Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/511

 England in the Middle Ages 435 army had long since disappeared. Even before the opening of the war the nobles had begun to be paid for their military services and no longer furnished troops as a condition of hold- ing fiefs. But the companies of soldiers found their pay very • uncertain, and plundered their countrymen as well as the enemy. As the war drew to a close, the lawless troopers became a terrible scourge to the country and were known disjlayers, on account of the horrible way in which they tortured the peasants in the hope of extracting money from them. In 1439 ^^^ Estates General approved a plan devised by the king, for putting an end to this evil. Thereafter no one was to raise a company without the permission of the king, who was to name the captains and fix the number of the soldiers. The Estates agreed that the king should use a certain tax. The perma- called the taille, to support the troops necessary for the pro- "atai to'^he tection of the frontier. This was a fatal concession, for the powers of the ' Estates Oen- king now had an army and the right to collect what he chose to erai consider a permanent tax, the amount of which he later greatly increased ; he was not dependent, as was the English king, upon the grants made for brief periods by the representatives of the nation. Before the king of France could hope to establish a compact, The new well-organized state it was necessary for him to reduce the power of his vassals, some of whom were almost his equals in strength. The older feudal families had many of them succumbed to the attacks and the diplomacy of the kings of the thirteenth century, especially of St. Louis. But he and his successors had raised up fresh rivals by granting whole provinces to their younger sons. In this way new and powerful lines of feudal nobles were established, such, for example, as the houses of Orle'ans, Anjou, Bourbon, and, above all. Burgundy. The process of reducing the power of the nobles had, it is true, been begun. They had been forbidden to coin money, to maintain armies, and to tax their subjects, and the powers of the king's judges had been