crusades" comes to an end in 1270. You will also find the Crusades divided up into first, second, third, and so on. But, as we have seen, there was a continual going to and from Palestine. There was, too, one European country in which we may say that a perpetual Crusade, or war for the Cross against the Crescent, went on without ceasing for close on 800 years. That country is Spain, from its first invasion by the Moslems, which was early in the eighth century, until their final expulsion at the end of the fifteenth.

The Moorish "conquest"

The Mahommedans, you may remember, even pressed on over the Pyrenees, those mountains dividing France from Spain, after they had helped in breaking up the kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain itself; but they were defeated and driven, back as soon as they came up against a strong opposition. They were able to overrun Spain just because there was no strong opposition there. But these Moslems themselves did not form any durable government in Spain. They had none of the ability for governing and organising that the Romans had shown. They had no sooner swept over the Spanish peninsula, as they did, than a Christian kingdom independent of them was proclaimed in that region of Spain which you may still see marked on the map as Asturias. But it extended much beyond the bounds of the present province so-called, reaching from the Pyrenees away to the western extremity of the peninsula.

The story of Spain all this while was cut off and separated from the whole great story and did not enter intimately into its making, rather as that peninsula itself is cut off from the rest by the Pyrenees. It is a story, however, which we cannot afford to neglect because there came a time, a little later, that is to say in the sixteenth century, when Spain was very masterful all over the world and played the leading role in the story. But during all these eight centuries of her crusade with the Moslem she took but little part.

We have observed that the Pyrenees, beside being a formidable obstacle and boundary in themselves, were the home of a very independent and unconquered people called the Basques. They are there still, still a people rather apart. Probably they are survivors of one or the other of those early Celtic invasions which swept over Europe and of which there survive also remnants in Brittany and in Wales. They still speak a language unrelated to that of the French on the one side or the Spanish on the other.

And what was the story of this Spanish peninsula, thus separated from the rest? We have in the first place to try to understand what the "Moorish conquest," as it is called, meant. It is said that the Moors "swept over" the country. It is a good phrase to express what happened if we take it in the right sense. They "swept over" the country, but that does not at all imply that they swept all the former inhabitants, who probably were chiefly of the Visigothic race, before them. Spain is a country of many mountain ranges. To bear that fact in mind will help us to understand what happened.

These mountain ranges provided refuges into which the inhabitants could resort in time of invasion, and whence they could come forth again and take up their lives much as before when the sweeping of the invasion had passed over. Spain was far too large a country for the Moslems who came in to settle and to govern, and it was too much cut up by the mountains. The invaders had not any very settled government or organisation among themselves. They were a mixed company of soldiers, Arabs, Syrians, and Africans. They had no settled purpose in their invasion. They seem not to have known what to do with it when they had achieved it.

They achieved it easily, because there was no real resistance, as we have seen, until they crossed into France. But though the Christians of Spain could not combine to resist them, the Christians had some settled interests in common, to hold them together. They had the Church, and they had the combination of their own Gothic laws with the Roman law which they found in Spain when they came there. They had, therefore, some influences to bring them together into that unity which gives strength, and as their numbers grew they became powerful.

