CHAPTER XV.

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR.

Edward III. had just entered upon his nineteenth year when he became king in fact as well as in name.  In person he was not unworthy of his father and grandfather.  Less strikingly tall than they, he was nobly built and finely proportioned.  In full manhood, long hair, a thick moustache and a flowing beard adorned his regular and handsome countenance.  His graciousness and affability were universally praised.  His face shone, we are told, like the face of a god, so that to see him or to dream of him was certain to conjure up joyous images.[1] He delighted in the pomp of his office, wore magnificent garments, and played his kingly part with the same majesty and dignity as his grandfather.  Despite the troubles of his youth, he was well educated.  Richard of Bury is said to have been his tutor, and the early lessons of the author or instigator of the Philobiblon were never entirely lost by the prince who took Chaucer and Froissart into his service.  More conspicuous was his love of art, his taste for sumptuous buildings and their magnificent embellishment, which left memorials in the stately castle of Windsor and its rich chapel of St. George, in St. Stephen’s chapel at Westminster, and the Eastminster for Cistercian nuns hard by Tower hill.  A fluent and eloquent speaker in French and English, Edward was also conversant with Latin, and perhaps Low-Dutch.  Yet no king was less given to study or seclusion.  Possessed, perhaps, of no exceptional measure of intellectual capacity, and not even endowed to any large extent with firmness of character, he won a great place in history by the extraordinary activity of his temperament and the vigour and energy with which he threw himself into whatever work he set his hand to do.  He was a consummate master of knightly exercises, delighting in tournaments, and especially in those which were marked by some touch of quaintness or fancy.  He had the hereditary passion of his house for the chase.  In his youthful campaigns in Scotland and in his maturer expeditions in France, he was accompanied by a little army of falconers and huntsmen, by packs of hounds, and many hawks trained with the utmost care.  He honoured with his special friendship an Abbot of Leicester, famed throughout England as the most dexterous of hare-coursers.[2]

    [1] Continuation of Murimuth (Engl.  Hist.  Soc.), pp. 225-27,
    which gives the best contemporary description of Edward’s
    character.

    [2] Knighton, ii., 127.