So it was that an English army was once more upon French soil, and in 1346 Edward, with his toy cannon, had won the battle of Crecy, followed by the siege and capture of Calais, which for two hundred years was to remain an English port—­a thorn in the side of France.

A part of the old kingdom of Burgundy, which was called Dauphiny, dropped into the lap of Philip, this first Valois king, during his reign.  The old duke, being without an heir, offered to sell this bit of territory to the King of France upon the condition that it should be kept as the personal possession of the eldest sons of the kings of France.  Thenceforth the title of Dauphin was worn by the heir to the throne, until it became extinct with the son of Louis XVI.  And when the feeble Philip VI. died in 1350, his son John, the first dauphin, assumed the crown of France.

John, this second Valois king, was an anachronism.  A man intended for the eleventh century had been set down in the fourteenth.  The restoration of knightly ceremonial, tournaments at the Louvre, the details of a new Crusade which he was planning, and the distribution of new titles, these were the things occupying the mind of the king, while his kingdom, rent by factions within, was in a death-struggle with foes from without.

A fantastic Don Quixote, on a tottering throne, was fighting the most practical statesman and the strongest-armed warrior Europe held at the time.

With this weakness at the centre, France was again falling into fragments.  There was even a resumption of private wars between nobles; and, most paralyzing of all, an empty treasury.  Such time as he could spare from his main projects John gave to the affairs of the kingdom.  First of all, taxes must be levied; and when the first tax was upon salt, King Edward condescended to make an historic witticism, saying “he had at last discovered who was the author of the Salic Law!”

In the various plans for raising money, it was important that the taxes should be levied so that the burden would fall upon those who could, and who would, pay.  This meant the dwellers in the towns and cities; the bourgeoisie.  They were the capitalists.  But what if they should refuse?  In order to secure the success of the measure, it was considered wise to obtain their consent in advance.

When King John asked permission of the States-General to tax them, a critical line was passed.  That body for the first time realized its power.  It might make its own terms.  It demanded that the moneys collected, and their expenditure, should be under the direction of its officers.  Then, growing bolder, it demanded reforms:  Private wars must cease; the meetings of the States-General must be at appointed intervals, without being summoned by the king.

These meetings at Paris grew stormy.  Gradually re-enforced with a vicious element, they were soon led by demagogues, became violent and revolutionary, and finally red caps and barricades, characteristic of Parisian mobs of a later period, brought the whole movement into the hands of the agents of “Charles the Bad,” evil genius of his time, who saw his opportunity to use it in his own ambitious designs upon the throne.  But France was to hear from the Tiers Etat again!