We should bear in mind that they had not long been converted to Christianity when the Moslems came upon them. The religion of Christ had no very strong hold over them. The consequence was that, when they found that their conquerors would let them live far more comfortably in the country if they adopted the religion of Mahomet, there were many who were quite willing to do so. The conquerors do not seem to have used their power cruelly, and it is likely that the people in general were in quite as good a position and quite as happy under the new rule as under the old. The Jews, particularly, of which nation there were very many in Spain, were almost certainly happier, for the Christian government had persecuted and oppressed them and the Moslems were far more tolerant. The Moslems, indeed, whether in Spain or Asia, or even in Africa, were probably quite as advanced in general culture as the Christians. Europe was indebted to them for a better knowledge of medicine than the Western world had acquired before. The game of chess was given us by them, and when we say "check-mate" we are really saying "Sheik mat"=the sheik, or king, is dead. By the tenth century the Christian power from the north was beginning to press heavily upon the Mahommedans in the south, and this pressure southward led to the foundation of the Kingdom of Castile, in the centre of Spain. Another kingdom which had been independent, that of Leon, was absorbed by Castile. This name of Castile is said to be derived from castillas, or castles, because the Christians, as they spread southwards, made forts or castles, as they went, which they held as outposts against the Mahommedans. All through the next, the eleventh century, in the course of which William the Conqueror came to Britain, the war between Christian and Moslem went on, a continual Crusade, in Spain. We may notice that twice, when the Moslems were hard pressed, they summoned others of their own creed in Africa to come to their assistance. On each occasion of the coming of these new forces the Christians were forced back.

Waning power of the Moors

But the energy and the organisation which made the strength of these counter-attacks seem to have spent themselves quickly. Always there was more unity among the Christians and a more steady purpose. They came on again to the attack and found the Moslem force less able to resist.

A very important gain for the Christians was the taking of Cordova by Ferdinand III., King of Castile and Leon, in 1236. Cordova was the chief city of Mahommedan Spain. There was a Caliph, or head of the Moslem Church, at Cordova, independent of the Caliph at Mecca. It is rather like the position of the Pope at Rome and the Patriarch at Constantinople in the Christian Church at that time.

The effect of this capture of Cordova was decisive. Not many years later another important and strong city of the Mahommedans, Seville, was also taken from them, and it is a remarkable fact in this capture of Seville that the Christians had the assistance of ships belonging to the Moorish King of Granada. The King of Granada had done homage to Ferdinand for his kingdom. Even before the middle of the previous century Alphonso VII. had been crowned as "Emperor in Spain and King of the Men of the Two Religions."

SEVILLE. The Giralda.
SEVILLE.
The Giralda.

Our England came near to being drawn into the story of Spain herself, or rather, of Castile—I say rather of Castile, because the name of Spain, to include the whole country which we now so call, was hardly in use then. This happened because John of Gaunt, who was son of our King Edward III., had married, as his second wife, a daughter of Pedro the Cruel, as he was styled, the King of Castile. Pedro, for his cruelties, had been hunted off the throne by his own brother, and our Edward the Black Prince, eldest brother of John of Gaunt, went down from France into Castile and helped to put Pedro back.

John of Gaunt's claim was settled by the marriage of the son of John I., who had succeeded Pedro on the throne of Castile, to John of Gaunt's daughter. We may think that England was fortunate in thus escaping all the complications in which this claim might have involved her.

And now—to conclude the story of Spain, up to the year 1500 or so, and the story of that long drawn-out crusade of eight centuries of which she was the scene—it is remarkable that although the Moslems' power had been restricted to the Kingdom of Granada as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, it was not until nearly the close of the fifteenth that their dominion in Spain was brought to an end by the capture of Granada itself. And by this time the Christian power in the country had been strengthened by the union of the Kingdom of Aragon with that of Castile. This was brought about by the marriage of Ferdinand, King of Aragon with Isabella, Queen of Castile. Thus, with Granada now included in Christian Spain, we have the boundaries of the country as they are to-day, except for a small part of the little Kingdom of Navarre which lay south of the Pyrenees. That final portion also will be annexed before many years of the new century have gone.

And now Columbus is just coming back with the news of America. Spain is about to enter on her conquests in the New World. A new day is dawning.

CHAPTER XX

THE PLANTAGENETS IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

If the kings of England after John had been content to acquiesce in his giving up of practically all that were of value of his possessions on the Continent, it is likely that they would have saved much fighting and misery, both for the people of England and of the Continent also.

It was not to be thought for a moment that they would so acquiesce, however. It took the almost continual fighting of some 300 years to effect that useful separation of England from the rest of Europe.

