lation; nearly all her looms ceased rattling on one
and the same day, and the streets of her cities, but lately filled with
rich and busy workmen, were overrun with beggars who asked in vain for
work to escape from misery and hunger." The English land-owners and
farmers did not suffer so much, but were scarcely less angered; only it
was to the King of France and the Count of Flanders rather than their own
king that they held themselves indebted for the stagnation of their
affairs, and their discontent sought vent only in execration of the
foreigner.

When great national interests are to such a point misconceived and
injured, there crop up, before long, clear-sighted and bold men who
undertake the championship of them, and foment the quarrel to
explosion-heat, either from personal views or patriotic feeling.
The question of succession to the throne of France seemed settled by the
inaction of the King of England, and the formal homage he had come and
paid to the King of France at Amiens; but it was merely in abeyance.
Many people both in England and in France still thought of it and spoke
of it; and many intrigues bred of hope or fear were kept up with
reference to it at the courts of the two kings. When the rumblings of
anger were loud on both sides in consequence of affairs in Flanders, two
men of note, a Frenchman and a Fleming, considering that the hour had
come, determined to revive the question, and turn the great struggle
which could not fail to be excited thereby to the profit of their own and
their countries' cause, for it is singular how ambition and devotion,
selfishness and patriotism, combine and mingle in the human soul, and
even in great souls.

Philip VI. had embroiled himself with a prince of his line, Robert of
Artois, great-grandson of Robert the first Count of Artois, who was a
brother of St. Louis, and was killed during the crusade in Egypt, at the
battle of Mansourah. As early as the reign of Philip the Handsome Robert
claimed the count-ship of Artois as his heritage; but having had his
pretensions rejected by a decision of the peers of the kingdom, he had
hoped for more success under Philip of Valois, whose sister he had
married. Philip tried to satisfy him with another domain raised to a
peerage; but Robert, more and more discontented, got involved in a series
of intrigues, plots, falsehoods, forgeries, and even, according to public
report, imprisonments and crimes, which, in 1332, led to his