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some did not know him and all of whom kept shouting, "Yield you! yield you! else you die." The banner of France fell at his side; for Geoffrey de Charny was slain. Denis de Morbecque, a knight of St. Omer, made his way up to the king, and said to him in good French, "Sir, sir, I pray you, yield!" "To whom shall I yield me?" said John: "where is my cousin the prince of Wales ?" 66 Sir, yield you to me; I will bring you to him." "Who are you?" "Denis de Morbecque, a knight of Artois; I serve the king of England, not being able to live in the kingdom of France, for I have lost all I possessed there." "I yield me to you," said John and he gave his glove to the knight, who led him away "in the midst of a great press, for every one was dragging the king, saying, 'I took him!' and he could not get forward nor could my lord Philip, his young son.... The king said to them all, Sirs, conduct me courteously, and quarrel no more together about the taking of me, for I am rich and great enough to make every one of you rich.'" Hereupon, the two English marshals, the earl of Warwick and the earl of Suffolk, "seeing from afar this throng, gave spur to their steeds, and came up, asking, What is this yonder?' And answer was made to them: It is the king of France who is taken, and more than ten knights and squires would fain have him.' Then the two barons broke through the throng by dint of their horses, dismounted and bowed full low before the king, who was very joyful at their coming, for they saved him from great danger." A very little while afterwards the two marshals "entered the pavilion of the prince of Wales, and made him a present of the king of France; the which present the prince could not but take kindly as a great and noble one, and so truly he did, for he bowed full low before the king, and received him as king, properly and discreetly, as he well knew how to do.... When evening came the prince of Wales gave a supper to the king of France and to my lord Philip, his son, and to the greater part of the barons of France who were prisoners. . . . And the prince would not sit at the king's table for all the king's entreaty, but waited as a serving-man at the king's table, bending the knee before him, and saying, 'Dear sir, be pleased not to put on so sad a countenance because it hath not pleased God to consent this day

to your wishes, for assuredly my lord and father will show you all the honour and friendship he shall be able, and he will come to terms with you so reasonably that ye shall remain good friends for ever."

Henceforth it was, fortunately, not on King John or on peace or war between him and the king of England that the fate of France depended.

ET us turn back a little, in order to understand the government and position of King John before he engaged in the war which so far as he was concerned ended with the battle of Poitiers and imprisonment in England.

A valiant and loyal knight, but a frivolous, hare-brained, thoughtless, prodigal, and obstinate as well as impetuous prince, and even more incapable than Philip of Valois in the practice of government, John, after having summoned at his accession, in 1351, a states-assembly concerning which we have no explicit information left to us, tried for a space of four years to suffice in himself for all the perils, difficulties and requirements of the situation he had found bequeathed to him by his father. For a space of four years, in order to get money, he debased the coinage, confiscated the goods and securities of foreign merchants, and stopped payment of his debts; and he went through several provinces, treating with local councils or magistrates in order to obtain from them certain

subsidies which he purchased by granting them new privileges. He hoped by his institution of the order of the Star to resuscitate the chivalrous zeal of his nobility. All these means were vain or insufficient. The defeat of Crécy and the loss of Calais had caused discouragement in the kingdom and aroused many doubts as to the issue of the war with England., Defection and even treason brought trouble into the court, the councils, and even the family of John. To get the better of them he at one time heaped favours upon the men he feared, at another he had them arrested, imprisoned, and even beheaded in his presence. He gave his daughter Joan in marriage to Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, and, some few months afterwards, Charles himself, the real or presumed head of all the traitors, was seized, thrown into prison and treated with extreme rigour, in spite of the supplications of his wife, who vigorously took the part of her husband against her father. After four years thus consumed in fruitless endeavours, by turns violently and feebly enforced, to reorganize an army and a treasury, and to purchase fidelity at any price or arbitrarily strike down treason, John was obliged to recognize his powerlessness and to call to his aid the French nation, still so imperfectly formed, by convoking at Paris, for the 30th of November, 1355, the states-general of Langue d'oil, that is, Northern France, separated by the Dordogne and the Garonne from Langue d'oc, which had its own assembly distinct. Auvergne belonged to Langue d'oil.

It is certain that neither this assembly nor the king who convoked it had any clear and fixed idea of what they were meeting together to do. The kingship was no longer competent for its own government and its own perils; but it insisted none the less, in principle, on its own all but unregulated and unlimited power. The assembly did not claim for the country the right of self-government, but it had a strong leaven of patriotic sentiment and at the same time was very much discontented with the king's government: it had equally at heart the defence of France against England and against the abuses of the kingly power. There was no notion of a social struggle and no systematic idea of political revolution; a dangerous crisis and intolerable sufferings constrained king and nation to come together in order to make an attempt at an understand

ing and at a mutual exchange of the supports and the reliefs of which they were in need.

On the 2nd of December, 1355, the three orders, the clergy, the nobility and the deputies from the towns assembled at Paris in the great hall of the Parliament. Peter de la Forest, archbishop of Rouen and chancellor of France, asked them in the king's name "to consult together about making him a subvention which should suffice for the expenses of the war," and the king offered to "make a sound and durable coinage." The tampering with the coinage was the most pressing of the grievances for which the three orders solicited a remedy. They declared that "they were ready to live and die with the king and to put their bodies and what they had at his service;" and they demanded authority to deliberate together -which was granted them. John de Craon, archbishop of Rheims; Walter de Brienne, duke of Athens; and Stephen Marcel, provost of the tradesmen of Paris, were to report the result, as presidents, each of his own order. The session of the states lasted not more than a week. They replied to the king "that they would give him a subvention of 30,000 men-at-arms every year," and, for their pay, they voted an impost of fifty hundred thousand livres (five millions of livres), which was to be levied "on all folks, of whatever condition they might be, Church folks, nobles, or others," and the gabel or tax on salt "over the whole kingdom of France." On separating, the states appointed beforehand two fresh sessions at which they would assemble, " one, in the month of March, to estimate the sufficiency of the impost and to hear, on that subject, the report of the nine superintendents charged with the execution of their decision; the other, in the month of November following, to examine into the condition of the kingdom."

They assembled, in fact, on the 1st of March, and on the 8th of May, 1356 [N.B. as the year at that time began with Easter, the 24th of April was the first day of the year 1356: the new style, however, is here in every case adopted]; but they had not the satisfaction of finding their authority generally recognized and their patriotic purpose effectually accomplished. The impost they had voted, notably the salt-tax, had met with violent opposition. "When the news thereof reached Normandy," says Froissart,