To understand the story we have to bear in mind that the character and will of the king in those days were all-important for the country. He could practically dictate what was to be done. He could declare war and make peace.

And yet, remember this, even a king could not make war without money, to pay and feed his troops and to get munitions of war and horses and so on. The kings of England often found themselves in want of money for their wars. They tried once or twice to impose, of their own authority, a tax—over and above the taxes which had grown out of ancient usage and were recognised as the king's right—to pay these expenses, but the people and the barons always proved too strong for the king when he attempted these exactions. If they did not actually force him to give up the new tax, they at least compelled him to accord them some further liberties and privileges in return for their consenting to pay the extra contribution demanded of them. It was largely in this way, because of the necessity for money in which the king found himself, that the "rights of the people," as we call them, were conceded.

So it is possible to argue that out of the evils and miseries of the wars this good did come, and that it might not have come but for these evils and miseries, because it was through them, or through the wars that caused them, that the needs of the king became so pressing.

Henry III., succeeding the wretched John, gave his subjects further offence, besides that of the money which he made them subscribe for his wars, by the number of foreign counsellors and officials that he had about him. And the effect of this again was perhaps not altogether evil, for it helped the English people to a stronger idea that they were one nation—to a stronger idea of their national unity, as we say. While the kings were trying to be both English kings and French kings, the people grew more and more purely English.

Because of Henry III.'s money difficulties, he had often to summon that Great Council which had grown out of the Anglo-Saxon "witanagemote" or "meeting of the wise men" of the nation. It began to be written of by its present name of "parliament," and exercised, as we have seen, one of the most important powers of parliament, namely, allowing the king to collect money from the people. And this very phrase, that it seems natural and right to use, "allowing the king," shows how the power of the king was already limited. It was very different in France; and it was largely because the French people had not been able to put any such check on their king's power that the horrors of the French Revolution had to happen. The English counties sent up representatives, chosen by themselves, to the Councils or Parliaments; and so government by the representatives of the people began.

Charters for free trading and immunity from certain taxes were granted by the king at these Councils, but he broke his word as readily as he gave it, and his barons soon came to open war against him. The barons had the better of the fighting. Twice they defeated him and extorted promises from him as a condition of letting him continue on the throne at all, but the last and deciding battle at Lewes, went in the king's favour. By that time he was perhaps softened by age. His terms were not severe and the last years of his long reign were the best.

When he died in 1272 his son Edward, his heir, was on Crusade, and it was not until two years later that he returned. That no claimant to the throne came forward in that interval seems to show that the idea of hereditary succession to the throne was at length fully recognised.

First Prince of Wales

It looks as if Edward had learnt wisdom from his father's folly. He did not attempt expensive foreign adventures, except as he was compelled to them by his difficulties with his feudal lords in Aquitaine and Gascony. He had the King of France as his own feudal overlord in respect of those lands. But he did undertake, and successfully, an enterprise against a foe nearer home—Wales, whose prince refused him the homage due. He conquered Wales and, although it rebelled against him about ten years after, and again against a later king, he really had conquered it once for all. From that time forward the eldest son of the King of England has had the title of Prince of Wales.

He was not nearly so fortunate in his attempt to settle the affairs of Scotland. He was called in as an umpire over the question of who was the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, and trouble quickly arose because he claimed that he had given this decision as the overlord of Scotland, whereas the Scottish view was that he had merely been invited, as an independent party, to arbitrate in a case of difficulty.

Hence came war, and repeated war, with Scotland—repeated, because after more than one conquering invasion Scotland appeared to be defeated, and at the conqueror's mercy, but always its spirit revived, first under the leadership of William Wallace, then under that of Robert Bruce; and Bruce was the effective ruler of Scotland when Edward I. died, in 1307. Seven years later, in Edward II.'s reign in England, Bruce won the decisive battle of Bannockburn, which made Scotland secure in her independence during all the years of Bruce's life, and left her a constant menace to England until the happy union of the nations was accomplished by the succession of the Scottish king—James, the first Stuart King of England—to the English throne. But that was not for many a long year beyond the date that this book tells of.

