the most part Englishmen, men of character, energy, and resources, but utterly without scruples and with no other ambition than to raise a good revenue and maintain themselves in authority.  The most famous of them were members of gentle but obscure houses, whose poverty debarred them from the ordinary avenues to fame and fortune, and whose vigour and ability made good use of their exceptional positions.  Two Cheshire kinsmen, Hugh Calveley and Robert Knowles, thus won, each for himself, a place in history.  Some of the adventurers were of obscurer origin, some were foreigners, German, French, or Netherlandish, and some few Breton gentlemen of Montfort’s faction.  Of these Crockart, the German, and Raoul de Caours, the Breton, were the most famous.

The results of the system bore heavily on the Breton peasantry.  Each lord of a castle levied systematic blackmail on the neighbouring parishes.  These payments, called ransoms, were exacted as a condition of protection.  The governor, though severely maltreating those who neglected to pay their ransom, did little to save his dependants from the ravages of the partisans of Charles of Blois.  Despite such misdeeds, the war of partisans was brightened by many feats of heroism.  The friends of Charles of Blois disregarded the truce and waged war as well as they could.  Among them was already conspicuous the son of a nobleman of the neighbourhood of Dinan, the ugly, able, restless Bertrand du Guesclin, whose enterprise and valour won for him a great local reputation.  In 1350 Dagworth was slain.  The history of the following years is not to be found in the acts of his successor, Sir Walter Bentley, but in the private deeds of daring of the heroes of both sides.  Conspicuous among these is the famous Battle of the Thirty, well known from the detailed narrative of Froissart, and the stirring verses of a contemporary French poem.  This fight was fought on March 27, 1351, between thirty Breton gentlemen of the Blois faction, drawn from the garrison of Josselin, and a less noble but even more strenuous band of thirty English and other adventurers of the Montfort party, from the garrison of Ploermel, seven miles to the east.  Beaumanoir, the commandant at Josselin, had been moved to indignation at the cruel treatment of peasants who had refused to pay ransom by Robert Bembro, the commander of Ploermel.  He challenged the tyrant to combat, and thirty heroes of each party fought out their quarrel at a spot marked by the half-way oak, equidistant from the two garrisons.  After a long struggle, in which Bembro was slain, victory fell to the men from Josselin.  Among the vanquished were Knowles, Calveley, and Crockart.  This fight had absolutely no influence on the fortune of the war.