Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/567

 THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 517 tinker, "Hickey the horse-dealer and Hogg the needle- seller," "a fiddler, a rat-catcher, a Cheapside scavenger" — all these and many more live for us in his pages. If Will, as the poet calls himself, depicts low life for us and also satirizes iniquity in high places, he none the less cherishes high ideals both in politics and religion, and also portrays ideal charac- ters such as Piers the ploughman, the thrifty and industrious peasant. As for Will himself, after a long search for Saint Truth and for Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best, in which he was occasionally cheered by the song of wayside birds and of sweet brooks and by many a marvelous dream, Hunger and Fever met him and proved too much for him. Finally, we are told, — 11 Death dealt him a dent and drove him to earth. He 's now covered with clay. May Christ have his soul! " When the war began again, John the Good, so-called be- cause he was "a good fellow," not a good general or king, was on the throne of France and Charles the Bad Poitiers and of Navarre, whose sobriquet we do not need to Bretl s n y qualify, was making him trouble. This Charles, born in 1332, was son of that daughter of Louis X who had been ex- cluded from the succession and so Charles had the same sort of claim to the throne as had Edward III. Edward's eldest son, the Black Prince, so named because of the black armor which he wore to set off his fair complexion, had won his spurs at Crecy and now became the English commander in Gascony. From there he made a plundering raid into Tou- louse as far as the Mediterranean, and then, after marching north and finding that he could not cross the Loire, retreated to Poitiers. There he defeated and captured King John, who spent the remainder of his reign in honorable captivity in London, voluntarily returning thither when his son, who had taken his place as a hostage while he returned to France 1 his parole. Meantime, in 1360 peace had been concluded in the Treaty of Bretigny, for although the French govern- ment had neither army nor money left, the English could not
 * to try to collect the remainder of his enormous ransom, broke