Of the three Edwards who succeeded each other at this time as kings of England, the first was the best and most statesmanlike, the second the least worth, and the third, bold and chivalrous, committed many of the sins of the father of Edward I. and wasted the country's strength and resources in foreign war. In his reign began that of which history speaks of as the Hundred Years' War: and indeed it lasted for more than a hundred years, seeing that it had its commencement before the middle of the fourteenth century and did not end until just after the middle of the fifteenth. That long-drawn-out war was of course with France, and France had Scotland ever ready to help with a stab from the north of England when England was in trouble.

The war was almost forced upon the kings of the unfortunate countries, France and England, by the circumstance that the English king was the lawful feudal holder, under the King of France, of Aquitaine and the Gironde in the south of France. It was a possession far from the English centre, and immediately attached to France. Geographically it was a part of France.

Therefore, in defence of these and other claims to territory on the Continent, England was practically obliged to fight, seeing that France was scarcely less obliged, for her own safety and settlement, to endeavour to win this territory to herself. The long war was fought with very varying success, and not without intervals of peace. The feudal lords of the disputed districts were willing to play off one king against the other, proclaiming themselves now under allegiance to the one and now to the other, as they found it to their best advantage.

The Black Death

Edward began by winning a great naval victory, which made his fleet unquestioned mistress of the sea for twenty years or more, and at the end of the first ten years of the war, from 1337-1347, all the gains seemed to be with him. He made a truce with the French king, after winning a great victory at Crécy, after capturing Calais, and after his armies had been no less victorious in the south. We can never know how matters might have gone, when the time of that truce ended, had not an awful calamity, far worse than war, fallen upon England and upon all the Western world. It was that calamity known by the dreadfully suitable name of the Black Death.

It seems to have been the same disease as that which is now called the plague, and it was so terribly deadly that actually one-third of the population in England is said to have died from it, and the loss of life on the Continent was no less. Most countries had far fewer inhabitants then than they have now, and they could less afford the loss. The result, in England—and it must have been much the same elsewhere—was that much of the cultivated land went back to wild waste land, for want of workers to keep it tilled. This lack of labourers led to a general change in the system on which agriculture was carried on. It led to the system that is still in use.

According to the old way, the workers were practically bound to stay and work on the manors. They were called villeins, and their condition was quite different from that of the serfs. The condition of serfdom itself was dying out. The villeins could not, at all events, be bought and sold, like chattels or cattle. They were protected by law. But they were obliged to give so many days' work, and do other services, to the lord of the manor on which they lived. They had to till the lord's land for him. The rest of their time they might employ in working for their own livelihood.

Under the new system, which came in by reason of the scarcity of labourers after the two years or so of the Black Death had passed over the land, the lords of the manors found it more to their advantage to let out part of their land—to "farm" it out—to tenant farmers, who paid partly in money and partly in produce, instead of by so many days and pieces of work. The farmers engaged labourers to whom they paid a wage, again part in money and part in kind, of which the amount was settled by Act of Parliament. The modern system, in fact, was established.

But another result of this terrible Black Death, which lasted till just after the middle of the fourteenth century, was that the truce between France and England was formally renewed. Troubles on the boundaries of France, however, both in the south and in the west, were constant. Edward, claiming to have a right through his mother to the throne of France, gave the French lords a ready pretext for declining feudal services which they did not wish to render to the king who occupied that throne.

Open war was renewed, and both in Normandy and in the south Edward triumphed. The Black Prince, as he was called, King Edward's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, conquered more than all that England claimed in and around the troubadours' Langue d'oc and won the wonderful victory of Poitiers in which he took captive the French king. Again a truce, all in England's favour, was made. Once more war broke out, aroused as usual by the discontent of the French nobles; but this time it was discontent, on the part of those nobles of the south who had long been under the suzerainty of the French king, with the foreign rule of England.

