or the camp, not as they lived in the cottage. He is the biographer not of the pastoral but of the feudal age. His justice is not our justice; he recognises no valour but in plate and mail, sees no beauty but that arrayed in silk and embroidery, believes no religion but in rochet and mitre. In his estimation the sin of poverty was a worse heresy than that of Pelagius or Socinus. Wealth and birth are necessary ingredients in his compositions; his chronicle was intended to be written upon shining yellow parchment, bound in velvet, clasped and embossed with silver, and presented on the knee to kings and queens. He matches no cloth of frieze with his cloth of gold. Russet and serge find no favour in s sight. Great was his respect for noble blood, but he had very little sympathy with the red puddle. The lower orders were "rascailles, vilaines, communes, pedailles." "Tuez toute cette ribaudaille!" was the order of the day. "Rustici quidem fuistis et estis, et in bondagio permanebitis," ran the proclamation of Richard the Second to his Kentish subjects. John De Vienne was a good knight, but Eustace de St. Pierre and his five companions, whose only nobility was in their self-devotion, receive a very moderate share of commendation. Froissart did not appreciate civil virtue. The courage of his age was active rather than passive, physical rather than moral,-the courage of a warrior, not that of a martyr. Nothing puts the cruelty of that period in a stronger point of view, than the passing mark of regret that a wholesale massacre is barely able to extort from so really good-natured a person as Froissart.

He

But although Froissart's work would have been far more interesting to the present age, had he paid more attention to the manners and habits of the lower classes, that circumstance would probably not have augmented its value in the eyes of the noble knights and high-born dames to whom it was presented. Such an attention would besides have been contrary to the genius of the man. He has transmitted to us a bold and skilful sketch of the heroes of the fourteenth century. He is good at a pageant, and excellent at a serious affair. He describes his military braveries with a skill that his father, the herald-painter, might have envied, and records a courteous speech or a bold stroke, with a truth and good-will peculiarly his own. came to England at a period when it was described as "a country where they loved war better than peace, and where strangers were well received." Nothing can exceed his affection at first setting out for his "dear lord and master Sir Robert de Namur, knight, Lord of Beaufort," nor could Dalgetty himself have surpassed him in subsequent fidelity to the various noble persons who were, from time to time, his patrons. In his capacity of clerk to Queen Philippa, he was present at many of the great events of his time, and enjoyed ample means of informing himself upon them all. He possessed an active gossiping disposition, that led him from place to place, asking

questions of every body, and prepared to marvel with all his heart at everything they told him. When he visited a strange country, he took it for granted that he should meet with strange things; but, although the measure of his faith is undoubtedly capacious, we can scarcely, whilst his contemporary Sir John Mandeville goes at large, complain very severely of our canon in this respect. His incredible stories, moreover, arise from his anxiety to collect knowledge, and his love of the marvellous makes him, though a worse authority, a far more entertaining writer.

Froissart perpetuali reminds us of Pepys. His appearance upon a handsome horse, with lackeys and attendants, instead of upon his former hackney, with his portmanteau en croupe, is exactly Mr. and Mrs. Pepys in their new coach. Both have a lurking affection for a fine garment, whether it be an embroidered tabard or a new camlet cloak; both would have been grieved, "even though it were no great matter," at a rent or stain; and pretty Mistress Nelly and Alice Perrers would have been regarded by both with the same half-admiring, half-fie-fie sort of manner. A love of finery, a great respect for nobility, thorough honesty and good faith, and a marvellous simplicity, are features common to the son of the tailor with the son of the herald-painter. Thus much of our chronicler. We next approach the subjects of his Chronicle.

