No national interest, no public ground, was provocative of
war between the two peoples; it was a war of personal ambition, like that
which in the eleventh century William the Conqueror had carried into
England. The memory of that great event was still, in the fourteenth
century, so fresh in France, that when the pretensions of Edward were
declared, and the struggle was begun, an assemblage of Normans, barons
and knights, or, according to others, the Estates of Normandy themselves,
came and proposed to Philip to undertake once more, and at their own
expense, the conquest of England, if he would put at their head his
eldest son, John, their own duke. The king received their deputation at
Vincennes, on the 23d of March, 1339, and accepted their offer. They
bound themselves to supply for the expedition four thousand men-at-arms
and twenty thousand foot, whom they promised to maintain for ten weeks,
and even a fortnight beyond, if, when the Duke of Normandy had crossed to
England, his council should consider the prolongation necessary. The
conditions in detail and the subsequent course of the enterprise thus
projected were minutely regulated and settled in a treaty published by
Dutillet in 1588, from a copy found at Caen when Edward III. became
master of that city in 1346. The events of the war, the long fits of
hesitation on the part of both kings, and the repeated alternations from
hostilities to truces and truces to hostilities, prevented anything from
coming of this proposal, the authenticity of which has been questioned by
M. Michelet amongst others, but the genuineness of which has been
demonstrated by M. Adolph Despont, member of the appeal-court of Caen, in
his learned Histoire du Cotentin.

Edward III., though he had proclaimed himself King of France, did not at
the outset of his claim adopt the policy of a man firmly resolved and
burning to succeed. From 1337 to 1340 he behaved as if he were at strife
with the Count of Flanders rather than with the King of France. He was
incessantly to and fro, either by embassy or in person, between England,
Flanders, Hainault, Brabant, and even Germany, for the purpose of
bringing the princes and people to actively co-operate with him against
his rival; and during this diplomatic movement such was the hostility
between the King of England and the Count of Flanders that Edward's
ambassadors thought it impossible for them to pass through Flanders in
safety, and went to Holla