We have mentioned two great battles won by the English, Crécy and Poitiers. They deserve a few words more, for they marked a big change in the military story.

Mediæval armour

The ideal of the formidable fighting engine during all the earlier years of those Middle Ages of which we are speaking now, was the knight, in armour clad. Up to the fourteenth century it was armour of mail, that is to say of rings of steel connected with each other and so forming a flexible covering, and yet able to keep out a moderate sword thrust or arrow shot. During the course of the fourteenth century the armour became more solid and weighty, with plates of metal instead of the mail. The horse, as well as the knight, was thus plated, and, so defended, neither could easily be hurt by the weapons then in use. Horse and man together were so heavy that they could bear down, in their charge, a great force of men on foot. Therefore they were so feared that a very small number of the heavy cavalry could put to flight, and to death, a very much larger number of infantry.

But this weight of armour made them very unwieldy. If they fell from their horses they could only regain the saddle with great difficulty. The Crusades, taking these heavy armed knights into the scorching sun of the East and nearly baking them alive within their armour plates, must have taught them some of the disadvantages of this weighty armour. But what taught the English, in the first place, that the heavy armed cavalry was not as invincible as was commonly thought at that time, was the lesson learnt in their wars against Scotland. The Scots had adopted the plan of putting pikemen, with long pikes, in the forefront of their battle. The English heavy horse charged on these, but the pikes kept them back; and, all the while, lightly armed archers on either flank poured in showers of arrows to the destruction of horse and man.

That was the manner in which the Scots several times had beaten the English. The English, taught by these reverses against the Scots, adopted just the same order of battle against the French at Crécy and also at Poitiers. And they had an astonishing success. In both battles the enemy was in far larger numbers, but the pikemen stood firm and held back the French cavalry, which charged again and again, and all the while the famous archers of England poured in arrows, from either side, with the long bow.

These battles meant more than victories of the English over the French. They were victories of the common soldier, the foot soldier, over the knight and the cavalry. They took away, at a blow, much of the awe with which the knight in armour had been regarded. Doubtless they added something to the self-respect of the foot soldier as they must have diminished something of the pride of the other. They led, too, to a lighter arming of the cavalry which made the horsemen quicker in movement and less clumsy.

England and Flanders

Edward, after Poitiers and the capture of the French king, seemed to have brought his kingdom to the height of its power. The country increased in wealth, especially in the wealth which it derived from the wool trade with Flanders. The association of England with the Flemings was close, and many of that nation came over at this time and established a weaving industry in the towns of our eastern counties. But probably the great bulk of the wool that was grown on the backs of English sheep was still taken to the Continent in the unworked state. We may picture to ourselves the long strings of pack-horses, led by carriers, going along the bridle-paths, as we might call them now, bearing the wool to the port whence it should be shipped across Channel. Wheeled vehicles were known and were in use, but it is tolerably certain that most of the carrying was on horseback, until a river was reached which was navigable by the small ships of that day. The roads were not adapted for carts—in spite of the old road-making of the Romans.

A considerable portion of the revenue of the Crown came from the "duties," that is to say the money due according to the arrangements of the law, that were paid to the king's officials by the merchants on the exported wool.

There had been Counts of Flanders ever since the tenth century, and the King of France was their overlord. When the King of England claimed to be King of France, the Count of Flanders, like other feudal vassals, was ready enough to take what advantage he could get from changing his allegiance from one master to the other. The industrial cities of Flanders, such as Ghent and Bruges, had secured great privileges for themselves. Like our own city of London, they had gained most of their privileges in return for sums of money given at one time or another to help their sovereigns in distress. The large degree of independence claimed by these cities, and the power which their wealth gave them, made the position of the rulers of Flanders constantly difficult. They were not independent States, like the Italian cities; but they had far more independence than our London.

