In 1356, Edward’s son, the Black Prince, won a still greater victory than Crecy, at Poitiers, in which king John was captured and carried to London.

But Edward found that, while victories were comparatively easy, conquest was difficult.  A generation had passed since the war began.  So in 1360 both kingdoms were ready to consider terms of peace.  By the treaty of Bretigny, Edward renounced the claim to the French throne, and received in full sovereignty the great inheritance Queen Eleanor had brought to Henry II.  King John was to be released and his son held as hostage until the enormous ransom was paid.  Of course the money could not be paid by impoverished France, for such a doubtful benefit, at least; and so the son and hostage made his escape.  Then King John, faithful to his chivalrous creed, returned to London and captivity, dying in 1364.

The dauphin, who had now become Charles V., came to the throne with the determination of restoring France to herself.  His attention had been drawn to the military talents of a Breton youth—­Bertrand du Guesclin.  Poor, diminutive in stature, deformed, he had raised himself to military positions usually reserved as a reward for sons of nobles.  In the reopening of a war with England, which Charles was planning, du Guesclin was to be the sword and he the brain.

The Black Prince had gone to Spain to fight the battles of Peter the Cruel, in a civil war in which the Prince was involved by inheritance, and was levying taxes for this Castilian war upon his new subjects in Aquitaine.  The people in this province turned to Charles to deliver them from this oppression.  He immediately summoned Prince Edward before the Court of Peers; to which the Black Prince replied that he would accept the invitation, but would come with his helmet on his head and sixty thousand men in his party.

So successfully did Charles and du Guesclin meet this renewal of the war that Prince Edward and his sixty thousand men were gradually driven north until the English possessions were reduced to a few towns upon the coast.  The Black Prince, under the weight of responsibility and defeat, succumbed to disease, and died, 1377.  The death of Edward III. occurred soon after that of his son, and Richard II. was King of England.

The expulsion of the English was not the only benefit bestowed by Charles V. The revolting States-General were restrained and were firmly held in the king’s hand.  Still more important was the reorganization of the military system, by placing it under the command of officers appointed by the Crown, who might or might not belong to the order of nobility.  No more effective blow could have been aimed at feudalism, which was nothing if not militant.  Indeed, every act of this brief reign was a protest against the purposes and ideals of his father, King John, who was the embodiment of the ancient spirit.  It was a needed breathing-spell between a half-century of disaster behind and another half-century of still greater disaster before.