m, and Edward
renounced his pretensions to Querey in consideration of a yearly sum of
three thousand livres of Tours. In 1292, a quarrel and some hostilities
at sea between the English and Norman commercial navies grew into a war
between the two kings; and it dragged its slow length along for four
years in the south-west of France. Edward made an alliance, in the
north, with the Flemish, who were engaged in a deadly struggle with
Philip the Handsome, and thereby lost Aquitaine for a season; but, in
1296, a truce was concluded between the belligerents, and though the
importance of England's commercial relations with Flanders decided Edward
upon resuming his alliance with the Flemish, when, in 1300, war broke out
again between them and France, he withdrew from it three years
afterwards, and made a separate peace with Philip the Handsome, who gave
him back Aquitaine. In 1306, fresh differences arose between the two
kings; but before they had rekindled the torch of war, Edward I. died at
the opening of a new campaign in Scotland, and his successor, Edward II.,
repaired to Boulogne, where he, in his turn, did homage to Philip the
Handsome for the duchy of Aquitaine, and espoused Philip's daughter
Isabel, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. In spite,
then, of frequent interruptions, the reign of Edward I. was on the whole
a period of peace between England and France, being exempt, at any rate,
from premeditated and obstinate hostilities.

In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome,
just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his
reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III. and Jayme II.; but
these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties
between the descendants of St. Louis and of his brother, Charles of
Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the
general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty
concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without
historical importance.

The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and
kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of
defeat and success, a really serious war. In the thirteenth century,
Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe. She
owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial
undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but th