was all but crowned with success, when Scotland was again saved by the intervention of France.  The successes of Edward roused anew the jealousy of the French court.  David Bruce found a refuge with Philip; French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and brought aid to the patriot nobles; and the old legal questions about the Agenois and Aquitaine were mooted afresh by the French council.  For a time Edward staved off the contest by repeated embassies; but his refusal to accept Philip as a mediator between England and the Scots stirred France to threats of war.  In 1335 fleets gathered on its coast; descents were made on the English shores; and troops and galleys were hired in Italy and the north for an invasion of England.  The mere threat of war saved Scotland.  Edward’s forces there were drawn to the south to meet the looked-for attack from across the Channel; and the patriot party freed from their pressure at once drew together again.  The actual declaration of war against France at the close of 1337 was the knell of Balliol’s greatness; he found himself without an adherent and withdrew two years later to the court of Edward, while David returned to his kingdom in 1342 and won back the chief fastnesses of the Lowlands.  From that moment the freedom of Scotland was secured.  From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance the struggle died into a petty strife between two angry neighbours, which became a mere episode in the larger contest which it had stirred between England and France.

[Sidenote:  The Hundred Years War]

Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the contest which was now to open between these two nations.  To England it brought a social, a religious, and in the end a political revolution.  The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, and the New Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred Years War.  With it began the military renown of England; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of the seas.  The pride begotten by great victories and a sudden revelation of warlike prowess roused the country not only to a new ambition, a new resolve to assert itself as a European power, but to a repudiation of the claims of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence both of Church and Crown which paved the way for and gave its ultimate form to the English Reformation.  The peculiar shape which English warfare assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight, gave new force to the political advance of the Commons.  On the other hand the misery of the war produced the first great open feud between labour and capital.  The glory of Crecy or Poitiers was dearly bought by the upgrowth of English pauperism.  The warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the baronage, and sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on the throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the