inaction in wars between Connaught chiefs, answers to Edward I. that in policy he thought it expedient to wink at one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffer and purchase peace to the land.2

Shane O'Neill is profusely thanked when he defeats the Scots who hold the king's Northern fortresses to blackmail; but when he is murdered by Alexander Oge, who lay in the Glynns with eight or nine hundred Scots, the pious lookeron writes to Cecil that "God so disposed his pleasure as he suffered that traitor (not this time Alexander Oge) to receive his end among those Scots, who cut and hewed him it is said extremely."

Lord Justice Arnold in notes on Ireland sent to be considered by Cecil (Jan. 29, 1565), assures him that he acts with the wild Irish as with bears and bandogs; so that he sees them fight earnestly and tug each other well, he cares not who has the worse.

From the time of Bruce's invasion the English power, which has shown itself incapable of affording the peace and protection which is the only ground for its existence, steadily dwindles until the authority of the Crown is reduced to a mere strip along the Eastern coast, which becomes the refuge for the worsted of either party in the meaningless struggle between the great feudal English families whose bloody slaughters are dignified by the title of the Wars of the Roses.

For the rest, the great Anglo-Irish nobles continued the practice which, from the first days of the invasion, in the absence of royal authority, had faced the foreign kingly power. They allied themselves of necessity with the native Irish, they fostered and intermarried with them, they adopted their habits, customs, and laws, accepting the position of the tribal chief.

Such a condition might have been bearable and ultimately productive of good if the feeble garrison between Dublin and Dundalk had had any such sense of military discipline, of unity of purpose, as actuated the members of the Hanse in the Steelyard in London. But (I quote from the State Papers of as late a date as 1537) all the English march borderers, i.e. those living on the borders of this narrow

strip by the sea, use the Irish apparel and the Irish tongue, and for the most part use the same in the English pale. Nine years before this date the Archbishop of Cashel comes to petition the king that coyne and livery may not be levied in his province.3 The feudal system of the Anglo-French had no more chance of driving out the communal system of Ireland than of its eastern type in India. It could overlay and regulate, but when it attempted to destroy, it failed.

It would seem further that this perpetual conversion from feudal to communal usage would soon have come to an end if at any time in the history of Ireland there had been given a chance for the successive waves of settlement in the country to remain with any security in any one spot to develop a society on the lines on which European society was developing. Ireland is a very rich country except where its fertility has been absolutely destroyed by the AngloScot invader. But whatever the subject of dispute, whether pastoral use of land, agriculture, cattle breeding, woollen trade, or glass manufacture, no chance of rest has ever been given to Ireland.

But before referring ever so slightly to the political and economic causes of communal decay, such as the movements of population, which may have their military counterpart in the cruelties perpetrated by the brute German on the peoples of Belgium, France, and Serbia at the present day, and the wrestling of the peoples over commercial gains, I would review the feudal and communal societies as they showed themselves at a critical moment of transition in the middle of the fourteenth century.

NOTES.1 The English constitutional historian as a rule wholly ignores all these expeditions. 2 Hanmer, 1278. 3 The Duke of

Norfolk to Wolsey, 1528, State Papers, Irish Series.

PART VII

THE AFFAIRS OF BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND FLANDERS IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

(See EXPLANATION OF TECHNICAL WORDS, supra, p. xxvi)

CHAPTER XXIX

FEUDAL SOCIETY AT MATURITY. THE WARS OF EDWARD III. THE WAR OF THE THREE JOANS

THE affairs of the British Islands, France, and the Low Countries in the period 1328-64, when feudalism was in the fruiting time which precedes decay, are from every point of view instructive of the contrast between the two forms of living. They illustrate the methods of mediaval warfare both by sea and land, the use of feudal and communal levies and of mercenary troops, and the many sides of the feudal relationship which were bound up with and enforced by military power. They show the value of matrimonial alliances under feudal rules of succession as a means of obtaining military supremacy or a desired neutrality, much as we see it used to-day by the Prussians in Greece, Bulgaria, and other countries. The period points to the efforts of the Church to check war and to modify its horrors, to the worthlessness of truces and of the pledged word. It especially emphasises, I think, the contemptuous disregard in which all that portion of society which under the feudal system tilled but did not own the land, and those others who by trade provided them with the means of subsistence, were held by the fighting men.

This period has the great advantage of illumination from a very modern special correspondent, the Rev. John Froissart, born at Valenciennes in Hainault, for a long time attached to Queen Philippa's court, enjoying intimate relations with prominent men of high station who took part in the action described by him. He travelled in England, Scotland, France, and the Low Countries, and gathered news as greedily and as impersonally as the Norsemen "gathered property,' without, so far as one can see, any intent to use it for political or ecclesiastical purposes. He is generally accurate and painstaking, but he frequently makes mistakes, as any man collecting information from all sources must do. Where his statements are questioned they can be checked not only by the monastic chroniclers, such as Adam Murimuth and Robert of Avesbury, but by the numerous written records of the time.

The Decay of the Feudal System. -At this time feudalism was losing all connection with the cause of its origin, the better organisation of the State for war. For short campaigns at home the feudal levies were freely used, against the Scots or Welsh or Irish; but apart from such use the system had merely become the excuse for a continuous game of war played by a small clique of gamblers at the expense of the people at large, an excuse for the transfer of territory from one king or king's nominee to another, without any regard whatever to the interests of the people transferred with the land. On the part of the kings it could never have been said to have been in any sense defensive warfare. As the principle of the individual ownership of land, the basis of the power of the kings and great feudal nobles and churchmen, enabled them to amass wealth by war and commerce, the mass of the people, sinking further into poverty, ceased to have even the fiction of kinship with those who led them and despoiled them. The results of the destruction of communal life showed eventually in such movements as the Jacquerie and the Free Companies.

The accompanying pedigrees will show that the feudal rulers, who exploited the people of the different districts, were intimately interconnected by marriage. The bargain

and sale of children for territory went on from their earliest years, and the Church assisted to endorse the system by a sweeping table of affinities, always to be dispensed with for money if the alliance was not likely to turn out profitably either for the Church or for one of the contracting parties.

There was no longer under feudal usage any community of interest between ruler and people. The rulers had come to regard their respective territories with the inhabitants as objects of sale and exchange for the aggrandisement of their families by marriage or by treaty in war, much as a secondhand furniture dealer might regard a chest of drawers, something to be acquired to be sold again if convenient at a profit. This habit of exchange of territory as personal property with the inhabitants occupying it and payment by intermarriage becomes gradually an acknowledged principle in the dealings with territory and peoples by their rulers, and it obtains up to the present day in Europe wherever the absolute ruler remains.

The Influence of Trade. One thing only checks the perpetual slaughter-want of money to pay expenses when plunder fails, money which can only be obtained either by robbery or on terms from the traders who are making it. So this period also illustrates, though this is much more difficult to trace in records, the use of the complications of this feudal military system to cover up commercial designs which the rulers of the different countries had upon the trade of the others.

While the kings affected great contempt for the trading community and plundered without mercy wealthy towns in their military campaigns, they were well prepared to borrow money and receive assistance from the burghers in return for trading privileges and compliments, and they made pretence in a lordly way of being democratic traders themselves. They were quite ready to take part in commercial adventures if they were likely to be lucrative, and to repudiate their debts if the venture failed.

It is not for nothing that the Lord Chancellor of to-day sits upon a woolsack; Edward's wars were fought on and for wool; the profit from wool and woollen manufactures