England had become by this time a land possessing many beautiful buildings. Even the first of these three Plantagenet Edwards had been a great builder. It is one of the many curious facts about the story of these Middle Ages, in which fighting was almost continual, that they were the date of the building of some of the most stately cathedrals and ecclesiastical buildings both in England and all over Europe. In Spain, nearly from the time that the Moslems first came there, there was building showing much of the Byzantine style, as it was called, from Byzantium or Constantinople.

BYZANTINE STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE. Capital and column from St. Sophia.
BYZANTINE STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE.
Capital and column from St. Sophia.

But the most beautiful and impressive buildings were in what is known as the Gothic style, which had many varieties, but of which the striking feature is that the tops, the highest points, of the arches came to an angle, or peak, and were not rounded as was the style of the arch in the older buildings, called Norman, which were before them. Arch is from Latin arcus, a bow, and the Norman arch was of the rounded shape of a bow when the string is pulled back to discharge the arrow. The Gothic form of the arch is said to have been copied by its builders from the form which the corner poles of the primitive Gothic houses naturally took when they were brought together at the top to form the angle of the roof, as described on p. 100. This name of Gothic for this glorious architecture is a little confusing, first because we made the acquaintance of the Goths a long time before we read of the Normans, and yet what is called the Norman style of building is older than that which is called Gothic; and secondly because the very words Goth and Gothic are apt to suggest to our minds a very barbarous and uncultivated folk.

And so they were, when they came first into this story, from their homes east of the Rhine, but they acquired, by degrees, civilisation from the Roman world which they conquered, and this particular science and art of architecture was carried to great perfection at the date to which we have brought the story now. It is almost enough, to impress upon our minds the idea of that perfection, to remember that the building of Westminster Abbey, as we see it now, was undertaken in the reign of Henry III. in the thirteenth century, and that the beautifully decorated chapel of Henry VII. attached to it was added later, as the name of the king after whom it is called, indicates. There are some traces left of Norman and still older Saxon building in the cloisters, for the original building was a monastery, established in Saxon times, of Benedictine monks.

In the Poets' Corner, as it is called, of the Abbey is a tablet commemorating the poet Chaucer who lived, at one time, close to the Abbey. He died in 1400 and his stories of the pilgrims travelling to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where he was buried, tell us very much about the manner of life of the people of that day.

But, besides, Chaucer was a poet of the highest genius, and the beauties of his verse are marvellous considering the rough and troubled times in which he wrote. Most of the earlier writers had been clerics, and none approached the grace of Chaucer, a layman. But, what is perhaps more wonderful still, he had no followers, certainly none for more than a century after his death, who came near him in beauty of language or of thought.

Our story does not take us as far as that great Renaissance, or new birth of learning and culture, which distinguished the sixteenth century. We must put our Chaucer, together with Dante in Italy, and a few disciples such as Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio, as forerunners, a century or more ahead, of that great revival of literature.

By far the most of the Gothic building was of places for worship or for the accommodation of the clergy. Men thought—and it was a view which the Church was very ready to encourage—that they could find salvation and forgiveness for their sins if they devoted their wealth to the building of houses for religious purposes; and they also supposed that they could secure the favour of God by giving lands and property during their lifetime to the Church or by leaving it to the Church at their death.

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. Doorway of Beauvais Cathedral.
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
Doorway of Beauvais Cathedral.

By these gifts and legacies the Church grew more and more wealthy. But this generous gift to the Church did not altogether find favour with the kings or other feudal overlords of the givers, because every such gift to the Church meant a diminution of the taxes payable to the lord. Such feudal taxes were those paid at a vassal's death, on the succession of a new heir—but the Church did not die; or on marriage—but the Church did not marry. Lands of which the owners died without leaving an heir lapsed back to the Crown, which was looked on as having originally given the lands to the tenant on a feudal tenure, or tenancy—but the lands of the Church never thus lapsed.