The house of Plantaganet sat upon the throne of England, from the accession of Henry the Second in 1154, to the death of Richard the Third in 1485,-a line of fourteen princes, and a period of great events in the history of this country. The times of our Edwards and Henries, of the Plantaganet race, bear a relation to the history of England, which the government of no other princes bears to no other country. In personal character, in valour, capacity, and success, many of them, though not surpassed, have possibly been equalled among other nations; but we alone can look back upon the period of our most warlike, most politic, and least scrupulous dynasty, as that under whose military rule our greatest civil advantages were won. Nothing is more obscure, or has been less explained by historians, than the spirit shown by the English people under the dynasty of Plantaganet. That this spirit was no common inheritance of the hardy children of the north, due to their colder climate and bracing air, the histories of Sweden, Russia, and Denmark abundantly testify. In spite of the bloody wars with the Danes, drenching the land, from the Thames to the Humber, in her own gore; in spite of the crushing weight of the Norman tyranny, the old Saxon institutions still retained their vital energy, and shot up like the foliage of the acanthus, adorning on every side the rude mass that had threatened utter extinction. Under the Plantaganets, the Normans and Saxons became one people, took common share in the struggle for political freedom, and displayed a spirit of liberty and a jealousy of tyranny,

equal in strength but far superior in moderation to that of the free republics of antiquity, and that we seek for in vain amongst ourselves under the later dynasty of Tudor. The commons, who rose into political existence under Edward the First, and were placed in frequent and perilous opposition both to that sovereign and his scarce less formidable grandson, learned to temper their boldness with prudence, to be precise and consistent in their demands, and to choose a proper season for enforcing them. From the eight first Plantaganets, the "Great Charter," and the scarce less important "Confirmation," were gained; under their sway, English, the language of the people, became the language of their courts of law; the papal usurpations were continually detected and disallowed; the commercial genius of the people was fostered and developed; their native literature was created, and the scriptures were rendered into the English tongue. These things are very dear to our recollections. They were gained step by step, almost century by century, until now, their value having been proved by experience, and their character rendered venerable by time, we willingly associate them with the race of monarchs under whom they were grasped by our forefathers.

The race of Plantaganet was moulded in no common clay. Strange and dreadful rumours of incest and sorcery floated over the origin of their house; and, according to the vulgar belief, the blood of the Prince of Darkness flowed in their veins from no very distant fountain. "Is it strange," returned Richard, when upbraided for some act of extraordinary wickedness, "that they who proceed from hell should thitherward return?" The curse, heavy and withering upon the race, was domestic discord, the son rising in rebellion against the sire. When Geoffrey rose against his father, and a priest adjured him to forbear the crime of Absalom, "what," said he, "shall I disseise myself of my inheritance! Knowest thou not that not to love one another is the birth-right of our race?" From Geoffrey of Anjou to Edward of Warwick, who closed the line beneath the axe of his Tudor kinsman, the Plantaganets dipped deep into their own blood.

The characters of the Plantaganet monarchs were almost all conspicuous for manhood; whether for good or evil, they were strongly marked. Their high personal courage, their martial renown, their virtues and even their vices, their triumphs and their misfortunes, their regal port and the haughty outline of their features as they lie carved upon their tombs, have all combined to render them a part of our most intimate associations, and to grave them deep upon the bead-roll of our English fame. Their bolder deeds strike root into our imaginations in early childhood, as their crafty policy and perpetual struggle with the rising liberties of their people, afford fit subject for our meditation at mature age.

The reigns of Edward the First, Edward the Third, and Henry VOL. I. (1843.) NO. I.

C

the Fifth, are without question the most glorious periods of the Plantaganet government. Crecy, Poictiers, Agincourt, after a lapse of four and five centuries, are as little forgotten as Blenheim and Waterloo. Edward and Henry, Warwick and Talbot, are still familiar in our mouths as household words, or as the names of Marlborough and Wellington. The impetuous courage of Picton and Crawford is not better remembered than that of Chandos and Sir Walter Mauny. The two periods of conflict possess many things in common. The opposing nations were the same; there was the same headlong and barely-restrained valour; the shouts of triumph and the groans of the dying were in the same languages; the sternness of the struggle was not unequal; the skill and courage of the leaders was in either case pre-eminent, and victory finally sat upon the same banners. There was, however, this grand difference between the two-those wars were aggressive-these were remedial. Then we fought for fame, for territory, for plunder, for our selfish interests: now we have fought for existence, for liberty, for the deliverance of Europe. As a courageous people, we may be proud of both periods; but, as a just people, we have far more reason to rest upon our late than our earlier victories.

