did homage to the French crown.  Joan was consoled by remaining in possession of the county of Penthievre and the viscounty of Limoges.  Practically her defeat was an English victory, and Montfort remained in his duchy so long only as English influence prevailed.  A second step towards the pacification of the north was made when the troubles in Brittany were ended within a few months of the destruction of the power of Charles the Bad in Normandy.

The free companies lost their chief hunting-grounds; and a further relief came when some of them, like the White Company, found a better market for their swords in Italy.  With all their faults, the companies opened out a career to talent such as had seldom been found before.  John Hawkwood, the leader of the White Company, was an Essex man of the smaller landed class.  He had played but a subordinate figure beside Knowles, Calveley, Pipe, and Jowel; but in Italy he won for himself the name of the greatest strategist of his age.  Thus, though at the cost of murder and pillage, the English made themselves talked about all over the western world.  “In my youth,” wrote Petrarch, “the Britons, whom we call Angles or English, had the reputation of being the most timid of the barbarians.  Now they are the most warlike of peoples.  They have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by a series of victories so numerous and unexpected that those, who were not long since inferior to the wretched Scots, have so crushed by fire and sword the whole realm that, on a recent journey, I could hardly persuade myself that it was the France that I had seen in former years."[1]

    [1] Epistolae Familiares, iii., Ep. 14, p. 162, ed. 
    Fracassetti.

It was to little purpose that King John laboured to redeem his plighted word and make France what it had been before the war.  Though in November, 1361, neither he nor Edward sent commissioners to Bruges, where, according to the treaty of Calais, the charters of renunciation were to be exchanged, John offered in 1362 to carry out his promise.  Edward, however, for reasons of his own, made no response to his advances.  The result was that the renunciations were never made, and so the essential condition of the original settlement remained unfulfilled.  The matter passed almost unnoticed at the time as a mere formality, but in later years Edward’s lack of faith brought its own punishment in giving the French king a plausible excuse for still claiming suzerainty over the ceded provinces.  Perhaps Edward still cherished the ambition of resuscitating his pretensions to the French crown.  He found it as hard to give up a claim as ever his grandfather had done.