In order to put a check on this, Edward I. found it easy to persuade his Parliament to pass an Act to prevent such giving of land to the Church unless leave were first obtained from the Crown. The Act was called the Statute of Mortmain, or of The Dead Hand, probably because land given to the Church passed into a hand that was dead so far as any giving of fees to a feudal lord was concerned. The Crown might, or it might not, grant the leave requested. The persuasion of the Parliament to pass the measure was easy, because most of the influential members of the Parliament suffered in the same way as the king. Their vassals, as well as his, might leave or give land to the Church, and so diminish their fees.

Wycliffe and Huss

Thus king and barons stood together in this particular, against the Church, and all through our story we find a certain difference in this respect between England and the rest of Europe. In England we find that the king, the nobles, and the commons were generally ready to stand together to resist the power claimed by the Pope, representing the Church. They might, and they did, constantly fight amongst themselves, but on the whole they were very ready to unite on this one point, and to resist Rome. The great teacher and preacher Wycliffe gave the Crown all the assistance of his eloquence in denouncing the greed of the Church for civil power and great possessions. Just as we look on Dante, the Italian, as a forerunner of the new birth in learning, so we may regard our Wycliffe as forerunner of the great Reformation in the Church. A great preacher in Bohemia, John Huss, preached the doctrines of Wycliffe and gained far more followers than he; and after Huss, Luther, the greatest of all the reformers, carried the work to its conclusion in the seventeenth century.

The Hussites of Bohemia became a large and formidable armed force. In our country it is likely that a revolt of the people of the eastern counties, led by Wat Tyler, was in some part inspired by the teachings of Wycliffe. Questioning the authority of the head of the Government would easily follow from questioning the authority of the head of the Church. But partly by a very gallant show of courage by the young king, Richard II., and partly by the valour of the citizens of London, under the Mayor, the rebels were overcome and crushed.

This spirit, however, in which Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, disputed the authority of the Pope, found favour with the Government for a short while only, and then the Lollards were hunted down and burnt as heretics. In Southern Germany, it inspired the Hussites a little later. But it made no way in France. We have to remember that at the very beginning of the fourteenth century the Pope fled from Rome and came to live, with his court, at Avignon, and this fact, that the Pope lived, and lived for many years, in a French city, had the effect of drawing the Pope and the King of France closely together. A further effect of this was that, all through the weary years of almost incessant war between France and England, the favour of the Church was with France rather than with England, and it was a favour which had much value.

CHAPTER XXI

ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND BURGUNDY

After the Hundred Years' War had been in progress less than a quarter of a century, it seemed as if Edward III. had won all that he could possibly claim—peace and sovereignty over all the outlying parts of his dominion at home, and over more than he had set out to gain on the Continent. But the war was renewed by the action of Edward's vassal lords in France, only nine years later, and before his death, which happened in 1377, scarce a possession on the Continent was left to England except the city of Calais and a narrow strip of coast south of Bordeaux, in Guienne. Even at sea the French fleet, now aided by the Spanish since the interference by the Black Prince with the affairs of Spain—see p. 180—was completely victorious and made raids on the south coast of England. At the end of the fourteenth century it was on the terms that England should hold these fragments, and these only, of her once great territory on the Continent, that a treaty was made with France by Richard II., Edward's successor on the English throne.

The cost and miseries incurred in England by those unsuccessful wars in France led to serious riots against the Government. It was then that Wat Tyler led his force of Kentish rebels to London, where only the courage of the king, a boy of fourteen, and the resistance of the militia of the town saved the city from the mob.

Twice towards the end of the century Richard, now the French treaty was arranged, found time to visit Ireland and claim the homage of the chiefs of the Irish clans, and it was while he was in Ireland, on the second of these expeditions, that his enemy, Henry, Earl of Bolingbroke, whom he had banished, came back to England and was joined by great forces in the country which had by now become disgusted with Richard's tyranny. For though Richard had shown extraordinary courage and manly wisdom as a boy, his later acts raise a doubt whether he was quite sane. In the last year of the century, 1399, Henry came to the throne as Henry IV.

