In this break in the line of succession, England saw an opportunity.
The mother of Edward III., King of England, was Isabella, daughter of
Philip IV. Edward claimed that he, as grandson of the French king, had
a claim superior to that of the nephew. A strict interpretation of the
Salic Law certainly vitiated his claim of heirship through the female
line. But Edward did not stand upon such a trifle as that. The stake
was great, and so was the opportunity. Now England might not alone
recover her lost possessions in France, but might establish a
legitimate claim to the whole.

So it was that an English army was once more upon French soil, and in
1346 Edward, with his toy cannon, had won the battle of Crecy, followed
by the siege and capture of Calais, which for two hundred years was to
remain an English port--a thorn in the side of France.

A part of the old kingdom of Burgundy, which was called Dauphiny,
dropped into the lap of Philip, this first Valois king, during his
reign. The old duke, being without an heir, offered to sell this bit
of territory to the King of France upon the condition that it should be
kept as the personal possession of the eldest sons of the kings of
France. Thenceforth the title of _Dauphin_ was worn by the heir to the
throne, until it became extinct with the son of Louis XVI. And when
the feeble Philip VI. died in 1350, his son John, the first dauphin,
assumed the crown of France.

John, this second Valois king, was an anachronism. A man intended for
the eleventh century had been set down in the fourteenth. The
restoration of knightly ceremonial, tournaments at the Louvre, the
details of a new Crusade which he was planning, and the distribution of
new titles, these were the things occupying the mind of the king, while
his kingdom, rent by factions within, was in a death-struggle with foes
from without.

A fantastic Don Quixote, on a tottering throne, was fighting the most
practical statesman and the strongest-armed warrior Europe held at the
time.

With this weakness at the centre, France was again falling into
fragments. There was even a resumption of private wars between nobles;
and, most paralyzing of all, an empty treasury. Such time as he could
spare from his main projects John gave to the affairs of the kingdom.
First of all, taxes must be levied; and when the first tax was upon
salt, King Edward condescended to make an historic witticism, saying
"he had at last discovere