he would have to deal with a more powerful enemy than the Count of Flanders only. A new family sat upon the throne of France, and Philip VI., the first of the Valois dynasty, renouncing the traditions of the older branch, bore himself as a gay knight amongst the knights of his kingdom, and knew no wisdom better than to give his support to the splendid and thoughtless feudal aristocracy rather than to the sober and hardworking citizen. Philip now ranged himself on the side of the Count against the burghers of Flanders, and a war against him in the interest of the Flemish towns, would therefore have rendered a real service to Flanders as well as to England itself.

CHAP.

V.

$5. Beginning of the Hun

It was probably inevitable that a second and less justifiable cause of war should have been thought more of in those days than it is likely to be thought of now. The loss of Gascony, unconnected as it was by any ties of nationality with England, was a mere question of time. But if Edward I. held the preservation of Gascony to be worth struggling for, it is no wonder that his grandson did the same. That which gave the war its indefensible character was not the support of Flanders or the claim to the retention of Gascony, but the monstrous assertion of Edward's rights to the very crown of France, on the most flimsy of pretexts. Crecy and Poitiers demonstrated to the world that a people with united ranks, in which the nobility and gentry regarded the townsmen and the yeomen as their fellowcitizens, was stronger than a people in which distinction of rank was everything, and in which the business of defence was entrusted to the more showy part, instead of being a burden imposed upon the whole. It was a war in which the victors suffered as much as the vanquished. Habits of rapacity and greed were easily contracted, not easily cured. When France at last learned to act

dred Years

War.

СНАР,
V.

§ 6. The Constitution of the House of Commons.

together under a wiser king, the tide of English conquest was thrown back, and the men who had taken pleasure in preying upon a foreign people were driven to prey upon one another at home.

No nation can wage a war upon this scale without some effect being produced on its social and political institutions. During the earlier years of failure and expectation, before the victory of Crecy, the existence of war was chiefly felt in England by the increasing demands for money made by the king. The parliament to which these demands were addressed was separated into two Houses, if indeed it had not been already separated in the days of Edward I.-an Upper House, composed of peers and prelates; and a Lower House, composed of the knights of the shire, representing the untitled gentry and freeholders of the country, together with the burgesses who represented the towns. The day would come when the fact that there were two houses rather than one would be considered to be a matter of prime importance. In the early days of the House of Commons, the thing of prime importance did not lie in its separation from the House of Lords, but in the union of classes within its own walls. No stronger evidence could be given of the depth to which the idea. of national unity had struck its roots in England than lay in this combination. On the continent there was a strong repulsion between these very classes. The dwellers in towns cannot suffice alone to make a nation; their occupations are such as to induce mental exertion, to make men quick and lively, eager for profit, and full of warm devotion towards the spot of earth upon which their fortunes have grown. But the very strength of this devotion tends to exclude a larger patriotism, and it had never proved possible to teach the citizen of Athens that he was above all a Greek, or the citizen of Florence

that he was above all an Italian. In the close relations of the country gentleman to the burgess class, England found a powerful solvent which hindered her towns from crystallising themselves apart, as the towns of Italy had crystallised themselves, or from clinging for support, like the towns of France, to the arbitrary government of the king, in order to free themselves from the brutalities of the feudal landowners around.

It must never be forgotten that the form taken by the House of Commons was the effect, not the cause. Long before there was a House of Commons at all, the ancestors of the knights of the shire of the reign of Edward III. had fought side by side at Lewes with the ancestors of the citizens of London who sent their representatives to Parliament in the same reign.

Such

a union was of advantage to both classes. The burghers brought an acquaintance with trade which was of the utmost value at a time when the battle of the constitution was fought out on questions mainly relating to commercial imposts, whilst the knights of the shire gave a vigour to resistance which mere citizens could never have offered. It is of the utmost importance that strength in argument should clothe itself in effective strength, if necessary, in battle. It is ill to reason with the master of thirty legions, and it is the fate of cities. which stand alone to discover that neither arts nor commerce nor civic virtue can avail for ever to resist the masters of the wide fields which stretch away beyond the horizon outside their walls. In the House of Commons the masters of the streets and lanes made common cause with the masters of the fields. The knights of the shire furnished the effective strength that was needed, and were consequently the most honoured members of the assembly on them fell the weight and the glory of speaking, as well as of acting in defence of all, and not merely in defence of their own peculiar privileges.

CHAP.

V.

$7. Unity

of the

Nation.

СНАР.
V.

The early years of Edward's reign were years of constant progress on the part of the House of Commons, $8. Grow- interrupted no doubt by times of retrogression. Edward Strength of promised concessions, and then withdrew them. He

ing

the Com

mons.

§ 9. Chivalry.

mingled cajolery and flattery with positive falsehood Step by step, however, the Commons grew in influence. The great lords of the Upper House found their account in having the knights and burgesses on their side. The protest against injustice and wrong was often no more than a protest. But it was repeated again and again. till a sense of right was created which would in the end gain the mastery over the wrong.

After all, however, the leading power in England was still the baronage. Edward's French wars indeed were rendered possible by the support which he received from other classes; but they were waged in accordance with the ideas, and with due respect for the interests of the feudal and more especially the military class. So far as that class was animated by any special idea, it was by the idea of chivalry. Chivalry was to the medieval warrior very much what monasticism was to the medieval churchman. It placed before him his own mode of life, in the best and highest light of which it was capable. The rough and often brutal warrior learned that selfrestraint and respect for others were higher than prowess in the field. The Black Prince showed himself nobler in humbly waiting upon a captive king than when he won his spurs by his charge at Crecy. In some respects the ideal of honour and courtesy was higher than the ideal of the monk. It was less entirely introspective, less concerned with separating those who entertained it as a class apart from others, more of a bond attaching man closely to his fellow-creatures. But in other respects it was a lower ideal. The code of honour was always more arbitrary, more concerned with outward actions, and less

with inward purity and uprightness than the code of monastic virtues.

In the Middle Ages too the code of honour was subject to special limitations which were most injurious to its development. Courtesy finds all the more scope for its excellence when exercised by the rich towards the poor, or by the strong towards the weak. But in the fourteenth century the community of feeling necessary to the development of courtesy did not reach to all classes of the population. The nation, the growth of which we have been slowly tracing, was by no means co-extensive with the population of the kingdom. Even the House of Commons, which was pushing its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation. Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down upon those beneath them without trust or affection. To the warrior knight the labouring man was but an instrument of service to whom no courtesy was due, and who, in war, might be pillaged or plundered without pity, when the defeated knight or gentleman would be received to mercy. The course of the French wars deepened this feeling of estrangement. The lot of the labourer in France was lower and more pitiable than in England, and the English victors learned to treat the whole class with more complete disdain from their new experience.

Then came the days of failure and disaster. Expensive habits, acquired when booty was easily got, were hard to throw off, and the demands made on the labourer, when the baron or the knight returned discomfited from the war in which he had learned the evil lesson of cruelty to the poor, were certain to be higher than they had ever been before. The feeling of the

СНАР.

V.

§ 10. The Labourers.

§ 11. Piers

the Plough

inan.