, and squires,
English and Breton, and about eight or nine hundred archers." Du
Guesclin's troops were pretty nearly equal in number, and not less brave,
but less well disciplined, and probably also less ably commanded. The
battle took place on the 29th of September, 1364, before Auray. The
attendant circumstances and the result have already been recounted in the
twentieth chapter of this history; Charles of Blois was killed, and Du
Guesclin was made prisoner. The cause of John of Montfort was clearly
won; and he, on taking possession of the duchy of Brittany, asked nothing
better than to acknowledge himself vassal of the King of France, and
swear fidelity to him. Charles V. had too much judgment not to foresee
that, even after a defeat, a peace which gave a lawful and definite
solution to the question of Brittany, rendered his relations and means of
influence with this important province much more to be depended upon than
any success which a prolonged war might promise him. Accordingly he made
peace at Guerande, on the 11th of April, 1365, after having disputed the
conditions inch by inch; and some weeks previously, on the 6th of March,
at the indirect instance of the King of Navarre, who, since the battle of
Gocherel, had felt himself in peril, Charles V. had likewise put an end
to his open struggle against his perfidious neighbor, of whom he
certainly did not cease to be mistrustful. Being thus delivered from
every external war and declared enemy, the wise King of France was at
liberty to devote himself to the re-establishment of internal peace and
of order throughout his kingdom, which was in the most pressing need
thereof.

We have, no doubt, even in our own day, cruel experience of the disorders
and evils of war; but we can form, one would say, but a very incomplete
idea of what they were in the fourteenth century, without any of those
humane administrative measures, still so ineffectual,--provisionings,
hospitals, ambulances, barracks, and encampments,--which are taken in the
present day to prevent or repair them. The _Recueil des Ordonnances des
Lois de France_ is full of safeguards granted by Charles V. to
monasteries and hospices and communes, which implored his protection,
that they might have a little less to suffer than the country in general.
We will borrow from the best informed and the most intelligent of the
contemporary chroniclers, the Continuer of William of Nangis, a picture
of those sufferi