doth, or can possess any part of it but mediately or immediately as a gift from him, to be held on feudal service. This one sentence sums up the three great Statutes of Edward I.—the tendency of them all was to tighten the hold of the great lords, and also that of the King, on the lands.
We all know the stories of Crecy, Poictiers, Agincourt, and Joan of Arc; but we do not all realise that our wars for the conquest of France lasted—with truces—for a hundred years, and it is with some shock of surprise that even the well-informed of us see for the first time these wars spoken of by French historians, as "La Guerre de Cent Ans," The first effect of them was to pour immense wealth into England. Besides the actual spoils of war — the loot of towns and castles—there were the enormous ransoms paid by the prisoners taken at Crecy and Poictiers, The ransom of the King of France was fixed at 3,000,000 gold crowns; and the King had to wait a prisoner three years before impoverished France could raise the first instalment of this monstrous sum. This sum equalled £5,000,000 of our money; but it must be considered equivalent to very much more, since as late as the reign of Henry VIII. money was about twenty times its present value. Four dukes paid 200,000 florins—the gold florin of Edward III. was worth 6s. And besides all this, there were concessions of castles and estates, to be granted by the victorious King of England to his favourites. But as usually happens with the prosperity accompanying war, that prosperity was inflated, and the great drain of men in the wars was not made up by the ransom money.[1]
Then came the unfortunate expedition of the Black Prince to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile. In a great battle, the King of the people's choice was defeated, but
- ↑ France suffered incalculably more than England. England was never the battlefield of her foreign wars. The inevitable devastations caused by the marching of armies fell on her enemies, not on herself. The pestilences which invariably follow war helped the depopulation of France. The Black Plague, which we call the Black Death, was not the only pestilence, though it was the worst, which raged in France during the Hundred Years. Normandy suffered the most from the war. Twelve parishes with 941 parishioners in the thirteenth century were reduced to 246 inhabitants during the English occupation.
