in the Prince of Wales’s immediate circle.  Chandos recruited scarcely any but English or Bretons, and when, to the great joy of the Count of Montfort, he arrived before Auray, “he brought,” says Froissart, “full sixteen hundred fighting men, knights, and squires, English and Breton, and about eight or nine hundred archers.”  Du Guesclin’s troops were pretty nearly equal in number, and not less brave, but less well disciplined, and probably also less ably commanded.  The battle took place on the 29th of September, 1364, before Auray.  The attendant circumstances and the result have already been recounted in the twentieth chapter of this history; Charles of Blois was killed, and Du Guesclin was made prisoner.  The cause of John of Montfort was clearly won; and he, on taking possession of the duchy of Brittany, asked nothing better than to acknowledge himself vassal of the King of France, and swear fidelity to him.  Charles V. had too much judgment not to foresee that, even after a defeat, a peace which gave a lawful and definite solution to the question of Brittany, rendered his relations and means of influence with this important province much more to be depended upon than any success which a prolonged war might promise him.  Accordingly he made peace at Guerande, on the 11th of April, 1365, after having disputed the conditions inch by inch; and some weeks previously, on the 6th of March, at the indirect instance of the King of Navarre, who, since the battle of Gocherel, had felt himself in peril, Charles V. had likewise put an end to his open struggle against his perfidious neighbor, of whom he certainly did not cease to be mistrustful.  Being thus delivered from every external war and declared enemy, the wise King of France was at liberty to devote himself to the re-establishment of internal peace and of order throughout his kingdom, which was in the most pressing need thereof.

We have, no doubt, even in our own day, cruel experience of the disorders and evils of war; but we can form, one would say, but a very incomplete idea of what they were in the fourteenth century, without any of those humane administrative measures, still so ineffectual,—­provisionings, hospitals, ambulances, barracks, and encampments,—­which are taken in the present day to prevent or repair them.  The Recueil des Ordonnances des Lois de France is full of safeguards granted by Charles V. to monasteries and hospices and communes, which implored his protection, that they might have a little less to suffer than the country in general.  We will borrow from the best informed and the most intelligent of the contemporary chroniclers, the Continuer of William of Nangis, a picture of those sufferings and the causes of them.  “There was not,” he says, “in Anjou, in Touraine, in Beauce, near Orleans and up to the approaches of Paris, any corner of the country which was free from plunderers and robbers.  They were so numerous everywhere, either in little forts occupied by them or in the