villages and country-places, that peasants and tradesfolks could not travel but at great expense and great peril.  The very guards told off to defend cultivators and travellers took part most shamefully in harassing and despoiling them.  It was the same in Burgundy and the neighboring countries.  Some knights who called themselves friends of the king and of the king’s majesty, and whose names I am not minded to set down here, kept in their service brigands who were quite as bad.  What is far more strange is, that when those folks went into the cities, Paris or elsewhere, everybody knew them and pointed them out, but none durst lay a hand upon them.  I saw one night at Paris, in the suburb of St. Germain des Pres, while the people were sleeping, some brigands who were abiding with their chieftains in the city, attempting to sack certain hospices:  they were arrested and imprisoned in the Chatelet; but, before long, they were got off, declared innocent, and set at liberty without undergoing the least punishment—­a great encouragement for them and their like to go still farther. . . .  When the king gave Bertrand du Guesclin the countship of Longueville, in the diocese of Rouen, which had belonged to Philip, brother of the King of Navarre, Du Guesclin promised the king that he would drive out by force of arms all the plunderers and robbers, those enemies of the kingdom; but he did nothing of the sort; nay, the Bretons even of Du Guesclin, on returning from Rouen, pillaged and stole in the villages whatever they found there—­ garments, horses, sheep, oxen, and beasts of burden and of tillage.”

Charles V. was not, as Louis XII. and Henry IV. were, of a disposition full of affection, and sympathetically inclined towards his people; but he was a practical man, who, in his closet and in the library growing up about him, took thought for the interests of his kingdom as well as for his own; he had at heart the public good, and lawlessness was an abomination to him.  He had just purchased, at a ransom of a hundred thousand francs, the liberty of Bertrand du Guesclin, who had remained a prisoner in the hands of John Chandos, after the battle of Auray.  An idea occurred to him that the valiant Breton might be of use to him in extricating France from the deplorable condition to which she had been reduced by the bands of plunderers roaming everywhere over her soil.  We find in the Chronicle in verse of Bertrand Guesclin, by Cuvelier, a troubadour of the fourteenth century, a detailed account of the king’s perplexities on this subject, and of the measures he took to apply a remedy.  We cannot regard this account as strictly historical; but it is a picture, vivid and morally true, of events and men as they were understood and conceived to be by a contemporary, a mediocre poet, but a spirited narrator.  We will reproduce the principal features, modifying the language to make it more easily intelligible, but without altering the fundamental character.