ngs and the causes of them. "There was not," he says,
"in Anjou, in Touraine, in Beauce, near Orleans and up to the approaches
of Paris, any corner of the country which was free from plunderers and
robbers. They were so numerous everywhere, either in little forts
occupied by them or in the villages and country-places, that peasants and
tradesfolks could not travel but at great expense and great peril. The
very guards told off to defend cultivators and travellers took part most
shamefully in harassing and despoiling them. It was the same in Burgundy
and the neighboring countries. Some knights who called themselves
friends of the king and of the king's majesty, and whose names I am not
minded to set down here, kept in their service brigands who were quite as
bad. What is far more strange is, that when those folks went into the
cities, Paris or elsewhere, everybody knew them and pointed them out, but
none durst lay a hand upon them. I saw one night at Paris, in the suburb
of St. Germain des Pres, while the people were sleeping, some brigands
who were abiding with their chieftains in the city, attempting to sack
certain hospices: they were arrested and imprisoned in the Chatelet; but,
before long, they were got off, declared innocent, and set at liberty
without undergoing the least punishment--a great encouragement for them
and their like to go still farther. . . . When the king gave Bertrand
du Guesclin the countship of Longueville, in the diocese of Rouen, which
had belonged to Philip, brother of the King of Navarre, Du Guesclin
promised the king that he would drive out by force of arms all the
plunderers and robbers, those enemies of the kingdom; but he did nothing
of the sort; nay, the Bretons even of Du Guesclin, on returning from
Rouen, pillaged and stole in the villages whatever they found there--
garments, horses, sheep, oxen, and beasts of burden and of tillage."

Charles V. was not, as Louis XII. and Henry IV. were, of a disposition
full of affection, and sympathetically inclined towards his people; but
he was a practical man, who, in his closet and in the library growing up
about him, took thought for the interests of his kingdom as well as for
his own; he had at heart the public good, and lawlessness was an
abomination to him. He had just purchased, at a ransom of a hundred
thousand francs, the liberty of Bertrand du Guesclin, who had remained a
prisoner in the hands of John Chandos, after the battle o