rdy
yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent
lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a
helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they
had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English
peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English
yeomen had begun.

Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the
Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging
at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which
had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation
into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous
plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with
England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take
their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering
and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and
the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the
desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles
with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the
English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the
beginning of the war.

Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph.
His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen.
England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and
her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of
rebellion--though with them this meant no more than that they felt
themselves over-taxed.[22]

The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded
as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde
movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even
seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success
reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in
1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land,
had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish