This war was, on both sides, remarkable for cruelty.  If Joan de Clisson gave to the sword all the people in a castle, belonging to Charles of Blois, to which she had been admitted on a supposition of pacific intentions, Charles of Blois, on his side, finding in another castle thirty knights, partisans of the Count of Montfort, had their heads shot from catapults over the walls of Nantes, which he was besieging, and, at the same time that he saved from pillage the churches of Quimper, which he had just taken, he allowed his troops to massacre fourteen hundred inhabitants, and had his principal prisoners beheaded.  One of them, being a deacon, he caused to be degraded, and then handed over to the populace, who stoned him.  It is characteristic of the middle ages that in them the ferocity of barbaric times existed side by side with the sentiments of chivalry and the fervor of Christianity:  so slow is the race of man to eschew evil, even when it has begun to discern and relish good.  War was then the passion and habitual condition of men.  They made it without motive as well as without prevision, in a transport of feeling or for the sake of pastime, to display their strength or to escape from listlessness; and, whilst making it, they abandoned themselves without scruple to all those deeds of violence, vengeance, brutal anger, or fierce delight, which war provokes.  At the same time, however, the generous impulses of feudal chivalry, the sympathies of Christian piety, tender affections, faithful devotion, noble tastes, were fermenting in their souls; and human nature appeared with all its complications, its inconsistencies, and its irregularities, but also with all its wealth of prospective development.  The three Joans of the fourteenth century were but eighty years in advance of the Joan of Arc of the fifteenth; and the knights of Charles V., Du Guesclin and De Clisson, were the forerunners of the Bayard of Francis I.

An incident which has retained its popularity in French history, to wit, the fight between thirty Bretons and thirty English during the just now commemorated war in Brittany, will give a better idea than any general observations could of the real, living characteristics of facts and manners, barbaric and at the same time chivalric, at that period.  No apology is needed for here reproducing the chief details as they have been related by Froissart, the dramatic chronicler of the middle ages.

In 1351, “it happened on a day that Sir Robert de Beaumanoir, a valiant knight and commandant of the castle which is called Castle Josselin, came before the town and castle of Ploermel, whereof the captain, called Brandebourg [or Brembro, probably Bremborough], had with him a plenty of soldiers of the Countess of Montfort.  ‘Brandebourg,’ said Robert, ’have ye within there never a man-at-arms, or two or three, who would fain cross swords with other three for love of their ladies?’ Brandebourg answered that their ladies would not have them lose