It is not, however, on account of their military fame that the historian unites with the chronicler in his admiration of these reigns. The subjects of his more thoughtful praise are of a less brilliant, though far more glorious, description.

It appears almost a paradox that the liberties of the people should have thriven under such princes as Edward the First and Third, so little scrupulous in their methods of raising money, so politic, and so successful in war. But in the state of society which then existed, a long course of foreign war promoted internal peace, by removing the robber bands that infested the country, and providing a distant and more profitable field for the display of the martial and rapacious spirit of the nobles. The taxes laid on to support war tended, no doubt, to impoverish the people, and were at times severely felt; but this evil was far more than counterbalanced by the general benefits of internal peace; the social bonds that sprung up, and the new classes of men that commerce, unharassed by petty exactions, brought into existence. The foreign wars were expensive. Crown plate and the jewels and the royal security could raise but a temporary supply of money. The King could proceed but few steps without the general and voluntary aid of his subjects. Parliaments and great councils were therefore frequently called. Edward the Third, during the fifty years of his reign, summoned no less than seventy of them of one description or another. The monarch was in continual communication with his people; he regarded as an evil the pestilence that prevented him from meeting them; he persuaded them that his interest was their interest; he referred money bills to

them, as their peculiar province. Their aids on the other hand were liberal, but they were often granted with difficulty, and rarely without some actual or promised concession by the crown. The foundation of English liberty was wrested from a weak monarch by a strong hand. The superstructure was purchased from strong monarchs, stone by stone, by subsidies and reliefs.

Men

In later days, military monarchs have employed their armies to enslave their country. Formerly this danger did not exist; the monarch was far more likely to be pulled down by his army. feared a military democracy far more than a soldier-sovereign. There was little discipline in a feudal army. Each man came for his forty days, or the term of his feudal tenure, and then, having eaten up his provisions, he returned to his native fields, and became again a husbandman. It was sufficiently difficult to raise and maintain an army so constituted in time of actual war, but to retain it beneath its standards in time of peace, would have been well nigh impossible. A defeat or a victory was equally fatal to the commander: after either event, his army melted away like snow before the sun. Even during the blockade of Calais-no very severe service,-when the laurels of Crecy were green, and the soldiery had already tasted the plunder of Picardy, desertions to England were numerous; and Edward, in one of his letters to the sheriffs, complains bitterly that his men-at-arms and archers had taken themselves off, 66 et nos inter inimicos nostros in periculo seditiosè reliquerunt." The home duties and attractions of both lord and vassal were not inconsiderable, and both were far too much entangled with the cares of civil life to make steady soldiers. Hired mercenaries indeed were to be found in great numbers in every army; but they lived wholly by war, and necessarily transferred their services from one scene of action to another. The more peaceful duties of a permanent body-guard would have suited neither the inclination nor the interests of a class of men, whose pleasure was war and their gain plunder. Henry the Seventh was the first English sovereign who retained a band of household troops, and that was composed of fifty archers only and a captain.

It is not in the pages of a chronicle, still less in such a chronicle as that of Froissart, filled with descriptions of gorgeous pageants and deeds of valour, nor indeed in the direct information of any writer of that simple age, that we are to look for proofs of the real value of the advantages gained during Edward's reign. These proofs are to be found in the tenor of the acts of parliament, in the constitutions of the parliament itself, in the regulations respecting commerce and commercial property, in the blasts and counter-blasts of the popes and clergy, in the public records, in the Foedera: not in avowed history, but in the indirect testimony of statutes and proclamations. From these we learn that the reign of Edward the Third was the commencement of our commercial prosperity, as it