Henry IV

It was a troublous succession. There was discontent and active rebellion of both lords and commons in England itself. Wales rose in arms against the king and was followed by Scotland. France threatened to renew the war. Gradually the king gained the victory over each of these various forces opposed to him. Wales and Scotland were subdued by arms. Against Scotland he had the help of the great Earl of Northumberland and his son famous in story as "Hotspur." Very shortly afterwards the power of Northumberland was brought into opposition to the king, but was overthrown in that battle which settled the Welsh trouble and, as Shakespeare relates to us, gave Henry, the king's son—soon to be Henry V.—the chance of distinguishing himself by killing "Hotspur" in single combat, and thus proving that he was made for better things than to be the boon companion of the drunken old knight Falstaff.

But with his own commons Henry IV. was able to make terms only by giving up a serious piece of what had been the royal privilege before. He agreed that the taxes raised to meet the expenses of the war should be received and paid out again by a committee appointed by the Parliament, and no longer by an official appointed by the king. The difference was of much importance for the liberties of the English subject.

As for the threat of war from France, that threat died away for the moment in consequence of an event which had a large effect on the course of the story during most of the fifteenth century. This event was the rise of the Duke of Burgundy to a power almost as great as that of the King of France himself, the Duke's feudal overlord.

Burgundy had for very many years been the name of a territory varying in extent, sometimes including portions of the present Italy and Switzerland, and always some of the most fertile and beautiful country in Europe. Towards the end of the fourteenth century it gained greatly in wealth and territory by uniting with itself the province of Flanders. This union came about through the marriage of the heiress of the Count of Flanders with a Duke of Burgundy. The province of Flanders included, as we have seen, semi-independent and wealthy cities such as Bruges and Ghent. Its addition to the dukedom of Burgundy made that chief vassal fully equal in possession of territory and resources with his overlord, the King of France. The story of the next many years in Europe is largely the story of the struggle between this great vassal and his lord. Possibly it was a struggle which saved our England, for England was very wearied and weakened by foreign war; she was full of discontent at home; her fleet had been beaten and broken up. If her old enemy of France had been able to attack her with any united force at this moment, it would have been hard for her to make head against it.

The threat of Burgundy gave the French king business to attend to nearer home. Unfortunately it also gave England an easy opportunity of vexing her ancient enemy by lending her aid to the Duke.

Agincourt

Henry V., the Prince Hal of Shakespeare's dramas, developed from a foolish prince into a wise king, but he was not wise enough to resist the temptation, given him by the rivalry between the French king and the powerful Duke, to regain what England once held on the Continent. He was wise enough, however, to conduct his campaign in a different manner from that in which former leaders of English armies in France had waged war. The Black Prince and others had marched, conquering and raiding, into the country, with very little apparent plan. Henry V.'s first enterprise was indeed rather of the same kind, and nearly ended in a disastrous failure. But he turned the threatened disaster into a resounding victory in the battle of Agincourt. The chivalry of France was caught up in marshy ground, and the archers of England shot them down. It was a repetition of Crécy and of Poitiers. The slaughter of Frenchmen of distinction and high birth was very great, and this wonderful victory made the English soldier a terror in France for years to come.

But the danger, from which only a wonderful victory could have rescued him, seems to have taught Henry a lesson. In his next campaign he set to work in a methodical way to conquer Normandy, making the country safe behind him as he progressed. It was a slower way than that of the Black Prince, but far more sure.

The French king was kept busy by Burgundy. He could send no help to his vassal of Normandy, and the whole of Normandy fell into Henry's hand. The Burgundians meantime had captured Paris; and now a desperate deed of treachery was done by the heir to the French throne. The actual King of France was insane, and incapable of taking any part in the government.