ever, began to acquire his great celebrity when
he was very young: he fought at the great battle of Crecy, in France,
as one of the principal commanders on the English side, when he was
only about seventeen years old.

Crecy, or Cressy, as it is sometimes called, is situated on the banks
of the River Somme, in the northeast part of France. The circumstances
under which the battle in this place was fought are as follows. The
King of England, Edward the Third, the father of the Black Prince,
laid claim to the throne of France. The ground of his claim was that,
through his grandmother Isabel, who was a daughter of the French
king, he was the nearest blood-relation to the royal line, all the
other branches of the family nearer than his own being extinct. Now
the people of France were, of course, very unwilling that the King of
England should become entitled to the French crown, and they
accordingly made a certain Prince Philip the king, who reigned under
the title of Philip the Sixth. Philip was the nearest relative after
Edward, and he derived his descent through males alone, while Edward,
claiming, as he did, through his grandmother Isabel, came through a
female line.

Now there was an ancient law prevailing in certain portions of France,
called the Salic law,[C] by which female children were excluded from
inheriting the possessions of their fathers. This principle was at
first applied to the inheriting of private property, but it was
afterward extended to rights and titles of all sorts, and finally to
the descent of the crown of France. Indeed, the right to rule over a
province or a kingdom was considered in those days as a species of
property, which descended from father to child by absolute right,
over which the people governed had no control whatever.

[Footnote C: The Salic law is very celebrated in history, and
questions growing out of it gave rise, in ancient times, to
innumerable wars. It derived its name from a tribe of people called
_Saliens_, by whom it was first introduced.]

The chief reason why the Salic law was applied to the case of the
crown of France was not, as it might at first be supposed, because it
was thought in those days that women were not qualified to reign, but
because, by allowing the crown to descend to the daughters of the king
as well as to the sons, there was danger of its passing out of the
country. The _princes_ of the royal family usually remained in their
own land, and, if they m