rs, which became a mere
episode in the larger contest which it had stirred between England and
France.

[Sidenote: The Hundred Years War]

Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is difficult to
overestimate the importance of the contest which was now to open between
these two nations. To England it brought a social, a religious, and in the
end a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, and the New
Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred Years War. With it began the
military renown of England; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of
the seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a sudden revelation of
warlike prowess roused the country not only to a new ambition, a new
resolve to assert itself as a European power, but to a repudiation of the
claims of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence
both of Church and Crown which paved the way for and gave its ultimate form
to the English Reformation. The peculiar shape which English warfare
assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight, gave
new force to the political advance of the Commons. On the other hand the
misery of the war produced the first great open feud between labour and
capital. The glory of Crecy or Poitiers was dearly bought by the upgrowth
of English pauperism. The warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at
home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the
baronage, and sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on the
throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the succession which troubled
England to the days of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import in the
history of France. If it struck her for the moment from her height of
pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among the states of
Europe. It carried her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked
alike the feudal power of her _noblesse_ and the hopes of constitutional
liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation of the peasant or the
action of the burgher. It founded a royal despotism which reached its
height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into the gulf of the
Revolution.

[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance]

Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the moment when Philip
and Edward declared war. But from the very first the war took European
dimensions. The young king saw clearly the greater strength of France. The
weakness of t