e dead, or
unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?" he asked the envoy.
"No, sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely
needs your help." "Return to those that sent you," said the king, "and bid
them not send to me again so long as my son lives! Let the boy win his
spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and that the
honour may be with him and them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward
could see in fact from his higher ground that all went well. The English
bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed
the French horses in the melly and brought knight after knight to the
ground. Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion. "You are my
vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles
around him, "I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I
may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!" Linking their bridles
together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall
as their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily against the French.
At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a
rout. Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a number equal
to the whole English force--lay dead upon the ground.

[Sidenote: The Yeoman]

"God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a
passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he
had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was
hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a
system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had
risen out of that system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the
horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl. The
real fighting power of a feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage
and landowners who took the field, each with his group of esquires and
mounted men-at-arms. A host of footmen followed them, but they were ill
armed, ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any decisive part on
the actual battle-field. In France, and especially at the moment we have
reached, the contrast between the efficiency of these two elements of
warfare was more striking than elsewhere. Nowhere was the chivalry so
splendid, nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the poor more
terribly expresse